Denares, dosh, dough. Whatever you want to call it, biotechnology companies can do nothing without cash. The problem sometimes, though, has been that they can do nothing with it either.

It was, to a first approximation, a year ago that investors returned to biotechnology. In the year before October 1999, biotechnology companies received on average only $500 million of OPM (other people's money) per month. From October 1999 to August 2000, however, the financial markets gave biotechnology firms at least $1 billion every month; the average was over $2.7 billion a month and the peak, in March, was over $8.5 billion.

Alas, the bread-fest may be over, at least for a little while. As Nature Biotechnology went to press, it looked pretty unlikely that September would make it to the billion-dollar mark. At the very least, this should be a reminder that money people do not always smile on the life sciences sector. But then again, the life sciences sector has not always given the money people much to smile about.

When money is short, the sector may have an excuse: it's difficult to innovate profitably when everything you develop has to be sold in a buyer's market. However, the life sciences sector has garnered a 12-month financial harvest of over $30 billion, five times the figure for the year before. Thirty billion dollars is 10 Human Genome Projects worth (or a hundred the way Celera did it). It's more than three times what public biotechnology companies worldwide spend on R&D in a year. Investors are betting that with this kind of money biotechnology can get itself a name as a force for genuine good, the improvement of the human lot, and profit. If it can't, it may be time to give up altogether. The financiers certainly will.