That alone might make it well worth the investment. If I knew back in '95 what I know today (as in lessons learned the hard way, not 'invest in apple')...
One thing I don't see happening in biotech is an end-run around the law such as AirBNB pulled off. That's going to get you into a lot of very hot water.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'end-run' but there are massive opportunities in biotech for reading the letter of the law and understanding what you can do that other people don't realize.
For instance my company (Glowing Plant, YC S14) is entirely predicated on such an understanding. We read the rules and realized that if we engineered a plant with a gene gun instead of agrobacterium it would not be regulated in the United States. This saves us millions of dollars in getting a product to market and means we can pursue an agile product development strategy. Game changer.
I'm aware of another 4-5 such opportunities for syn bio products where you can get to market for low or zero regulatory permission.
With respect, there is a large gap between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Yours is a good example: using a gene gun may not be regulated in the US at present, but as was pointed out in a Nature piece covering the controversy around your company [0], that may not hold for the future [1]. My experiences with the FDA, and I have reason to believe they hold true at the USDA, lead me to conclude that regulators are fickle. What is the plan for when Monsanto, seeing your early success, copies your business plan and regulators respond to their terrified constituents in order to "fix the glitch"?
Trying to move fast and break things in a regulated industry strikes me as producing fragile business plans, at best.
Thanks for the counterpoint, and I agree. Some areas of biotech are much less mature than others when ti comes to regulation.
Most of what people think about when they hear biotech still falls under typical FDA CFR regulations for either pharmaceuticals or durable medical devices. I think that's what the grandparent was talking about.
One thing I don't see happening in biotech is an end-run around the law such as AirBNB pulled off. That's going to get you into a lot of very hot water.