Biotechnology issues, hit hard last week, were beaten down again yesterday.
Biotechnology issues, which have been giving back some of their gains lately, were lower for a fourth day.
And the performance of those stocks has not matched that of biotechnology issues, which have nothing to do with the Internet but which have suddenly come alive in their strongest performance since 1992, when biotechnology stocks dominated market speculation.
"Can you imagine?" Life-extending technology is a serious enough prospect to have merited its own chapter in "Beyond Therapy," a report on biotechnology issued last fall by the President's Council on Bioethics.
The Market Came to Them An 80percentt stake in technology stocks, with a sprinkling of biotechnology issues, pushed the $1.22 billion Kopp Emerging Growth fund into the No. 3 place for the quarter, with a return of 42.3percentt.
"People may look at this differently than some of the transspecies work but some of the risks they worry about would still be there," said Dr. Margaret Mellon, who tracks biotechnology issues at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
The boom in US biotechnology issues that began a year ago multiplied IBT's asset value as the imminence of the completion of the human genome project spurred on some remarkable gains.
The union, an independent organization that has opposed the Bush administration on environmental policies and the Clinton administration on biotechnology, issued a report last Wednesday accusing the administration of distorting science to serve its political goals.
In December, Jon Entine, the executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that promotes education about biotechnology issues, wrote an article in Slate suggesting that the holdup wasn't with the F.D.A., which had completed the report, but with the Obama administration, which had just finished a re-election campaign.
And biotechnology issues are likely to get increasing attention from legal bodies that design world trade rules.
While a senator and self-styled expert on biotechnology issues, Gore praised Algeny, the bizarre diatribe by anti-biotechnology zealot Jeremy Rifkin and is quoted on its cover, calling it "an important book" and an "insightful critique of the changing way in which mankind views nature".
