Gates Foundation Funds Research, Venture Capital Style
There’s no shortage of good researchers with groundbreaking, unfunded ideas. So the Gates Foundation will dole out $100,000 to 104 scientists around the world with the aim of cultivating novel new preventive methods or cures for treating a variety of diseases, including HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The program, which has been planned for a year and is called Grand Challenges Explorations, aims to operate more along the lines of Silicon Valley’s investment approach, in which venture capitalists provide relatively small amounts of capital to a large number of ideas in the hope that just a few will succeed and become the next Microsoft or Google.
This is also an instance of a major foundation endorsing the “high-risk, high-return” approach which understands both that the road to scientific breakthroughs winds past some unmitigated failures, and that pursuing ultimately unsuccessful projects is perfectly healthy when there are multiple paths to a solution. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sent 56 researchers down this track earlier this year.
The Explorations proposals funded in this first round include researching “living antibiotics” that will send predator microbes to destroy harmful infections, employing mosquitoes as “flying syringes” to distribute vaccines, and investigating genetic resistance to HIV and tuberculosis.
The Gates Foundation press release describing the project is here.
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