Counterpoint: Biotech

On the other hand, medicine and industry ought to have a synergistic effect. After all, discoveries in the academic lab need to be translated to improved patient outcomes. Biotech and pharmaceutical companies are well placed to invest in such research and produce devices and drugs. It's a natural progression from understanding basic biology to designing marketable products that take advantage of that new knowledge and deliver it to the consumer. Indeed, many professors in the Bay Area have spun off startup companies that try to do just that (in all fields, not just biomedical). Furthermore, in clinical trials of drugs and testing of devices, who is better to evaluate these products than the experts who use them. Shouldn't companies advertise, market, and give information about their product to those who have the medical knowledge to decide whether it is appropriate for those patients? That's one way of looking at it.