What the Heck is This Stuff?

This is my dream job. It's a dream because it doesn't exist outside of this medium. No journalistic organization today has a spot assigned for someone like myself to filter, examine, and report on this marketplace. There are organizations that write about the genomics market, and others that cover segments of this market, but no one is taking an economics/business approach to looking at what the convergence of the advances in molecular biology, cellular biology, and information technology, combined with business culture and financing changes mean in the global marketplace.

So, that's my assignment. Why me? For the last three years, I covered the microarray market. Microarrays are a genomic technology that functions at the molecular level and can measure gene activity. I watched the market grow from being essentially a home-brew technology to becoming a calibrated, industrially produced near-commodity and a $1 billion a year market. Suddenly, the growth curve for this market was less hockey stick . But, microarrays, applied to DNA and RNA, are just the beginning of the technological growth curve for the life sciences.

Proteomics, the investigation of the proteins produced by the body, is just beginning and the use of mass spectrometry and chromotography is just starting to hit uphill growth. Metabolomics, the study of metabolism, is even earlier and in the just emerging phase.

Then there is systems biology, a term most often paired with Lee Hood of the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle. This has come to mean the application of the knowledge gained in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, combined with heavy duty computation to begin to create biological models that can predict. This is all, admittedly, very forward looking and research and advances come in little bits, like popcorn starting to pop in a microwave. The key to getting a big bowl of puffed bits is in streamlining the culture of innovation, and clearly, we are not there yet.

Our patent schemes are becoming a choke-collar on innovation and wealth-creation.

The R in R&D is largely being outsourced to academia and funded by the government.

India and China are beginning to move in this market, and aren't alone as countries in eastern Europe, and in Latin America may also become players, connected by the Internet, and fueled by lower fundamental cost structures.

In the US, innovation and growth for the molecular biology tools makers is coming from acquisitions, producing a short-term blip and an uptick in what is undoubtedly a cyclical market.

Today, New Biology Economy celebrates its second month but I'm not throwing any parties yet. Typically, experts say the third month is the hurdle for most bloggers. So, we will work through this month and in September, we'll pop corks.

If you are curious about how this publication is doing, check out Google. Searching for new-biology-economy now produces two pages of references as we propagate through the network.

For a reality check, we are No. 24591 and regarded as an "crunchy crustacean" in the Truth Laid Bear's blogosphere ecosystem rankings. That's better than being an "insignificant microbe," the bottom of the Truth Laid Bear's food chain.