My take is that it's just too early in biotech. Back in 1973 it was certainly possible to envision Facebook and Twitter. For example, if you read Steven Levy's Hackers you'll learn about the Community Memory project:
But computers and their associated tech like telecom were so expensive in 1973 that Community Memory was impractical at scale. There was no Facebook around to offer Lee Felsenstein an enormous salary and a potential IPO. The infrastructure wasn't yet built out, the audience wasn't yet there, and investor consciousness had not yet been raised. It took another twenty years of development to get from that point to the Web, and then another decade or so to get to Facebook.
Biotech is still stuck in the equivalent of 1973. We've identified many of the processes that need to become cheaper and more ubiquitous in order to conduct biotech research in your basement, but the tools are still large, expensive, and tedious to use. So at this point if you go into biotech you'll either spend 12 hours a day pipetting liquids by hand, waiting for the PCR machine, and pasting your data into Excel for analysis, or you'll spend 12 hours a day raising money to pay for the pipettes, the PCR machine, and the other scientists who are running them.
I've spent years as a biotech postdoc, and I've spent years as a programmer, and it's no mystery to me why people would rather be programmers, and would rather hire programmers. The day-to-day work is more pleasant, and the results have got such evident and immediate value that you can get good pay for them with relatively little effort or risk. Plus, you're part of a really big and freewheeling global culture, not only of web users but of web programmers.
And I know many many people who view programming as boring and love setting up experiments and assays. I was the only person in my group who looked at computers as anything more than a convenience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory
But computers and their associated tech like telecom were so expensive in 1973 that Community Memory was impractical at scale. There was no Facebook around to offer Lee Felsenstein an enormous salary and a potential IPO. The infrastructure wasn't yet built out, the audience wasn't yet there, and investor consciousness had not yet been raised. It took another twenty years of development to get from that point to the Web, and then another decade or so to get to Facebook.
Biotech is still stuck in the equivalent of 1973. We've identified many of the processes that need to become cheaper and more ubiquitous in order to conduct biotech research in your basement, but the tools are still large, expensive, and tedious to use. So at this point if you go into biotech you'll either spend 12 hours a day pipetting liquids by hand, waiting for the PCR machine, and pasting your data into Excel for analysis, or you'll spend 12 hours a day raising money to pay for the pipettes, the PCR machine, and the other scientists who are running them.
I've spent years as a biotech postdoc, and I've spent years as a programmer, and it's no mystery to me why people would rather be programmers, and would rather hire programmers. The day-to-day work is more pleasant, and the results have got such evident and immediate value that you can get good pay for them with relatively little effort or risk. Plus, you're part of a really big and freewheeling global culture, not only of web users but of web programmers.