Silicon Valley’s New Obsession
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In April 2020, when the coronavirus first swept across the United States, many of America’s top scientists struggled to get funding to answer basic and urgent questions about the disease it caused. Patrick Collison, the chief executive of the payment-processing company Stripe, spied an opportunity in this market failure. He co-founded a program called Fast Grants, which raised more than $50 million that was quickly distributed to hundreds of projects. In its first 20 months, the program supported research on saliva-based tests and clinical trials for drugs, such as fluvoxamine, that could be repurposed to treat COVID-19.
The success of Fast Grants raised an uncomfortable question about how the U.S. funds innovation. If a little pop-up could unlock so many good ideas so quickly, how many potential breakthroughs are being denied every year by the traditional system of funding science?
Since the end of World War II, America’s science spending has relied on centralized agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The NIH and NSF have helped researchers map putting together complex grant proposals. This time suck pulls scientists away from doing real science while it nudges them toward projects that will appeal to peer-review boards rather than lead to novel breakthroughs. More generally, innovation is in a rut. Economists have concluded that in the life sciences and that growth of scientific knowledge has been for decades.
