Nathan Myhrvold, a former top scientist at the Microsoft
Corporation
who runs Intellectual Ventures, an investment firm in Bellevue, Wash.,
surmised that in the not-too-distant future, the top 20 companies in
pharmaceuticals, with the exception of one or two, would be unfamiliar
names.
"If you look at the pipeline of drugs in clinical
trials,'' he said, "way more of them were made by the little companies
than the big guys."
The conference, organized by M.I.T.'s Technology Review magazine,
drew about 1,000 attendees from established companies like Cisco
Systems Inc., Kraft
Foods Inc. and the Sprint
Corporation, and even a few unknown start-ups.