Biotech Life in the Software City

What it's like living as someone working in biotech in San Francisco.

The Salesforce Tower shoulders up through the city like a blue-glass tombstone, but only at first glance. Step nearer—past the sidewalk steam, the acrid espresso breath of Market Street—and its skin behaves more like a mood ring, sipping sunrise and exhaling a dim corporate bruise. Commuters spill out of BART portals in the half-light, still blinking. The tower drinks light and gives back nothing—a monument to the strange mathematics of standing between people and charging them to pass through.

Then there's me. I slip past the Salesforce Tower in those gunmetal pre-dawn hours when the city finally shows its unpowdered face. Street sweepers sluice yesterday's dreams into the gutters while tents under the overpasses unzip, their blue tarps fluttering like broken wings. Commute buses groan by, windows fogged with the weary faces of people hired to fatten someone else's fortune. I trudge south toward a warehouse pretending to be a lab. The roll-up door shudders open, and I'm greeted by the pilgrim smells of bleach, agar, and a -80 freezer exhaling frost like a beaten dragon. Pipettes click, centrifuges keen, photons pinball through liquid chromophores.

This is supposed to be where the outcasts wash up—those of us who couldn't fit anywhere else. I came here believing San Francisco was still the place where the strange and stubborn could matter. But I got here to find the city locked in a fever that apparently never breaks. Every generation gets its own version—gold rush, dot-com boom, crypto winter, AI summer—each one promising to change everything while changing nothing that matters. At least the original prospectors were digging for something real. Now we're all mining engagement metrics.

The biotech labs cluster south of the city like settlements beyond the pale, exiled by rent and relevance. We work in converted warehouses while the tower people work in temples of glass and steel. Our experiments take years to show results; their code ships by lunch and shows revenue by dinner. We sequence genomes while they sequester ARR.

The VCs ruffle our hair at networking events. "Biotech! How important! So noble!" Then they go fund another app to help people avoid making eye contact with their delivery drivers. They'll give us just enough money to keep the lights on if we promise to say "AI-powered" somewhere in our pitch deck, but the real money—the stupid money, the tower money—all flows to software.

I'm starting to understand why. Because software scales like kudzu and biology moves like redwoods. Software fails fast and pivots faster; biology fails slow and usually just fails. The tower represents everything we're not: predictable, profitable—and, to us, pointless. It's the perfect monument to a city that's forgotten what it means to build something that lasts.

At least other cities are honest about what they are. New York doesn't pretend Wall Street is saving the world—it just admits it's there to make money. There's something almost refreshing about that kind of straightforward greed.

But San Francisco can't help itself. It has to dress every money grab in world-changing rhetoric. The tower doesn't say "we help companies extract more revenue from customers"—it says "we're democratizing customer relationships." Every rent-seeker calls themselves a revolutionary. Every middleman insists they're cutting out the middleman.

The people in the tower—and they really are just people, some of them younger than me, making ten times what the PhD grads in my lab make—they've figured out the secret to this economy. Don't create anything new: just position yourself between existing things and charge a toll. Don't solve problems: create platforms where other people solve problems and take a cut.

They call themselves builders, but they build nothing. They're tollbooth operators charging admission to roads they didn't pave. Between hungry people and food—DoorDash, taking its cut. Between lonely people and connection—Tinder and Hinge, monetizing desire. Between the sick and the cure—well, that's where they've graciously allowed us to keep working, for now. Though I'm sure someone's building the "Uber for clinical trials" as I write this.

Living here as a biotech person means living with a specific kind of cognitive dissonance. Your work matters more and pays less. You're saving lives while they're optimizing ad targeting, but guess who can afford to go out for dinner every night in the city? You're doing science while they're doing arbitrage, but guess whose company gets the headlines?

Alas.

There are people here I couldn't find anywhere else. Brilliant, obsessed, slightly unhinged people who dream bigger than makes sense. The woman in the lab next door who's teaching bacteria to eat plastic—she tried MIT first, but they thought she was too weird. The guy down at the incubator who swears he's going to prevent most cancers—he'd die of boredom in San Diego.

We end up at the same dive bars in Mission Bay after our experiments inevitably fail, and we talk about leaving. Moving to Boston where biotech is taken seriously. Moving somewhere with cheaper rent and lower expectations. Moving anywhere they build laboratories instead of "disruption engines."

But we never actually leave. Because despite the tower casting its shadow over everything, despite being second-class citizens in the kingdom of software, this is still the only city crazy enough to let us try to cure death. The same delusion that builds monuments to customer relationship management also funds moonshots at mortality. The same fever that creates fake problems sometimes accidentally funds solutions to real ones.

But the fog always lifts. And there's the tower again, blue and gleaming and smugly confident, perfectly erect while the rest of us scramble for funding.

Sometimes I wonder if we're all just waiting for the Big One—not because we want destruction, but because we want an excuse to start over. To build a city where the tallest structure might house a particle accelerator or a research hospital instead of a customer relationship management company.

But earthquakes don't reset cultures, just buildings. And this culture has been running a fever for so long it doesn't remember what normal feels like. Each wave of fortune-seekers leaves behind new ways to extract value without creating any.

Still, I stay. I stay because the work is actually starting to show promise. I stay because my friend just closed a funding round and bought drinks for all of us, and for one night we felt like we might actually matter. I stay because somewhere in this city of platforms and profit margins, there are still people trying to solve problems that will outlast the next funding cycle.

We might be vassals in the kingdom of software, but we're vassals with pipettes and the stubborn belief that biology will matter more than algorithms when everything else falls apart.

Every morning I walk past that tower and wonder: What if we actually cure something? What if we figure out how to make human life longer, healthier, more meaningful? What monument would they build for that?

What color would those LEDs glow?