Biotech and Mining comparison...

From the book Cracking the Code:

For every success in biopharma there are at least 10 failures. In a way, the biomedicine industry is a bit like the mining industry: it’s a capital intensive industry full of thousands of small companies trying to strike gold or other commodities; it’s an industry where travelling hopefully is often better than arrival; it has a fair share of charlatans; and when small exploration companies are successful, they often partner with mining giants, or sell outright to them. Mining is an industry where the time lags are long between the enterprise’s creation and the first mine (though not as long as in biotech) and, like biotech (although again, not to the same extent) it involves regulatory processes that create barriers both of time and of money.