A true bubble is formed only when a certain sector or sectors attract the attention of the general public and novice retail traders start taking positions following the herd, having little to no idea what they're doing. The last time we saw this in full swing was 1999/2000, when the Nasdaq started going completely ballistic. It has barely recovered three fifths of its former glory. I doubt we will see something on the order of magnitude of the Nasdaq bubble in the next few generations, but the sector that is mimicking this sort of behavior on a smaller scale right now is biotech. I do not believe it will deflate like the Nasdaq, but it is in for at least a decade of up/down crisscross consolidation, just like it was between 2000 until the beginning of 2012. There is an alternative for biotech investors, which I will get to

Way back in the day, people traded precious metal around by weight, say grams, in exchange for stuff. Those who messed around with their weights were boycotted and/or harassed and driven out of business. Money was thereby kept honest. Then some king or other conquered the area and gave the weight a special name, like "dinar" instead of "gram". One "gram" of gold became one "dinar" of gold, placing the imaginary concept of "face value" at the forefront over actual weight by inventing some imaginary proper noun with a nice ring to it. Then the king took control of the private mints and stamped his own face on the precious metal. Now, with his face on the metal, his own proper noun for the coins, and control of the coin-making equipment, he proceeded to make the coins out of higher and higher percentages of cheap scrap with the same imaginary

There's nothing like a good David/Goliath patent war to stir the market pot. Some would say that patent litigation has gotten out of hand in recent years, with lawyers upon lawyers getting richer and richer with money that could have otherwise been used to make our lives better with improved technologies. But this is not the fault of companies. They are just using tools provided to them to acquire as much money as possible, which is generally what all companies are created to do. If you claim that patent litigation has gotten out of hand, then you are basically arguing for the abolition of all patents. While this position has its merits as brand name and secrecy would be the name of the game and courts would stay out of it, it is not one that is currently seriously considered by anyone even close to power.

Be that as it

The history of cancer vaccines is a slow one. Aside from the cervical cancer vaccine which vaccinates against the virus (HPV) that causes the cancer, there have been no total successes. Companies have tried for decades to devise a method to get the immune system to recognize and attack cancer, with paltry-to-partial results. There is however, some better news to report. A quick run through of recent relative successes in the field shows that there are some among them that do show some real promise.

Provenge

Developed by Dendreon (DNDN) and FDA approved in May 2010 with wild fanfare, Provenge is a prostate cancer vaccine that extends patient life an average of 4.1 months according to its phase III trial data. Judging by the Google chart below, it extended the life of the stock for a little over 2 years until in mid 2011 sales were found

"Let me tell you a little story about immunization," late comedian George Carlin began in one of his famous comedy routines:

"When I was a little boy in New York City in the 1940s, we swam in the Hudson River. And it was filled with raw sewage, OK? We swam in raw sewage, you know, to cool off. And at that time, the big fear was polio…In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio. You know why? Because we swam in raw sewage. It strengthened our immune systems. The polio never had a prayer."

His routine gets a bit more vulgar than that, as is George Carlin, and he was not exactly a molecular biologist. His point, though, was correct. Don't go crazy about germs and hygiene because one's immune system needs practice. Unfortunately, it works the other way around. Germs get practice too. This is especially true regarding antibiotics,