What doth summer bring?

As the vacation season begins, it seems like everyone (markets included) would benefit from a little time off. The BioCentury 100 managed to post a 5.5 percent gain in the second quarter despite a landslide of bad news at the end, including a failed Phase III study by Liposome (LIPO), Phase III trials put on hold by Cambridge NeuroScience (CNSI) and Idec (IDPH), and an FDA panel vote against approving Ilex Oncology (ILXO) non-Hodgkin's lymphoma product in AIDS.

But the BioCentury 100 is still 2 points shy of its 1996 close of 985.54, and the group's gains were dimmed by the performance of the NASDAQ Composite (up 18 percent), the S&P 500 (16.9 percent) and the Dow Jones Industrials (16.5 percent)...