Randy Beavers opens a baggie, and there is an odor of soil as he fumbles with the goldenseal plants. For the next three years, his assistants will try to tame the wild herb, which is the focal point of his medicinal plant company, OrganiPharm.

Tucked on the second floor of a Medical College of Georgia building, this is the garden of the bioscience industry for the Garden City. OrganiPharm is among a second crop of companies to move into the college's biotech incubator.

Goldenseal extract is good for the immune system, acts as a natural antibiotic and can lower cholesterol, Mr. Beavers explains. The National Institutes of Health are paying him to develop enough goldenseal products so that it can conduct clinical studies.

Like its neighbors in the Life Sciences Innovation Center, OrganiPharm survives on grant money.

One of those neighbors, an anthrax vaccine maker called EMThrax, has been a quiet place over the past few weeks as its tag-team owners Mike Stump and Erin Worthy travel the nation in search of venture capital investment to keep running.

EMThrax is the epitome of what Augusta's bioscience industry has and has not: an abundance of researchers and little investment money.

"You do as much science as you can until you have to raise some money. Then when you raise the money, you follow through on the science," Mr. Stump said.

Consequently, the work gets done at a snail's pace. There is the problem with all of technology, he said, and results in invention coming slower than it should.

Augusta got serious about attracting bioscience companies eight years ago.

"Patience is a very hard sell," said Michael Gabridge, the former director for the MCG incubator. "Building a biotech industry is not a rapid-return kind of business."

Even without every major and medium-size metro area in the nation in hot pursuit of high-paying bio-tech jobs, an explosion of a bioscience industry in Augusta wasn't a reasonable expectation.

"There's good faculty and technology everywhere. No one has a monopoly on the tech anymore," said Donald Colbert, the director of the Georgia Medical Center Authority, which runs a second incubator in Augusta. "What these other places have been able to do is put together venture capital, serial mentoring by entrepreneurs talking to new ones, legal support, ready access to intellectual property attorneys ... and access to facilities."

In eight years, the city now has 34,000 square feet of incubator space for start up companies like EMThrax and OrganiPharm. Most of the space is filled.

Three hundred miles away is a mecca of bioscience, a park of 20 million square feet of offices and laboratories where 39,000 people roam through such nameplate companies as GlaxoSmithKline, Biogen and BASF.

The payroll for the companies located within the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park in Durham, N.C., is $2.7 billion each year. All of Georgia adds up to $940 million in annual bioscience payroll, according to the Georgia Biomedical Partnership.

Keep in mind, Durham had a 40-year head start.

"That was a long-term commitment, starting with building up the university system and then the rest," Mr. Colbert said. He ran a foundation in New York that assisted high-tech start-up companies before coming to Augusta seven months ago to attract companies to the city.

The medical center authority is now hunting for the city's third incubator location.

Mr. Colbert is in the process of bringing the foundation down to Augusta so that it can act as a second prong in search of money -- it would be able to go after grant money that the authority cannot.

Mr. Colbert also wants bioscience to be on the mind of the area's development authorities. But they've already been thinking about them a lot.

"We're still in the awareness building process, making the site consultants throughout the world, along with specific businesses, aware of the advantages that Augusta and Georgia in general can offer to companies in the life sciences business," said Zach Daffin, Columbia County's development authority director.

Mr. Daffin said his office gets inquiries from only three to four biotech companies each year. "Not as many as what we will ultimately be getting."

When he "brags" on Augusta, he points to the medical community and the incubators.

Before the biotech incubators came along, the face of Augusta's bioscience industry was on Lovers Lane at Monsanto, where they make an artificial hormone that stimulates milk production in cows. On Marvin Griffin Road at Tyco Healthcare Products, they make bandages. Situated on the edge of the downtown medical district, Xytex employees use cryogenics to store human tissue.

Augusta was noticed in a 2006 study for the Biotechnology Industry Organization for its specialization in agricultural-based bioscience, largely because of Monsanto's presence.

That diversity of companies, new and old, products to pharmaceuticals, is not a bad thing, Mr. Gabridge said.

In assessing Augusta's future, he said the city bioscience industry will be mixed use, diagnostic services, medical devices, drugs and some dental.

"Nothing succeeds like success," Mr. Gabridge said. "Now that we're having some (incubator) graduates, certainly it will generate more enthusiasm for more companies coming in, but lend some credibility that we've got some solid business opportunities here and the smart investors will realize that."

Investment is one of the major hurdles. An attempt five years ago to start an angel capital group failed because it didn't have enough members. Still, there are people who live in Augusta with money to invest is startup companies, but they spend it in other cities.

There are some ideas in progress to get around the inability to start a local group. Mr. Colbert said there are efforts underway to convince Atlanta and Savannah groups to branch into Augusta -- with the promise of not stealing away the companies they fund.

There's plenty of money out there. The life sciences sector set a record -- $9.1 billion -- for venture capital investment in 2007, according to the MoneyTree report on such investment compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 2006, there was $7.6 billion in investment in life sciences companies.

To understand Augusta's uphill battle for investment money, just look at the landscape: San Diego -- just the city -- gets as much investment as the six states that make up the southeast region.

"If these companies get anywhere near successful, venture people will come here," said Charles Nawrot, also a former director of the MCG incubator. "What we need right now is the seed investment, angel money, state money, to fund startup activities."

That up-front investment is important because biotech companies are heavily reliant on startup money to keep them afloat while their ideas snail their way through federal regulators. And because of the risky nature of these entrepreneurial science-based businesses, it is venture capital, not banks, that are the only money sources to take the chance on them.

"For us, we will have no cash flow for many years. Banks can't give you money with no assets and no positive return," Mr. Stump said.

Mr. Stump expects EMThrax will remain at MCG for another three to five years before it will be able to "graduate" and set up its own product facility for vaccines.

It is a similar time schedule for Mr. Beavers' OrganiPharm, though he has a separate company already marketing goldenseal products on a limited scale.

After eight years of toil, what's the grade?

"Solid B, Mr. Colbert said, with the potential of being an A."

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.