We already have tools and rules to avoid catastrophe. We just need to decide what it means to be human. — Walter Isaacson is mid-tour for his new book on the CRISPR story. Isaacson has a knack for distilling conventional wisdom into a best-selling biographies; it seems he’s done it again with Prof. Jennifer Doudna. …

*Never say never — In the last century, humanity mastered computation and data storage. In this century, humanity will master biology. It’s easy to believe that biological mastery will change the kinds of companies we can build. This is why I’m always tempted by the comparisons we might draw between the life sciences and…

Biotech is a security issue, even if we don’t want it to be — Looking back over my recent posts, I realize I may be turning a lot of people off. We in biotech and the life sciences talk about discovery and saving lives. We think of our industry as multinational and multiethnic. We view our work as humanitarian and humanistic. This is not…

The public sees defense contractors as their biggest parasite. Let’s not let biotech go there. — The big news last week was the signing of the monster COVID relief bill. The main biotech headline was the $1.75 billion earmarked for sequencing. (I admit surprise at the absence of any additional allocations for BARDA or NIH.) Still, the bill was expected to pass and the biomedical elements…

Sequencing everything, everywhere will boost our biodefenses — COVID variant tracking is having its moment. It’s the hot new topic we all need to have an opinion on. It comes up in the pre- and post-meeting banter on my day-to-day Zoom calls. It’s the peg for the latest round of How worried should you be about… news articles…

Without NIH, we likely would not yet have COVID-19 vaccines. We might not have the sequencers used to identify the disease in the first place. We wouldn’t have virtually any of the consequential therapies or diagnostics from the last thirty years. The National Institutes of Health is where Biotech goes…

Biotechies talk about how important it is for the US to maintain leadership in biotechnology. Public funding subsidizes R&D to maintain this leadership. We understand this as an effort to maintain economic growth, but it’s also a way to build geopolitical strength. The US invests heavily in military power, which…

I assume that all the big defense contractors became big because of WWII. Spot-check: Ratheon — yup, magnetrons. Lockheed — Army planes. Northrop — Navy planes. Martin Marietta — nope. Apparently Marietta’s juice was the Cold War — rockets. Wars are the public-sector example of Marc Andreesen’s great market theory…

It turns out a worldwide plague is a lot like a world war. Not a new observation. It requires expansion and training of the health workforce and mass mobilization of industrial resources for drugs, diagnostics, and medical equipment. It requires a strategy. Maybe more than one. And the fight is…