On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 9:53 PM, Dakota Hamill <dkotes@gmail.com> wrote:
It has nothing to do with anything you just said. It has to do with the fact that to make $100 million in IT and computers, you need a laptop and a coffee shop wifi and you can code the new Candy Crush or Flappy Bird and rake in micro-transactions and ad revenue while creating nothing of value besides an addictive phone app and an increase in car insurance premiums. I like to think of the movie Idiocracy as a good measure of where we're heading.To make advances in the life sciences, you need lab equipment that can run into the millions of dollars, as well as the space and facilities to handle the materials you're working with.
I've been working at a CPU company for a while now and let me tell you, there's a ton of $ that has to go into R&D as well as production. A big difference I think is that much of biotech is built on instrumentation, so it was (is) in a way limited by the electronics industry. It's only been in the past 10-20 years that compute power, storage, and RAM got to be cheap enough for bioinformatics to take off. I bet there's also the moral aspect, the public still doesn't 'just know' that biology is not unlike a machine... this concept isn't ingrained in childrens books and cartoons, pop culture. It is increasing, for sure. But when was the last time you heard anything about anti-electronics groups that were on the same level as anti biotech/synbio?
There's been a ton of crazy awesome biotech advancement in the past 30 years, while in computers it's kind of just been "Moore's law as usual"... fun and awesome, but maybe a bit more glamorized and even predictable in some ways.
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