The Biotech Age: The Business of Biotech and How to Profit From It

274 Pages·2003·2.71 MB·English

by  Richard L. Oliver

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The Biotech Age
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Also by Richard W. Oliver
The Shape of Things to Come: Seven Imperatives for Winning in the New World of
Business (1999)
The Coming Biotech Age: The Business of Bio-Materials (2000)
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The Biotech Age
The Business of Biotech and
How to Profit from It
Richard W. Oliver
McGraw-Hill
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DOI: 10.1036/0071425004
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For George Ellis Brothers
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Author’s Note xv
Introduction: The Bioterials Century 1
Chapter 1 The Twenty-First Century: The Age of Bioterials 11
Chapter 2 Conquering Matter: Explorations in the Cellular and
Subatomic Universe 31
Chapter 3 Bioterials: The New Economic Engine 43
Chapter 4 The Three Laws of BioEconomics 57
Chapter 5 New Materials: Every Atom a Factory 77
Chapter 6 Designer Genes: Re-Engineering the Body 105
Chapter 7 Betting the “Pharma”: The BioMedical Complex 139
Chapter 8 Betting the Farm: The Bionic Farmer 163
Chapter 9 Financing the Dream: The BioCapitalists 181
Chapter 10 The War on Genes: A Global Food Fight 203
Chapter 11 The DNA Divide: The Genetic Haves versus the Have-Nots 223
Index 245
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Preface
The Biotech Age is here! When I published an earlier book on this
topic, The Coming Biotech Age, in 2000, Jack and Lisa Nash of Col-
orado had just chosen an embryo that would become their new son
Adam. Genetic analysis showed it was free from an inherited disease
that was killing the couple’s other child, and the newborn would
have the future ability to donate bone marrow to his sibling. In 2000,
Adam was born, and in 2001, he lived up to his preordained task,
contributing marrow that saved his sister Molly’s life. Like much of
what was addressed in The Coming Biotech Age, “designer babies”
have quickly moved from theory to reality. Likewise, much that was
stated in The Coming Biotech Age has, with almost lightning speed,
already turned from speculation to fact.
The first and perhaps most noticeable difference between these
two books is the “slightly” different title. The Coming Biotech Age has
become, more simply, The Biotech Age. At the close of the last
decade, the Information Age was at its height in terms both of cor-
porate and public investment and of media and public awareness.
Dot.com stocks had soared to astronomical heights, and the best
“mind share” a book about biotech might claim was that “bio” was
“the next big thing.”
What a difference a couple of years can make. While many
observers are still struggling intellectually with the flip from chips to
genes, the biotech industry—agriculture, medicine, and industry—has
clearly come into its own as a key driver of the economy. The Biotech
Age is no longer the “next big thing”; it is now clearly “the thing.”
Information technologies will always be important—vital—to our
economic well-being. But, as I argued just 3 years ago, and as recent
history has borne out, they have entered their mature phase—cheap,
ubiquitous, and now rapidly becoming an “invisible” part of the eco-
nomic infrastructure of everyday life (the vast majority of chips do
their work at blinding speed, almost free, and mostly hidden). They
are as indispensable as the car, but they are no longer the driver.
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