Sure, biology might be profitable investment for those who know it well but I think the important part of the GP is that biology doesn't have the potential to "explode" in the fashion that chips exploded with Moore's law.
And the thing is that it's easy to imagine such potential, it's easy to imagine that discoveries will accumulate sufficiently in biology that the field passes from being about discovery to being about engineering, which discoveries can be pumped out easily instead of being hard-won, limited and preliminary. But biology has so much variation and complexity and ad-hocery "all the way down" that nothing is ever as straightforward as you'd want it, nearly everything is done by hand even today and for a reason.
But it's only people who live (and think) in clean room environs like computing that imagine biology is amenable to engineering. It's really not.
Unlike every kind of engineering and physical science, biology is wildly more complex and modulated by almost innumerable variables that are interdependent. I work in a large pharma, and one of the comments I hear often is "I'm amazed that any drug actually works as intended".
With 90% of validated compounds still failing after introduction into the human body (and the thousands of candidates new molecular entity candidate compounds that failed in vitro before that), the track record of human biology to engineered solutions is extremely poor and likely to remain so indefinitely. Just because new techniques are arising to manipulate the assembly language of the body does not mean they will have any better success in setting the right dials to the right settings among the myriad invisible gotchas of disease that inhabit that black box we call 'me'.
Until we can better know what's actually going on inside biology's many black box(es), no amount of engineering, no matter how precise, will reliably (and profitably) improve health outcomes. You can't engineer systems that you don't understand.
But it's only people who live (and think) in clean room environs like computing that imagine biology is amenable to engineering. It's really not.
It's some people used to computing, it's some investors with a streak of optimism and it's some amateur pundits. Humans think in metaphors and "a machine" is one metaphor often used for life. It's not that good but the problem is pure vitalism is often the alternative and that's not good either.
And the thing is that it's easy to imagine such potential, it's easy to imagine that discoveries will accumulate sufficiently in biology that the field passes from being about discovery to being about engineering, which discoveries can be pumped out easily instead of being hard-won, limited and preliminary. But biology has so much variation and complexity and ad-hocery "all the way down" that nothing is ever as straightforward as you'd want it, nearly everything is done by hand even today and for a reason.