A vibe check on the San Francisco biotech scene

2.5k words, 11 minute reading time

Nobody in New York City wants you to live forever. Really, they will typically find the proposition deeply problematic, their face curdling at the very suggestion of it. If you live forever, clucking in disapproval as their eyebrows furrow, you likely will not live at all. They will mention how their near-death experience catalyzed their desire to live, how the accident of a loved one taught them to be truer to themselves, and their family member succumbing to cancer finally made them make amends. Suffering is actually good for you, it ripens the spirit. You ask them if vaccines were a good thing. That, they insist, is different. Well, maybe. Either way, the narcissism needed to view tragic events as a part of your own personal character building exercise is probably really, really good for you, but it’s something that I find hard to stomach.

And, to be clear: I’m somewhat a fan of this. Since I pathologically consider any club that would have me to not be worth joining, the average mentality of the people in NYC — as much as I disagree with it — are helpful for keeping me on the right side of history. San Francisco would have me, and that is precisely why I could not live there, at least for the moment.

But in short doses, the city can be very refreshing. There is an ecclesiastical sect energy to the place, one that bleeds a sense of belonging. It is not only a vision of a better world, but a vision of a world in which you personally are one of the elect. You deserve to be frozen. You deserve to survive. You have thought the correct thoughts, read the right essays, and knew about all the latest foundation models before the normies did. You saw the signs. You believed. Perhaps this isn’t neccesarily good for you, but it is good for summoning up the energy to do something very, very hard.

Well, at least that’s what it was like at one point. Recently, I visited San Francisco, between June 16th to June 28th. But this was my second stint to San Francisco, the first time was in October 2024, just about 8 months ago. During that last visit, the intensity I saw in everyone I talked to there was overwhelming, and concretely cemented my view as San Francisco as a place I should visit much, much more often. Not so this past trip! While it was a lovely time, there was an gloom over a majority of the life-sciences people I spoke to. A background radiation of anxiety and fear so strong that, by the end of my third day, my mirror neurons had kicked in and I too had begun to feel uneasy.

One of three good writers on the internet, Sam Kriss, writes:

Does Vibe transform the world, or is it an index of the world’s transformations? Look: I’m a good Marxist. We’re all good materialists here, we all know what the right answer is. But you’ll still have noticed that there’s been a trend, lately, towards a totally vibe-based ontology. The vibe shift is also a shift towards vibes.

Yes, the essay written above is about politics, but vibes permeate everything. A hard science is not immune to it. Really, biology may be even more prone to dissolving into the vague, amorphous goo that is vibes given how much is it stake. Cheap decisions are made based on vibes, expensive ones based on a careful, deliberating analysis that hums and haws over the complex minutiae, and extremely expensive ones are based on vibes. And useful biology is very, very expensive.

So what is the vibe of biotech? Obviously, I’m the least qualified person to give their take on it, but, the few vibe-naming attempts I have seen have not offered up something interesting. Thus, the reason for this essay. Here is the pitch for what I think the vibe shift is after having talked to 30~ people during my time in the Bay: increasingly few people in biology believe that they will be rewarded for doing something ambitious.