In the third quarter of 2008, the first tremors of the financial crisis had been felt, and the number of venture deals in the U.S. fell to its lowest total since early 2005. According to Dow Jones's VentureWire, which tracks venture investment, information technology companies fared particularly badly, with their lowest deal total in more than 10 years.

But for the quarter, total dollars invested stayed fairly steady, off only about 1 percent from each of the first two quarters. So some companies were still getting big paydays. Of the 10 companies with the biggest third-quarter deals, the plurality--four--were in the health-care sector. One of those companies, Pacific Biosciences, builds genome-sequencing machines and figures prominently in Emily Singer's "Interpreting the Genome." The other three are testing promising new therapies for some of the most common medical conditions.