Does he honestly believe the greatest minds of this generation are all working at the googleplex?

Anyone in the biomed field knows there have been huge advances towards artificial pancreases over the last five years. The purpose of an artificial pancreas is to provide the "second-by-second efficiency" that raganwald discusses.

From googling (as I am an expert in other areas of biomedical research), there are several companies and universities going into clinical trials in hospitals during this time and UVA entered outpatient clinical trials last year[1]. FDA gave preliminary guidance on approval of these devices in December 2011 and final guidance in November 2012 [2].

As one example of the extremely intelligent people working in this field, I point to an interview with Ed Damiano[3], who describes some of the difficulties in the control algorithms around these devices. A big one is that the time delay within a single patient evolves with time, and this time delay can be on the order of hours. So, you have continuous glucose monitoring on a second-by-second basis, but if the patient doesn't respond to the insulin for hours, you can quickly overdose the patient. A lot of control theory work is extremely well established, but usually with a fixed time delay related to the physical parameters of the system. (at this point, I should point out that work on ad systems that learn over time and adapt to changes in individual users response over time to an individual ad may be very applicable here, meaning work on optimizing ads may someday contribute to better managing diabetes, who knows? cross-polination in algorithms is very common, one algorithm I have used in my biophysics research was adapted by Ephraim Katzir from work he did for the israeli army on detecting tanks in satellite photos....).

I don't know why raganwald believes "the greatest minds of our generation toiling away in the Googleplex". There's lots of proof this isn't the case and I know several people in the biotech field that are much smarter than anyone I've seen go to work at Google. In fact, just as it is easy to jump from a physics PhD into google or the finance industry, I've seen a ton of people do it from the biotech field (prominent example: D.E. Shaw[4]).

At the same time, don't forget that people work to cure or manage diseases such as diabetes so that people can lead normal lives with a vibrant social circle. Many social apps serve a similar purpose of helping keep us connected with loved ones. While there are specialized social networks for people with diseases, this activity is often mirrored on nonspecialized platforms. Additionally, while a specialized network may help you find people with a similar disease, facebook or gmail may be what keeps someone who has to have a specialized treatment at a hospital hundreds of miles away in touch with their friends and facetime can allow a patient to call the spouse and kids and read a bedtime story. When Intel comes out with a new power-efficient processor, they may be driven by tablets and ultrabooks, but those processors may allow new portable medical devices that save lives in the field as paramedics are now able to apply medical technologies critical minutes earlier to a patient. So, don't let your narrow view of technologies blind yourself to the good actually resulting from the work done at these companies. Not everyone will make the next vacanti mouse, but their work may save more lives.

[1] http://www.news-medical.net/news/20120514/First-US-outpatien...
[2] http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulation...
[3] http://www.diabetesmine.com/2011/02/behind-the-scenes-of-the...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._E._Shaw_Research