Article: Beyond Miracles, Biotech in 2018
- UMANA Family
- 4 de jan. de 2018
- 3 min de leitura
Biology is the magic and miracle producer of the technology world in 2018 restoring sight to the blind, curing cancers and creating a slaughterless world.
I’ve been reflecting on the last 8 years of building and funding early stage biotech startups in silicon valley and decided to share some insights on what I’ve been learning along the journey.
Four years ago, most of Silicon Valley didn’t care about biotech, the irony of course is that the birth place of the biotechnology industry was in south San Francisco (just a few miles north of silicon valley), a parallel but separate revolution, Genentech developed the first recombinant therapy in the late 70’s that transformed the lives of millions of diabetics who were still dying in large numbers across the world and suffering in developed countries with substandard therapies. Genentech had developed a human insulin, instead of relying on slaughterhouse products of pig and cow insulin (which kept patients alive but still caused terrible side effects), diabetic patients lives in the US and Europe were transformed and in the rest of the world, diabetes was no longer a death sentence.
Back in 2010, I remember the bleak headlines around the end of the biotech industry, we were living through the grim reality of biotech’s bankrupting on a monthly basis and the die back of our beloved industry into a few key hubs in San Francisco, Cambridge and Switzerland that were still able to support the industry through the great recession.
What we (the early biohacker movement) didn't realize back then was that this was a unique opportunity to reimagine the biotech industry, we started building biohacker labs out of frustration and the lack of access to scientific tools and equipment, out of the destruction and liquidation of the previous biotech boom, we were able to build basic labs to experiment and do science all over the world.
My personal journey started deviating from the biohacker movement through frustration (again), back then I thought I thought that the biohacker movement was similar to the homebrew computer club of the 70's which would lead to a whole host of nimble biotech startups, these biohackers would become the next Steve Wozniak’s.
However, what I realized after many discussions with those who were around and part of that early homebrew computer club/hacker movement was that the early biohacker movement was actually very similar to the hacker movement of the 70's, great at tinkering, community building and idea melding but not at actually building the (bio)technology, for that, people who had much deeper expertise were needed, a few of them had seeded the biohacker movement but they had day jobs.
Biology is technology but it operates under very different mechanics and principles to human built technology and as such, just understanding how to “code it” wasn’t enough.
Silicon valley often makes the mistake of thinking of biotech and biology as another discipline of engineering and computer science, it really isn't, biology and biological principles are far deeper than any human built technologies.
In biotech, CS and engineering are just tools for us to decipher essentially alien (evolved) technologies, many of which we don't fully understand at a fundamental science level, from quantum phenomena to the computational power of the neuron.
Phd Scientists and Postdocs are the hackers of these deep technologies and I believe we're only just starting to see the power of unleashing these scientist's entrepreneurial energies around world.
If as Arthur C. Clarke, once said any sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic, the next few years of scientific entrepreneurship will be so advanced, that many of us will be unable to differentiate from magic. The transformation of medicine, materials and food is just the start.
We’ve only just begun exploring the deepness of biology.
Comments