Chase-ing biotech?

It may not have been lost on biotech companies that the business media last week focused on disappointment over the small size of Chase Manhattan's $1.35 billion acquisition deal for Hambrecht & Quist, or on the big commercial bank's long-anticipated entree into high tech equity banking. What everyone in biotech knows - that H&Q has been a mainstay of biotech banking in this decade - was virtually ignored.

Thus the first question that comes to mind is whether H&Q will remain in biotech once it is swallowed by the giant bank, or if H&Q's equity banking and analyst coverage will suffer the fate of Montgomery Securities, which no longer covers biotech since it disappeared into NationsBanc in 1997...