Yeah, I know. I was (unclearly) trying to draw the comparison to the research into correctness. It's impossible for the general case, but people still try to make useful progress with the specific cases.

"A large reason why these have not been commercialized is because of the strong IP culture that permeates biology, and the chilling effect that has had."

I sort-of agree with this. I think one major difference between biology and CS is that CS has a long history of public knowledge about systems that tends to build on in ways that become more abstract (and more powerful) over time. A lot of biological knowledge is public, too, but most of the commercially relevant knowledge is locked up.

"This also creates a bias towards intractable problems. The more difficult your problem is, the less likely it is to have been patented, so there is an incentive to work on those problems."

I totally disagree with this. I've never encountered anyone in the research world who has shied away from a problem simply because there were patents involved. There are a lot of patents in software too, and in my experience, we treat them the same way: we ignore them, and deal with the consequences later.

"Among academics and in industry, I OFTEN see that the operator's understanding lacks depth"

Yeah, OK. I grant you this (I've encountered it, too), but I still don't see how this is meaningfully affected by the stuff we're talking about. Bio hacker-spaces and robot-rental startups do not make this problem go away.

"I'm not saying we have a comprehensive understanding of biology, I'm saying it what we the culture have is enough that simple, useful, garage operations are really in striking range."

Yeah, well...I'm still waiting for examples. ;-)

I tend to believe that the market for good biotech ideas is efficient: there are enough extremely talented people working in the space, and enough money chasing plausible outcomes, that if there's an idea out there that doesn't take decades of basic science to find product-market fit, it has a company working on it already.

More to the point, though, I definitely do not believe that the rate-limiting factor for the creation of new biotech startups is access to machinery. It's access to knowledge, and therefore, this kind of "we're on the cusp of a biotech revolution!" stuff is, well...hyperventilation.