Science and technology lifts the gloom for property investors

OXFORD NANOPORE’S MinION is a tiny but powerful device. When a hotel worker in Sydney tested positive for covid-19 in March last year, the portable DNA sequencer traced the infection to a flight attendant for an American airline, avoiding a general lockdown. The success of biotech firms—another celebrity is BioNTech, of Covid-19 vaccine fame—is sucking capital into life sciences. When such companies expand, they do so not with offices or shops but by means of white-walled, shiny-surfaced scientific laboratories.