The current pharmaceutical industry, whose origins date from the early 20th century, and the biotechnology industry, which emerged in the 1980s both have foundations built on the modern scientific method and share a mission to develop new drugs for humans and animals. At the same time, they are also made distinct by size (small biotechs versus "big pharma"), relative age, method of drug development (biology-based versus chemistry-based), product capabilities, and characterization of the employee base (innovative and risk-taking versus traditional and risk-averse). These distinctions are found in the definitional language of federal government classification systems and trade organizations, as well as the descriptive language found in news articles, economic development publications, and corporate material. In this article, the author attempts to approach a century of pharmaceutical industry history and rhetoric (and a quarter century of biotech history and rhetoric) and to compare the two industries meaningfully. Her second aim is to interpret popular reaction to the two industries and gain an understanding of how people have come to think and talk about pharmaceuticals and biotech. She then explores the intricacies of bio-pharma language. She opines that in embracing (or rejecting) pharmaceutical or biotechnology industries, people are essentially embracing or rejecting each industry's ability to transform them in some way--to provide jobs for their communities; to bring therapeutics to their medicine cabinets; to make everyone, by association, innovative and heroic, or greedy and staid. The author also discusses how the helix metaphor captures the essence of the two industries caught up in a twisting, fraught, and complex rhetorical relationship in which many parties play a role. The rhetorical helix highlights the way in which the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, as the primary example, move through rhetorically constructed illusions of independence and interdependence. As a construct of movement and transition, the rhetorical helix is inherently unstable and ambiguous--a postmodern image for a postmodern world.