"The thing I never understood is: shouldn’t the biotech community be happy that more people are trying to do this and that more people are funding this work?"
It's a world where lots of great ideas are underfunded (or not at all), because the traditional government sources don't have the money needed to invest in every good idea. Also, it's still generally too expensive to chase every possible business idea in biotech, and there are plenty of ideas with academic promise that don't get anywhere because the traditional sources of investment are too conservative. Scientists get punchy when they see funding going to "unproven" entrepreneurs, while they're slaving away at research that is peer-reviewed, but isn't getting any investor attention.
It's good to see YC bringing in outside expertise for this area, because the likely outcome for amateur angel investment in biotech would be investing in lots of flashy-but-insubstantial entrepreneurs, while legitimate research never gets off the bench. In my experience, it's much harder to evaluate biotech ideas than software.
A funny part of the history of biology: NASA established its Life Sciences office in 1960, and the following decades they funded some pretty influential research in molecular biology and on the origin of life, which was not getting funding from more conventional biology funding sources.
Maybe the highlights would be Lynn Margulis and the endosymbiosis theory, and Carl Woese finding the Archaea in 1977.
References:
JE Strick. 2004. Creating a Cosmic Discipline: The
Crystallization and Consolidation of Exobiology, 1957-1973.
Journal of the History of Biology 37:131-180.
My business straddles both biotech and software and I find it much easier to evaluate good biotech ideas than software ideas. The problem is the money and time required is so much greater with biotech that almost none of the good idea get invested in.
Agreed about the money and time, but I do think biotech ideas are harder to evaluate, if only because the basic knowledge required is far more specialized.
Your average CS undergrad can understand the technical risks of most software startup ideas, but you need at least a graduate degree or equivalent industry experience to be able to evaluate the technical feasibility of lab research. Moreover, life science research depends on sophisticated intuition that can't really be taught in a classroom.
I agree the barrier to entry in biotech is higher than software - in the area of bioinformatics it is usually easier to train someone with a life sciences PhD how to write software (bad software usually) than it is to try to train a CS graduate in the required life sciences. However once you have skills in both area the biotech ideas are easier to evaluate. I think this might be due to there being more good biotech ideas around because far fewer can be exploited because of the cost.
It's a world where lots of great ideas are underfunded (or not at all), because the traditional government sources don't have the money needed to invest in every good idea. Also, it's still generally too expensive to chase every possible business idea in biotech, and there are plenty of ideas with academic promise that don't get anywhere because the traditional sources of investment are too conservative. Scientists get punchy when they see funding going to "unproven" entrepreneurs, while they're slaving away at research that is peer-reviewed, but isn't getting any investor attention.
It's good to see YC bringing in outside expertise for this area, because the likely outcome for amateur angel investment in biotech would be investing in lots of flashy-but-insubstantial entrepreneurs, while legitimate research never gets off the bench. In my experience, it's much harder to evaluate biotech ideas than software.