And US tech entrepreneurs have a penchant for experimentation in how they structure their investments, says Keith Yamamoto, vice-chancellor of science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco. When it comes to philanthropy, private donors are more able to take risks with their investments than are government funding agencies, which are beholden to taxpayers to ensure that their money is spent wisely. “Public money limits your activities,” says Harold Varmus, a former director of the NIH, who has also been on advisory boards for the Gates Foundation and the CZI. “There is a freedom of motion that is associated with private money.” Some tech titans have experimented with various ways of structuring their grants. The Arc Institute, for example, boasts a “no-strings-attached” funding system that gives its investigators more freedom than do standard government grants awarded to biomedical researchers. Philanthropists are also able to fund long-term, interdisciplinary projects that can be difficult for government grants to take on. Convergent Research, a non-profit organization funded in part by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, is forming ‘focused research organizations’ that bring teams together to solve important scientific or engineering challenges that could benefit a wide swathe of research. “We’re looking for the pieces of critical, fundamental infrastructure missing from a particular field,” says Anastasia Gamick, a co-founder and president of Convergent Research, which is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Targeting research is a difficult process. One of my favorite targets was Multimedia Communications, now embodied in the current Internet world. But then many in management had no clue. A phone call was enough. Thus a good researcher will go for long term high impact work whereas the funders may have conflicting ideas. It should be interesting to see how this evolves.
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