Range - David Epstein Page 0,116
was taught that there were no human diseases caused by retroviruses, that retroviruses were a curiosity that occurred in some animal tumors. In 1981, a new disease emerges that nobody knows anything about. In 1984, it’s found to be a retrovirus, HIV. In 1987, you have the first therapy. In 1996, you have such effective therapy that people don’t have to die of it anymore. How did that happen? Was it because companies all of a sudden rushed to make drugs? No. If you really look back and analyze it, before that time society had spent some of its very hard-earned money to study a curiosity called retroviruses. Just a curiosity in animals. So by the time HIV was found to be a retrovirus, you already knew that if you interfered with the protease [a type of enzyme] that you could deactivate it. So when HIV arrived, society had right off the shelf a huge amount of knowledge from investments made in a curiosity that at the time had no use. It may very well be that if you were to take all the research funding in the country and you put it in Alzheimer’s disease, you would never get to the solution. But the answer to Alzheimer’s disease may come from a misfolding protein in a cucumber. But how are you going to write a grant on a cucumber? And who are you going to send it to? If somebody gets interested in a folding protein in a cucumber and it’s a good scientific question, leave them alone. Let them torture the cucumber.”
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Casadevall’s overarching point is that the innovation ecosystem should intentionally preserve range and inefficiency. He is fighting an uphill battle.
In 2006, when I was starting in journalism, I sat in on funding policy hearings of a U.S. Senate subcommittee on science and space, chaired by Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Hutchison would thumb through a stack of scientists’ research proposals and read the titles aloud. If a title did not directly pertain to the creation of a new commercial technology, she whisked it from the stack and asked the room how exactly that sort of thing would help the country get ahead of India and China. Among the disciplines Hutchison classified as distracting from technological innovation were biology, geology, economics, and archaeology. One can only guess how she would have assessed the work of Louis Pasteur (who started as an artist) on chickens with cholera, which led him to lab-created vaccines. Or Einstein’s fanciful idea to investigate if time passes differently in high versus low gravity, part of a theory essential to some rather useful technology, like cell phones, which use global positioning satellites with gravitationally adjusted clocks that sync with clocks on Earth.
In 1945, former MIT dean Vannevar Bush, who oversaw U.S. military science during World War II—including the mass production of penicillin and the Manhattan Project—authored a report at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt in which he explained successful innovation culture. It was titled “Science, the Endless Frontier,” and led to the creation of the National Science Foundation that funded three generations of wildly successful scientific discovery, from Doppler radar and fiber optics to web browsers and MRIs. “Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice,” Bush wrote, “in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
A curious phenomenon has appeared in recent years on a near-annual basis when the Nobel Prizes are awarded. Someone who receives one explains that their breakthrough could not have occurred today. In 2016, Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi closed his Nobel lecture ominously: “Truly original discoveries in science are often triggered by unpredictable and unforeseen small findings. . . . Scientists are increasingly required to provide evidence of immediate and tangible applications of their work.” That is head start fervor come full circle; explorers have to pursue such narrowly specialized goals with such hyperefficiency that they can say what they will find before they look for it.
Like Casadevall, Ohsumi knows that applications are the end goal, but the question is how best to get there. There is no shortage of institutions focused tightly on applications. A few appeared in this book. Why specialize the entire research world that way? The “free play” of intellects sounds horribly inefficient, just like the free play of developing soccer players who could always instead be drilling specific skills. It’s just that when someone