The murmur spread across the vast room. I was standing in front of about 400 senior executives from one of our industry’s most storied giants. I’d spent 45 minutes arguing that Darwinian evolution is the only theory that truly explains the weirdness of our sector. Then I opened the floor to questions.

First up was a man who was doing a poor job of hiding his frustration behind his polite tone.

“Why can’t we be like a biotech – nimble, flexible, agile?” he asked.

His voice said what the room was thinking: If you can answer this, maybe your Darwinian spiel has something to it. The murmur told me everyone was waiting for my reply.

I didn’t answer immediately. Academics are trained to pre-qualify and, in this case, I needed to.

“It depends what you mean by biotech. I think you’re comparing yourselves to small, start-up, single product biotechs. Am I right?”

He nodded.

“In that case, they are mayflies. And you are a bowhead whale.”

The murmuring stopped. I could see the brows furrowing. They were trying to decide whether I was talking about size, strength or the mayfly’s famously short life. But I was heading somewhere else entirely.

Mayflies and bowhead whales differ in many ways, but the difference I cared about was how they reproduce. Mayflies are semelparous: they reproduce once, then die.

Bowhead whales are the archetype of iteroparity: they raise a calf every three to four years across a century of fertility.

Bowhead whales aren’t just long-lived; they are built for endurance in a way that almost defies belief. A female bowhead whale will reproduce twenty plus times across a century, investing heavily in each calf. But she also maintains the machinery of her own survival the entire time. Mayflies, by contrast, burn through their adult lives in a single frantic burst. One strategy balances longevity and reproduction; the other sacrifices longevity for offspring. And, whether they realise it or not, life sciences firms make the same choice.

In that sense, mayflies remind me of single asset biotech companies. Their existence begins and ends with one product. By contrast, our long-lived, multi-asset pharma companies are corporate bowheads. They are built for repeated cycles of investment, learning and renewal.

Metaphor established, it was time to make my point.

Wade through the evolutionary biology of ageing, especially the ‘disposable soma’ theory, and you quickly see the ubiquity of trade offs. In a world of limited resources, natural selection makes tough choices. Cheetahs choose speed over stamina. Most plants choose either rapid growth or self-defence, but rarely both. And fish choose to carelessly release millions of eggs while birds invest heavily in a handful of chicks. The biggest trade-off of all is reproduction versus survival. Mice, mosquitoes and mayflies live fast and breed furiously. Bats, beavers and bowhead whales live long and reproduce slowly but consistently. These differences aren’t superficial. They are the visible consequences of their proteomes, genomes and ultimately the A, C, G and T of their DNA.

After that biological detour, I told the room: “You can’t behave like a single asset biotech, and they can’t behave like you, because you’ve chosen to be iteroparous and they’ve chosen to be semelparous. And those choices are encoded in your respective DNAs.” Around the room, heads began to nod. Time for my coup de grâce.

“Biotechs have very distinctive processes, behaviours and cultures,” I said. “They don’t care about tomorrow. Every ounce of resource is devoted to getting over the next hurdle. They know this jeopardises the day after tomorrow, but their unwritten mantra is: we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

“The opposite is true in companies like yours. Your unwritten mantra is that you hold the company in trust for the next generation. And that deep, structural difference shapes everything. Your behaviours flow from the attributes of your people, the way cooperation and conflict are managed, the teams you form and the way those teams are grouped. Acronymically: your ACTG.”

Having made the point that copying biotech is pointless, I wanted to leave them with something more constructive. “If you’re big and want the qualities of something very small,” I said, “biology has already shown the way. Look at your mitochondria – tiny, semi-autonomous units inside a much larger organism. They move fast because they’re small. They endure because they’re part of something vast. If you want agility, don’t imitate biotechs. Build mitochondria.”