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Along with Allen AI there is the Craig Venter institute. You did not just swindle wall street (I mean this in a good way) to fund scientific research and cash
by dnautics 5y ago
Along with Allen AI there is the Craig Venter institute. You did not just swindle wall street (I mean this in a good way) to fund scientific research and cash out at the top by having your board fire you (crocodile tears) to the tune of ~15B. Even if you did, your eponymous self-funded research institute will burn through its funds in a decade and your researchers will start having to do federal grant seeking at the point in time when federal grants are the hardest to obtain and other competitive research institutes are seeking a higher balance of private money.
A better example to shoot for would be peter Mitchell's Glynn research institute. You raise money to study one thing and one thing only. You do your research in a garage (to be fair, of a giant regency manor) and finish it. And then win the Nobel prize.
I'm still trying to find out what happened to Percy Julian's Julian research institute, which enjoyed some success but no longer exists as far as I can tell.
- dnautics 5y agoBy the way "by swindle wall street" I mean sell them on the idea that "you could patent human genes". I'm not convinced that Craig actually believed this was possible or that even it was a reasonable business model, but wall street in their boundless avarice certainly did; note that this all went down more than a decade before the myriad genomics supreme court case, which settles the issue in the negative.