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> Except the research was published and almost no one paid attention. No fanfare. Stop me if this sounds familiar: No funding. It’s interesting to me that for-
by dahart 3y ago
> Except the research was published and almost no one paid attention. No fanfare. Stop me if this sounds familiar: No funding.
It’s interesting to me that for-profit startups are taking chances on research that academics aren’t. Academics is supposed to be the place for charting unknown territory and taking unprofitable risks. Yet it seems like such stories are becoming more common, and this might be closely related to the reproducibility crisis in science too; the notion that we need to gatekeep funding for positive results may be slowing down progress. The tenacity of Karikó sounds amazing and beyond what most people are capable of, but it just makes me wonder how many would-be researchers and breakthrough ideas are being discarded because academics has become so self-protective and risk averse. Or is the system working well and as intended, and we just need to expect a few brilliant thinkers to be left behind every now and then?
- epistasis 3y agoI'm not surprised at all. First, the failure rate of new bio ideas is extremely high. Second, even when they work the development time is extremely long. As methods advance, there are chances to make time-to-derisk shorter and cheaper, but right now you need extremely patient capital with very long risk timelines. And the high failure rate means you need to place a massive number of bets, and each of those failed bets doesn't have the capital recovery mode of being an aquihire. The norm throughout history is for brilliant thinkers to be left behind and ignored and for their ideas to go nowhere. I would say we are living in a time when a greater number of great thinkers have a chance of impacting the world than ever before. Though I wouldn't know how to asses the fraction of great thinkers that get a chance to execute.