Paul Allen, sometimes seen as the Tonto to Bill Gates, has a vision of his own but .. what a difference! Where Gates is building the Gates Foundation as an awesome, multi billion dollar heritage, Allan continues to spent much smaller amounts on eclectic, perhaps Quixotic monuments.
The latest effort by his Paul G. Allen Family Foundation to fund far out biology projects may suggest the “Tonto” analogy is wrong. Is Gates is really Sancho to Allen’s Don Quixote?
The latest Allen venture is in the form a small (nine million dollars) amount spent on grants to develop high tech gadgetry. The projects seem more than a little fanciful and more directed at bio engineering than basic science. For example the projects include efforts to build tiny microscopes that can peer into the brain. Is this cool? I like gadgets but wonder if there is a real reason to think “seeing” in the brain will help scientists control anxiety and aggression. Another project aims to identify “brain tags” that can be used to identify cells that regulate fighting and submission in mice. Another, here at the UW, will build a a fly-sized robot that can interact with real fruit flies.
The worrisome thing here is the idea that this sort of science is being pitched to Mr. Allen as breaking ground that can not be explored because of the stuffy, conservative attitude at the NIH. David Anderson, one of the new Allen funded PIs said, “you already have to know whodunit in order to get an NIH grant,…You get the grant to find out details about why they did it, where they did it and how they did it.”
All of us living under the NIH can sympathize with Dr. Anderson’s complaint. However, I do not think these Allen grants are any better at the goal than the existing NIH or Hughes’ programs. Another Allen funded investigator said, “What the Allen Foundation is doing is really farsighted. Historically, the great ideas come at the intersection of fields.”
The grants, as described in the Times, are not so much interdisciplinary in the sense of bringing different areas of hard science together, as they are an effort to build new gadgetry to biology. I am NOT down on gadgets, the microscope and the genome projects transformed biology. Somehow, these projects seem to me to lack that kind of transformative power. I wonder how much more would be achieved if Allen had the imagination that led Seattle’s Lee Hood to push us all toward the power of sequencing? These grants seem to me too small and too gadgetry to have that sort of effect.
Nor am I down on money. Eli Broad’s investment in Eric Lander and the Broad Institute is going to pay off in a big way because the problems being studied at the Broad do require a lot of money, money hard to get from the NIH or Hughes. Allen’s $9.4 million is not that kind of money.
The amount of money might not be an issue if the projects were not so focused on engineering gadgets. Lee Hartwell’s Noble Prize came after years of relatively inexpensive experiments in the obscure are of yeast cell cycle. Bob Furchgott pioneered a huge amount of vascular biology by asking the simple question, “How do vessels dilate?” DNA itself grew out of the simple, and then hardly fashionable, experiment by Avery showing that DNA from one bacteria could transform the genetics of another bacteria. These sort of experiments remain critical to all biology and, as the NIH budget is impacted, non conventional ideas like these are getting harder and harder to fund. RNAi, the death pathway, clonal expansion in the immune system, and the discovery of inducible stem cells all grew out highly imaginative science that would be difficult to fund. Finding that sort of science is not likley to be the result of spending a few million dollars on a divers set of new gadgets.
Is Mr. Allen, who makes the final decision on what to fund, is “really farsighted?”
This is the same Paul Allen who gave Seattle the atrocious Blob Museum of Rock and Sci Fi. In business, most of Mr. Allen’s bets have been less than successful and, as a resident of South Lake Union, I truly wish he had some more inspired visions of urban design.
Frankly, it is his money, but his vision is not likely t produce the heritage Paul Allen seeks.
The projects described in the article in the Seattle Times, eerily resemble Allen’s museum project … Frank Gehry comes to Seattle but instead of the elegance of Bilbao, we got the Experience Music Project. The combination of Allen’s habit of giving very small amounts of money to small projects based on his taste may be no better in science than it is in architecture.
As I said before, I apologize to Mr. Allen if this seems to be an effort to diminish his contributions. That is not my intent. With his wealth, Mr. Allen could achieve a lot more. Perhaps he needs to find some more visionary biologists as advisers? Any volunteers?