Biotech’s not fleeing J.P. Morgan just yet

The drug industry’s annual grumble over price gouging and hallway crowding at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference was impossible to ignore this year, so we asked readers: If you work at a conference-attending company, will you be sending fewer (or no) people to San Francisco next year?

And while the majority said yes, that majority amounted to just 53 percent of respondents. Everyone else is, ruefully or otherwise, planning to do the whole thing over again next year.

And that jibes with how the conversation has shifted this week. On Monday, Atlas Venture’s Bruce Booth delineated all the good reasons for skipping JPM Week — stifling costs, suffocating crowds, superficial conversations — but by Tuesday, a bunch of people countered to say that that’s kind of the point. J.P. Morgan’s entropy is irreplicable anywhere else, so why not grin and bear it for one week a year?

We look forward to having exactly this conversation again in 2020.