Three years ago, Wen Xiaogang, winner of the Dirac Prize, the highest award in theoretical physics, gave a popular science lecture on condensed matter physics.

In the question and answer session, someone asked how quantum mechanics will develop in the next step. After Wen Xiaogang finished speaking his views, he did not forget to add humorously: However, I have not done relevant research. I am researching condensed matter, and I have to write funds.

The fund is well written, and the funding is not troublesome. Writing funds and applying for projects are essential skills for scientists around the world. However, young scientists are also reflecting on whether the current project-led system is really enough to promote innovation and scientific research progress.

“No one goes into science to write research grants, and that could end up costing you more than 50 percent of your time,” says biologist Patrick Hsu. “For the rest of the time, we have to take on a lot of management, operations, and logistics.” Working within the existing scientific research system, there are many external factors that need to be considered in order to successfully apply for a project. It is difficult for him to follow curiosity and to study real concerns.

To escape this life, he became the co-founder of the innovative research institute Arc Institute. Here, fellows will receive funding for up to 8 years to study complex and difficult problems in the biological field.

Scientist Silvana Konermann is the founder and executive director of the Arc Institute, which was funded by her billionaire husband, Patrick Collison. Patrick Collison and his younger brother John Collison are the founders of Strip, a technology provider for Internet payment services, which is valued at $95 billion.

According to foreign media reports, German girl Konermann and Irish teenager Collison met in a young scientist competition when they were seventeen or eighteen years old. The former won the first prize for a biotechnology, and the latter won the second prize for the programming language he invented .

The teenage Konermann climbed the academic path and became an assistant professor of biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The young Collison took a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneurial path, working as a software company while studying at university. The company was acquired at a young age and realized financial freedom. Strip is the second venture he started after dropping out of MIT.

Now, in a time when the “software eats the world” story is less sexy and the life sciences are more favored, a paradigm shift is taking place, and Silicon Valley tycoons have become donors to the scientist’s wife, supporting her research on complex diseases in unrestricted ways.

From the perspective of the development of science and technology, this institute is another attempt by the rich to donate life sciences and promote technological innovation. There is a growing awareness that life sciences are likely to be the next world-changing field. In addition to investing in startups, promoting scientific research through donations has also become an option.

Chen Tianqiao and Luo Qianqian, the former richest Chinese people, established the Tianqiao Brain Science Research Institute with a $1 billion investment, “hoping to find out the root cause of mental illness”; and Chen Zuckerberg, founded by Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chen and his wife Initiative, the first $3 billion in funding is earmarked “to cure, prevent and manage all human diseases in our lifetimes.”

The emergence of the Arc Research Institute represents a new generation of scientists with the ability and ideas to create new rules of the game by themselves, to build the container and soil required for scientific and technological progress, that is, the system and system. Many of today’s Silicon Valley giants were born in what used to be garages, and if people believe that biotechnology will usher in a revolutionary wave, there will inevitably be a “field” of innovation that will follow.

01 “Give science back to scientists”

Patrick Hsu and Silvana Konermann, the two founders of the Arc Institute, met in Feng Zhang’s lab at the Broad Institute.

This is the key place for the development of the third-generation gene editing technology CRISPR. The Nobel Prize technology has been refined here and used on animals and plants. Patrick Hsu, Zhang’s first-generation graduate student, co-authored an article in Science in 2013 showing that CRISPR technology could work in human cells.

In 2019, he was selected as one of the world’s “35 35-year-old innovators” by MIT Technology Review for a study using CRISPR technology to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Every year since 1995, the award has selected 35 young technology innovators or entrepreneurs from around the world with the greatest potential to change the world.

Alzheimer’s disease Alzheimer’s disease is often referred to as “senile dementia”. Some people will not be able to remember who the people around them are when they get old, and whether they have eaten a meal just now. This kind of “dementia” performance. At the brain level, this is caused by neurodegeneration, known as “neurodegenerative diseases.” In the past 10 years, scientists have studied hundreds of treatments, all of which have failed.

Today, the two young biologists have set up their own laboratories. The same is that they both focus on cutting-edge fields: from the cellular and genetic level, to understand the mechanisms of diseases that humans have not yet understood, and to explore therapeutics.

Patrick Hsu is at Berkeley’s Institute for Innovative Genomics, where his research focuses on the genetic circuits of brain and immune cell function, developing gene and cell therapies. Silvana Konermann works in her lab at Stanford University, using new technologies to understand cellular and molecular pathways in neurodegenerative diseases.

When they co-founded an institute, the mission of the Arc Institute was to “try to understand and treat complex diseases.” Mainly divided into three directions: neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, immune dysfunction. (eg AIDS, systemic lupus erythematosus)

They realized that to achieve such a goal, several conditions need to exist at the same time: new biological basic research, goal-oriented technology development, and effective commercialization path. It’s not easy to pull all three together in today’s academic system. For example, tool development and basic research are easily spread across different laboratories. At the same time, with the advent of technologies such as CRISPR gene editing systems, single-cell sequencing, and even protein structure prediction of AF2, new technological tools are increasingly important for biological research.

“It’s hard to attract real computational scientists or engineers to work in biology, or at least nonprofit biology,” Konermann said. Indeed, why should computer scientists study biology when software companies are more profitable? With the development of science and technology, some changes have taken place. In the field of synthetic biology, which is sought after by capital, people are trying to integrate engineering ideas, programming methods and biological research.

At the Arc Institute, Konermann hopes to attract computer scientists and engineers with more competitive salaries. “It is very possible to introduce some of the latest computational tools into biological problems,” and most of this currently happens in for-profit institutions. “I decided to bring it into a non-profit setting.”

The institute has been in preparation for the past two years, and has now established collaborations with Stanford University, UCSF and Berkeley. Konermann said, “Most of my energy has been spent building relationships with the three universities, figuring out the models that fit them and the details of the collaboration.”

Rather than funding specific projects, the Arc Institute hopes to support scientists who are willing to pursue curiosity and spend long hours working on high-risk topics. Scientists can ask a fundamental area that they want to deepen their understanding of, or a question they want to answer, become a researcher here and get an 8-year grant. At the end of their tenure, scientists need to present the most productive fruits of their work. “It could be an important breakthrough or some kind of technology. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be a specific paper, or be published in a prestigious journal.” Institutions create conditions that allow scientists to let go, and scientists take responsibility for their research careers.

“We want to give the science back to scientists so they can use long-term funding to research their best ideas,” says Patrick Hsu.

As for how to measure the success of this institute, in addition to the usual academic measures, there is also whether the environment here allows researchers to focus on science, and whether they discover new things here that make the world a better place.

Konermann described that if the mechanism established by the Arc Institute works, “will other funders, institutions, stakeholders in the existing system force themselves to pursue other verifications and models?” Her desire behind the creation of this independent research organization , is that scientific research is supported by a more complete and diverse system, each institution has its own characteristics, and the Arc Research Institute has become a part of it.

02 When the Internet and cryptocurrency rich, fund biological research

This isn’t the first time the three founders have funded research in innovative ways.

Before founding the institute, the two scientists and Patrick Collison launched an innovation funding program called Fast Grant. In 2019, the new crown epidemic just broke out. In the face of the development of the epidemic, the speed of traditional project funding was too slow to support scientists engaged in related research in a timely manner.

Fast Grants will be reviewed within 48 hours of receipt of applications (later changed to 14 days due to increased workload), and grants of $10,000 to $500,000 will be awarded to approved scientists. The program distributed more than $50 million to 200 labs over the next 12 months. Scientists who receive funding need to ensure that it is used to accelerate research related to the new coronavirus, and it is up to the scientists to decide how to use it. Grantees are required to email monthly updates summarizing progress.

Because one of the features of this funding is that it does not limit the specific usage. Curious about how researchers would use unrestricted funding, they surveyed funded scientists. This led them to the fact that 78.5% said they would “dramatically” change their research plans if existing funding were available without restrictions. That is to say, in the current funding system for scientific research, people are unlikely to pursue the ideas they feel are the “best” and “genius”.

Based on his own experience, Patrick Hsu described that when applying for project-based funding, it is often “based on what you know how to do, rather than the problems you may really want to solve.” Researchers need to think about their own research strategies that are “optimized for high-impact journals, not necessarily to address the researcher’s most exciting or important problem.”

Fast Grant backers include the Collison brothers and the Zuckerbergs. When the Arc Institute was established 2 years later, other Silicon Valley leaders and cryptocurrency entrepreneurs also joined it, including Ethereum founder Buterin, another Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife also participated in funding. The Institute has now been funded. Received $650 million in funding.

The Arc Research Institute is not an exception. In recent years, a number of similar innovative research institutions have emerged in the European and American scientific circles, and most of the supporters behind them are Silicon Valley rich people.

In 2021, two scientists, Seemay Zhou and Prachee Avasti, founded Arcadia Science. Backers include Jed McCaleb, life partner of one of the founding scientists, Seemay Zhou (he is a cryptocurrency billionaire and founder of a fund), and Open AI CEO Sam Altman.

Arcadia Science Laboratory is for profit. Its mechanism is to encourage scientists to study areas of interest and find opportunities for industrialization. It is characterized by providing tools and resources for biologists to study areas that are not in mainstream research. Organic species of concern.

Another non-profit organization, New Science, received funding from Skype co-founders Jaan Tallinn and Buterin V. It describes its mission as “promoting scientific breakthroughs by empowering the next generation of scientists and building 21st century institutions for basic science research.” An ongoing project is the creation of research fellowships for young life scientists in Boston.

In 2011, while A16z’s Mark Anderson proclaimed the power of algorithms with an essay “Software is eating the world,” economist Tyler Cowan published a book called “The Great Stagnation.” Book. He argues that scientific breakthroughs and technological progress are slowing, with the exception of computer technology, there is no significant progress in most other fields of technology , “pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology — all of these areas are more advanced than people think. much more limited.”

The new crown epidemic has made people realize how much the world needs life technology, and it has also made science full of powerlessness. Although the development speed of mRNA vaccines has broken historical records, scientific research still cannot keep up with the mutation speed of the virus. The emergence of a similar innovation mechanism at Arc Institute is an attempt by a group of people to promote technological innovation, which is not only a response to reality, but also an echo of history.

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