Back to School 1995: Old-fashioned values

Every year at Labor Day, BioCentury puts on its schoolmarm glasses and lectures on the issues that will consume the industry's attention as everyone settles back to work after the summer holiday. For the past two years, the key issue facing biotechnology has been building corporate value in the environment of capital rationing that prevailed until the middle of this summer.

This year, the critical issue is to maintain the focus on building value even as the financing environment has opened up. If companies allow themselves to be beguiled by the eased capital environment, they risk throwing away the gains embodied in the hard lessons of the past three years...