Now here's a thought. Research biologists really need to train themselves to be utterly unproductive most of the time. If they could only learn to compress their inventive energies into one 12 month period every three or four years, then biotechnology companies that sprang from those inventions might stand a much greater chance of success.

The logic is undeniable. Life science companies will not succeed without spending a lot of money—other people's money. To raise this efficiently, they must trawl the markets at their most giving. The key to success is timing. Public finance markets, in which the vast majority of biotechnology funds is raised, only shine on the life sciences one year in every three or four. Companies must be ready to jump through this “open window” and to make their initial public offerings.

But we must begin at the beginning. Most companies are founded with venture capital, and venture capitalists are likely to be at their most charitable just after an open finance window. That is the time to start a company. Having realized earlier investments at IPO, a VCs' coffers will be lined and their spirits more kindly. The foundling company that will result from a well-timed generously funded first venture round will have a full 3–4 years of the funding cycle to prepare itself for the reopening of the public finance window.

Working back still further, the ideal time for researchers to make the inventions that provide the technical basis of the company, is in the year or so leading up to biotechnology's open financing window. The patent lawyers then have time to secure the intellectual property before the company founders need to look for venture capital.

Unfortunately, invention is not predictable (there is no muse of invention, per se). Consequently, new corporations drip relatively randomly from the pipeline of knowledge ownership. But the serious upshot of sporadic formation is that companies will differ in their readiness for a subsequent public financing. When the window opens, some companies will have their proxies of maturity—advanced clinical products, pharmaceutical partners, early revenues—shined off and ready to show investors. But many well-managed, reliable companies with potentially dominant intellectual property portfolios may be deemed “too young” to attract public money or, at least, too young to attract it at a good price. The public markets will fund some poor companies that appear to be mature, and will fail to fund deserving adolescents. Suddenly, poorer than companies that did float, the youngsters may not be able to maintain their lead in the field until the next public finance window opens.

Are these mere idle speculations, invoking some capitalist utopia in which second-level uncertainty no longer governs the business cycles? Given the most peculiar of times in which we now live, perhaps, not. It may indeed be exactly the moment for would-be biotech entrepreneurs, and those who would put money in their coffers, to rethink some of the strategies that may have worked in the past. They may not work again, even when the next window opens (if it does).