<i>"The thing I never understood is: shouldn’t the biotech community be happy that more people are trying to do this and that more people are funding this work?"</i><p>It's a world where lots of great ideas are underfunded (or not at all), because the traditional government sources don't have the money needed to invest in every good idea. Also, it's still generally too expensive to chase every possible business idea in biotech, and there are plenty of ideas with academic promise that don't get anywhere because the traditional sources of investment are too conservative. Scientists get punchy when they see funding going to "unproven" entrepreneurs, while they're slaving away at research that is peer-reviewed, but isn't getting any investor attention.<p>It's good to see YC bringing in outside expertise for this area, because the likely outcome for amateur angel investment in biotech would be investing in lots of flashy-but-insubstantial entrepreneurs, while legitimate research never gets off the bench. In my experience, it's much harder to evaluate biotech ideas than software.