In 1984, during a tour of Silicon Valley by the then French President, François Mitterrand, the discrepancy between the venture capitalists’ newfound bullishness and their actual achievements was picked up in an exchange between Paul Berg, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year, and Tom Perkins (the co-founder of Kleiner-Perkins) boasting about his sector’s role in biotech. Berg said: ‘Where were you guys in the ’50s and ’60s when all the funding had to be done in the basic science? Most of the discoveries that have fuelled [the industry] were created back then.’
