The New Tailwinds in Science
Exploring where the next biggest breakthroughs will come from
The last few weeks have been radically transformative. For science. For Humanity.
SpaceX caught its rocket booster using a pair of mechanical arms called ‘chopsticks’, paving the way towards reusable rockets, which in turn are valuable assets when it comes to space travel and (potentially) settlement
The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the founders of Google DeepMind for developing AI-based tools for protein structure prediction (I write about the AlphaFold3 model in an earlier article)
While these are two very different kinds of work, there is an underlying thread - the biggest breakthroughs of our times are taking place outside of academia, largely through private funding. This is a marked departure from the earlier centuries and the first half of the twenty first, where university labs were the bastions of ground shattering discoveries.
Some of the smartest people in the world today are opting out of academia, thanks to the bureaucracy and the obsession with publications, which decide whether or not you get a PhD; whether you progress on your path to becoming a tenured track professor.
These smart scientists are then attracted towards startups like DeepMind and SpaceX, focused research organizations (FROs) like E11 Bio1, and independent R&D organizations commissioned by governments such as IARPA in the US and ARIA in the UK. Or they end up starting their own companies like Celine Halioua2 who dropped out of a DPhil program at Oxford to build the longevity company Loyal. Accelerators like MIT engine and 50Years are enabling academic scientists to spin out companies from the work they are doing in their labs.
A PhD is no longer a pre-requisite for pushing the boundaries of science. Funding agencies such as the Mercatus Center, 1517 fund, 776 Foundation and more are willing to pitch in and offer no-strings-attached grants for breakthrough projects, often to young people with limited (conventional) experience.
Organizations like Deep Science Ventures are redefining what grad school should look like by enabling entrepreneurial individuals to obtain a PhD degree while building a deep tech company.
Companies like ODIN founded by Jo Zayner are empowering folks to access basic raw materials to run bio experiments in their living rooms. Accelerators like HAX make it increasingly easy for founders to procure electronic components to build new kinds of hardware companies. Several research tools and protocols, both computational and otherwise, are being open sourced.
Just like how the ubiquitous access to personal computers transformed the software world, democratization of lab tools will transform hardware innovation. There will now be more young people in garages building the next big biotech company.
And given how societies in Asia and Africa often innovate in resource constrained settings (fondly called jugaad in India and kumbina in Israel), the likelihood of the next earth shattering hardware company coming out of these regions, as opposed to the US and Europe, is significantly high (provided the funding, and mentorship ecosystems in these regions evolve rapidly in the next few years). In case of countries like India, the rapid economic growth, and the subsequent inflow of investor and philanthropic capital are likely to accelerate deep tech innovation.
That’s why today is the best time in the history of humankind for a 22-year old Indian woman like me without a family background in entrepreneurship or a PhD degree to build a transformational company like BioCompute, to shift the paradigms of data storage and compute towards bio based systems.
Science has traditionally been gatekept, and now we are pushing open the gates a little wider to allow folks conventionally considered misfits to pursue knowledge and translate it into real world impact. Of course there is a lot more for us to do in terms of real diversity of STEM talent and the integration of indigenous knowledge systems into mainstream science. But this is a good first step.
I believe that impact-driven science is here to stay. And we are cruising on these tailwinds.
Podcast episode with Jun Axup leading E11 Bio
https://www.celinehh.com/about