The Biotechnology Industry Conference is held for a variety of reasons. In immediately practical terms, it fosters connections between investors, companies and researchers. In a more subtle way, it's an exercise in branding, both consciously and unconsciously: in the composition of its attendees, the design of its exhibitions and the rhetoric that accompanies it, the conference both reflects and shapes the dominant narrative of commercialized life science in the 21st century.
This is neither a good or bad thing; it just is. But as I sat outside the conference yesterday to gather my thoughts before leaving, I kept thinking of Eric Raymond's essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," originally written about software engineering but later analogized to other cultural phenomena. Is BIO, as a repository of dominant commercial wisdom, with its unchallenged fundamental assumptions about the direction of biotechnology, a cathedral? Or, with hundreds of small companies riding the turbulent crest of a rapidly evolving field, is BIO a bazaar?
I couldn't help but wonder what sort of narrative would be formed by a different system of research, development and commercialization. What if, for example, the handful of large companies that dominate agricultural bioscience were replaced by hundreds? What if more translational research was conducted by nonprofit groups and activists?
What if medical research funding was allocated according to need rather than potential profit? What if public research funding outweighed private, and came attached with the sort of provisions recently enacted to guide stem cell research in California?
My examples are limited by the constraints of my experience and imagination, and I offer them not in advocacy but as hypotheticals.
Perhaps the public interest would not be served at all by these ideas.
But it's worth trying, at least as an exercise that expands the boundaries of our horizons, to imagine a life science system other than the status quo.
