I moved to programming from biomedical R&D. It wasn't a decision based on economic concerns. I don't actually agree that "we could be further along in biotech if there were already a good number of us working on it", there are a bunch of people working on it and they are very intelligent, but the way projects are managed, communicated and evaluated is not conducive to great and immediate impact and doing research on humans actually has some issues.

Am very interested in talking about the field w/ pretty much anyone though. It has remained quite near to my heart.