BOOK REVIEW : A ‘Biotechnology Revolution’ That Never Was

Gene Dreams: Wall Street, Academia, and the Rise of Biotechnology by Robert Teitleman (Basic Books: $19.95; 237 pages).

Every new idea starts out as heresy. As a result, progress in science (and in many other fields) is almost always made by unreasonable people, people who won’t compromise or give up. If things work out, they’re called geniuses; if they don’t, they’re just, well, unreasonable.

For the scientists, businessmen and venture capitalists who promoted the “biotechnology revolution” over the last decade, things have not worked out. The promises of wonder drugs and miracle cures from genetic engineering have not been fulfilled. When was the last time you read an article about interferon, once hailed as “the scientific breakthrough of the century”? It hasn’t cured cancer.

Since Oct. 14, 1980, when the biotechnology company Genentech went public and saw its stock soar in a frenzy from $35 to $89 in less than a day, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by more than a thousand companies trying to turn the secrets of biology into useful products. So far, however, only nine drugs produced by genetic engineering have reached the public.

The industry’s response to this situation is to say, “Not yet”--always a handy response when things haven’t gone as predicted. “Just give us time,” the biotechnologists now say. “The task is more difficult and more complicated than we expected. We’ll get there yet.”

Robert Teitleman, a perceptive business writer who has cast a skeptical eye on the genetic engineering industry since its inception, has a different explanation. In “Gene Dreams” he argues that a combination of ignorance, greed, hope and hype led to wildly inflated expectations of what could be achieved.

When Genentech got the biotechnology craze going, everybody profited: biologists who suddenly found themselves in great demand, entrepreneurs who put together biotech companies, speculators who drove up the price of stock, even journalists, who could finally satisfy their editors by writing about a cure for cancer.

Teitleman tells the saga of the boom and bust of the biotechnology industry, focusing largely on the experience of Genetic Systems of Seattle, which spent a lot of money without anything to show for it.

He places biotechnology in its historical context. The decade before, the public believed in President Nixon’s War on Cancer. Every decade we believe in something or other. People like to believe in things.

There is in this book a healthy warning to everyone not to be sucked in, particularly by scientific claims, particularly where the normal process of peer review has been ignored. It’s a fair warning.

“Hope sold stock,” Teitleman said. “Hope won elections.” Those who tried to inject a cautionary note were dismissed as naysayers and cynics. It’s a familiar story, right? Nobody likes a party-pooper.

But there is a problem with Teitleman’s analysis: it works best in hindsight. To be sure, as Teitleman makes clear, the people who touted biotech stocks didn’t know much of what they were talking about. Investors in Genetic Systems fell for a slick presentation by a biologist-turned-businessman who gave “a spellbinding little talk on six revolutions in science: chemistry, physics, psychology, medicine, electronics, and now, biotechnology.”

When Teitleman asked one biotech analyst on Wall Street how he could evaluate companies that had neither products nor profits nor sales, the analyst said, “It’s not easy. A lot of what we do is to provide a rational basis for instinct. We provide a sort of window dressing for investment.”

That all looks pretty damaging in the light of how things turned out. But if things had gone better, these same people would now be called visionaries. They would be hailed as prophets who could read the future from its broad outlines, without being mired in detail.

Predicting science and technology is always a tricky business. Recall that when Lee De Forest, one of the inventors of radio, toured an experimental television laboratory in the 1920s, he came away saying he saw no future in it. Recall that in the 1950s, IBM thought that the worldwide demand for computers would be satisfied by a few dozen machines.

Should these people now be excoriated for having been too cautious? Or should we just remind ourselves that predicting anything is very difficult, especially the future?

Besides, as the biotechs insist, their technology may yet turn out to be very valuable. Sales of drugs produced by genetic engineering amount to nearly $1 billion a year. While only nine such drugs are currently on the market, more than a hundred others are in clinical trials or are awaiting government approval.

As Teitleman himself concedes, “As the new biology matures, the true economic revolution may be yet to come.”