Nobody who had the skills to seriously take a stab at curing cancer is instead coding up Angry Birds. All those kids from Stanford going to work at consumer technology shops are smart kids, but even at a place like Stanford the talent to really make fundamental breakthroughs in human knowledge is exceedingly rare. And it's not like there is any undersupply of smart people going into biology.

As a practical matter, it's more like "we got Angry Birds instead of some middling papers about some cellular pathways that are kind of interesting but ultimately not useful." Or more realistically, a bunch of smart kids got siphoned away from Wall Street and management consulting, and maybe big corporations like IBM or Oracle.