This morning, biotechnology firms Genentech and Xoma announced that they stopped testing their experimental psoriasis drug Raptiva for rheumatoid arthritis.
Until that happens, though, academics and biotechnology firms will remain busy trying to lift addiction drug development out of depression.
That means experts working for the government oftentimes can't share their findings with their colleagues who work for pharmaceutical or biotechnology firms.
This would increase their value to biotechnology firms who are trying to raise money and prevent run-of-the-mill stock buyers from getting fleeced.
Car makers are probably standing on safer ground than biotechnology firms.
Although Monsanto has promised to put its terminator-gene system in deep-freeze, the molecular switching that underlies it remains a hot topic at many of the world's leading agri-biotechnology firms.
Strict regulation is hardly a novelty for biotechnology firms.
But Patricia Danzon of the Wharton Business School argues that this makes little sense when most big drug firms have laboratories in several countries and often acquire drugs under development from biotechnology firms located elsewhere.
Exelixis and Maxygen, two firms applying their technology to agricultural ends, had successful stockmarket flotations in the past year, largely because they also have human-health research programmes that allow them to be seen more as medical biotechnology firms than as agricultural ones.
There are also plenty of other ways to develop a company's scientific and selling skills: research agreements, licensing arrangements and marketing alliances between drug companies, biotechnology firms and other bodies are all less traumatic than forcing two different corporate cultures into one bed.
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Over a longer horizon, Bristol still has not performed as well as Novo Nordisk, the diabetes specialist that has outperformed most other drug makers over the past year but which did not do as well this year, or biotechnology firms like Alexion, focused on rare diseases, or Biogen Idec, focused on multiple sclerosis.
Many activities can be put out to the growing legion of biotechnology start-up firms, contract research organisations, independent drug-development firms and freelance sales organisations.
May was a grim month for biotechnology stocks, with several biotech firms facing big drops in their share prices and few posting large gains.
Dotcoms may come and go, but people always need drugs, and big pharmaceutical firms need their smaller biotechnology brethren to do much of the basic research for their future products.
Among these firms is Sequella, a biotechnology and diagnostics company based in Rockville, Maryland.
Its rivals include firms such as Blue Heron Biotechnology, founded in 1999, and DNA 2.0, founded in 2003, both of which also deliver DNA on demand.
Some biotech entrepreneurs wonder if big firms with interests in both agricultural biotechnology and conventional pesticides could ever be persuasive advocates of the new science that their smaller peers are developing, since it could well undermine sales of their most popular chemicals.
These sorts of pressures, long faced by medical-device companies, are now also confronted by firms in industries such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology.
In April, a Sino-American trade commission resolved several gritty disputes, including disagreements about standards for mobile-phone technology, approvals for biotechnology products and the regulation of express-delivery firms.
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"The report says only half the people that took part - and remember, 99.9% of the population did not - had some concerns, " said Paul Rylott, of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council (ABC), which represents biotech firms like Monsanto and Bayer CropScience.
In this way, the clean energy space may more resemble the biotech space where biotechnology start-ups are routinely acquired by the large pharmaceuticals firms that have the distribution and sales networks necessary to bring new drugs to market at scale.
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While a few firms have come unstuck over drugs faltering in clinical trials, a solid core of big, successful firms such as Celltech and Shire is reassuring investors that Britain's biotechnology sector is a better long-term bet than, say, Germany's less mature, and less profitable, industry.
This picture of a technological ecosystem in which mature firms are gobbled up while new ones appear has a lot in common with the history of biotechnology.
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