The Globe has come out with a special collection of articles today as BIO gets underway. It paints a picture of the biotech industry as a cash-hungry animal that spends way more money than it makes (but still manages to attract loads of investment).

And if some companies do manage to make money, they do it by charging huge amounts (tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per patient) for their drugs. This has got insurers and patients worried and now there’s a push in Washington to lower the costs of the drugs by allowing biogenerics. The biotech industry is increasingly becoming aware that they run the risk of repeating big pharma’s mistake: appearing to the public as greedy profiteers.

But for scientists, biotech in Boston has been a boon for jobs with companies bidding for top talent.

Perhaps the most interesting article of the bunch for me was about the status of women in biotech vs academic labs. Preliminary research is finding that women do better in biotech labs than university ones in terms of filing patents.

According to a BU sociologist quoted in the article and who is studying women in biotech, there are 3 reasons why women feel they are better off in biotech:

>First is flexibility in whom to work with. Second is better transparency: People work on many teams, cooperating with other departments, and even other companies and academics, so everyone has a better sense for who is talented. Finally, biotech firms work in an environment of ‘‘collective rewards’’ — if the product succeeds, then everyone wins — while academic institutions are more focused on individuals.

Corporate leadership in biotech, however, is still dominated by men.