Just as ground zero for the computer business is Dave Packard's garage in Palo Alto, the Bay Area's other industry, biotechnology, marks its beginnings in a smoky bar in San Francisco.

After work one Friday about 22 years ago two men, a venture capitalist and a biochemistry professor, met and decided over a few beers to form Genentech, thereby founding the biotechnology industry.

Genentech now has a market capitalisation of $7 billion (£5 billion), and has memorialised that first meeting with a striking bronze bust of the two men huddled in conversation that sits at the company's research facility in south San Francisco.

Robert Swanson the money man and Herb Boyer the biologist, are still involved with the company, which has spawned countless biotech start-ups, just as Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard sit at the top of the family tree in the computer industry.

Unlike the computer industry, however, the biotech business has not yet delivered hundreds of products that, like them or not, have changed the world in which we live.

All these little companies with strange names like Tularik and Agouron, Cadus and ArQule have got incredibly bright chemists and biologists, lawyers and pharmacists working crazy hours to produce exotic substances and potions that may make their shareholders rich.

Genentech has 3,000 employees and is one of the two largest companies engaged in genetic engineering (the other is Amgen, also in California). It has maintained its position as a leader, developing such important drugs as genetically-engineered human insulin for diabetes, the first drug to treat cystic fibrosis and a vaccine to prevent hepatitis B.

The company has generated cumulative revenues of more than $15 billion from just 10 products. Amgen has two $1 billion products and nothing else of significance.

This concentration of sales from a small number of products (they're known as mega-drugs) is in stark contrast to the computer industry, which is all about continuing to throw products at customers in the hope that some will be successful.

Of course the computer business gets sensitive about any slight regulation of its business (ask Bill Gates about that), whereas the pharmaceutical industry has to contend with the Federal Drug Administration.

Forbes magazine recently noted that it costs $300 million to create a marketable drug, and around $100 million of that cost is taken up by the trials that the FDA monitors before it lets a drug hit the marketplace.

At the opposite end of the corporate spectrum from Genentech are the myriad start-ups, their investors drawn by the lottery-like possibilities of creating another multibillion dollar Genentech, Amgen or Affymetrix.

The star of the moment is Geron, whose stock increased by around 45 per cent when it announced that it had developed a process which slowed ageing by adding an enzyme to human cells.

At an earlier stage in its development is Versicor, which was formed last year by New York transplant doctor Eric Gordon, who left behind a stellar corporate career for the wild ride and endless challenge of a biotech start-up.

Dr Gordon believes that this is a watershed time for the industry. In fact he calls it a "revolutionary transition period", when methods that have been used for 50 years in the pharmaceutical industry are being questioned and the huge costs of research and development are less able to be recouped in the marketplace because of US healthcare reform.

New methods of research are being developed to cope with this transition, bringing the worlds of computing and biotech closer.

Chairman and president of an early biotech start-up Enzo Biochem, Elazar Rabbanisays, says: "In the 1970s it was a lifetime of work to isolate and clone a single gene: 20 years later it has become essentially a high school student's summer job."

This leap in productivity spans the biotech spectrum as problems become more complex. The scientist stooped over his bench testing formulae by shaking his test tube has been replaced by a computerised, high throughput screening process requiring significant processing power.

Incyte Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company in Palo Alto that "maps" human genes and sells the information known as genomic data to drug companies, has about 1,500 computers on its network and pipes two trillion bits of data over that network every 24 hours.

Dr Gordon's Versicor represents one of the first attempts within the biotech industry to bring these fundamental trends together in order to accelerate the discovery of drugs.

Intriguingly, Versicor is combining work on the methods of research and development with actual research, in their case on antibiotics. A case of taking their own medicine, you could say.

The company's makeup reflects Dr Gordon's hometown of New York, as its 30 people are from 17 different countries. "The pharmaceutical business is truly international," he says, "because science as a language is universal. Great ideas can come from anywhere."

Of course anywhere could also include the great research labs of "big pharma" the major industry players like Eli Lilly, SmithKline and Glaxo-Wellcome. These companies are pouring millions of dollars into developing mass production methods of R&D.

Dr Gordon is relatively sanguine about their prospects, and in fact intends to collaborate with "big pharma" on certain research projects. "We see it as a stepping stone to independence," he says.

When you're working with a combination of genes, alchemy, poker and the lottery it helps to shorten the odds any way you can.