It’s nice to finally have a name for what I suppose is an incurable addiction (maybe 1K books in my library). The most fun for me is buying almost exclusively used books, and then finding interesting inscriptions in them, or when the books come from an interesting place (many have ex-university library marks/stamps). For instance, I have a first printing of Weiner’s The Human Use of Human beings that came from the Redford Arsenal Library.
I worked in the Broad building at Caltech (Eli Broad), and I watched for 2 years as they demoed the parking lot outside my office to build the 200 million dollar Chen neuroscience building. It is a complete and total waste of money, and I say that cognizant of arguments like 'attracting talent'...etc. At one point we calculated the number of neuroscience postdocs we could hire for that money and easily came to the conclusion that we could have pulled off a Manhattan project of neuroscience with that kind of money. It's pathetic that donors delude themselves into thinking that projects like this do ANY good.
Donor behavior such as this comes down to human psychology and neuroscience.
* Tribalism: Humans like people who "are like them", it's easier to relate. Thus, IME, Stanford grads prefer other Stanford-branded people. Or at least crême de la creme Ivy. Especially compared to the plebs and the proles.
* Vanity: Donors find it appealing that the structure will be around for a long time, prominently and proudly emblazoned with the donor's own name. Yes, external validation does feel good. Especially among certain (insecure) types. A truly altruistic and self-assured person makes donations anonymously.
Empire building is a popular pastime among the human species, especially those with power. The rest of us settle for something like Civ, SimCity, or sand castles.
People should invest local. I just handed a check to our sons martial arts center. It is used for scholarships for kids that can't afford monthly dues. Every dollar is treasured.
Yea but it won’t raise your prestige, I mean giving charity to Stanford, one of the top schools in the world, shows everyone how baller you are, and maybe the next 20 generations of Doerrs will get guaranteed admission too
I chuckled when they demolished the nearby Mead undergrad chem lab to make way for another such building, then I realized that the department graduating 5 undergrads a year might have something to do with it. I already missed the sculpture where the bagpipe guy used to play that got taken out for some ChemE building.
> easily came to the conclusion that we could have pulled off a Manhattan project of neuroscience with that kind of money.
In general I wish people spent more time looking at alternatives when these huge projects are proposed. For instance, it drives me nuts thinking of all the alternatives when I see making bids to pay billions for the Olympics. That's the kind of money that could turn the whole area into a science Mecca in several different, with a whole host of positive downstream effects locally.
wait, is the 200 million just for the building, or for the entire facility (new equipment, etc)? Building a new facility in itself seems a worthwhile enterprise - though as a postdoc myself I'd rather have pay bumps for the postdocs :)
I believe at least 170 million was slated initially for construction costs, which may have run over. I don't know how much was for new equipment, but I can't imagine it was a significant fraction (and likely it was an additional expense over those numbers).
170+ million for a BUILDING?! That doesn't make sense to me at all - as someone who spends his waking hours in research laboratories in a newish building of comparable size to the Chen building, I can't see where the money would go.
Well....for starters there is the monkey tunnel that leads from Broad to the Chen building because....you guessed it....the vivarium was in the basement (and still is) of Broad. Many neuroscience labs were in Broad (a VERY nice building in and of itself).
Is the pitch directly to taxpayers? There have been lawsuits (by faculty even..including one in which the DOE was deposed) to rein in misappropriation of funds etc., but it seems like the agencies themselves don't care about conflicts of interest at these universities (and basically encourage them). Is it a research organization that says: 'Hey...we only do open source patents'?
I've thought about things like the patent/ip problem, the structure of biomedical research, Pharma research, etc. This is an area where I don't actually see competition as a net benefit, however....it's the reality. The only thing I can come up with is a version of 'data rental'. Rather than Pharma companies locking this data away from others indefinitely, is there a way they could profit from it somehow, while still retaining ownership and not divulging trade secrets? Maybe not.
I've thought that a type of cryptographic data commons based on multi-party communication [1] could possibly be deployed with some effect. Basically you need algorithms that can compute on encrypted data, and a way to securely communicate encrypted data. There might not be huge incentive to use something like this, but maybe a version of this idea could work.
I agree that the system is just "reality" right now. I think the idea of a cryptographic data commons is an interesting idea, I'm just trying to imagine how it'd play out in my day-to-day research. If a system would tell me that my hypothesis is correct, but I couldn't look at (and share with colleagues) the raw data being computed, it'd be tough to believe that system. Maybe there's some type of zero-knowledge proof system that could facilitate this, though.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of blockchain technologies, but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.
Another idea would be to completely socialize all biopharmaceutical research, but that type of system would require an extremely radical societal shift.
Yes, it's admittedly an incredibly tough problem (how do you get those competing to cooperate?), and how to compute on data that is trustworthy. Ultimately, in biotech/pharma you have to ultimately know what an underlying gene or say pathway actually is, it can't be totally obfuscated. Still not sure how to set this up (if it's really even possible) that solves for this use case.
> but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.
I think ultimately this is how a research cooperative could work. If distributing and re-allocating fractional ownership is efficient enough, it seems like something like this might be feasible. The idea with multiparty communication (MPC) is that in this setup a research entity would contribute their data in an encrypted fashion, and any parties would be granted access to compute on it based on some set of rules/buy in etc.
This is a really difficult technical approach, as MPC is really only in it's infancy, made only to seem easy by the far more difficult and distant prospect of socializing medicine, which would seem to be of the greatest benefit.
I have been reading a book recently: The Story of Taxol: Nature and Politics in the Pursuit of an Anti-Cancer Drug, and one of the most fascinating parts was the way they discovered this molecule. Long story short, Taxol is a molecule they isolated from the bark of the Pacific Yew. The interesting part for me was learning about the Cancer Chemotherapy National Service Center [1]. They went around collecting samples of random plants, then tested them for anti-cancer properties very systematically. So in the U.S., at one point, we had a publicly funded drug discovery program targeted at a specific disease, and this is what jump started Pharma research in anti-cancer drugs. I would say we need to restart a program like this, and of course we should also focus on rare diseases--we stand to learn a tremendous amount, and it's difficult to convince industry to do it.
Personally, I'm a computational/mathematical biologist and I work on single cell data targeting multiple myeloma, I'd really like to see serious non-profit Pharma. Drug repurposing seems like the most feasible avenue. What I know of right now is open Pharma [2].
The Broad Institute hosts a very interesting transcriptomic dataset called CMap [1] that was intended to facilitate rapid drug repurposing. Having studied this dataset and worked with the data generators and software teams, I can say that drug repurposing is NOT as straightforward as people think. However, I agree that as a strategy drug repurposing is a useful tool in the arsenal generally.
Interesting....I'll have a close look at this, thank you. I didn't mean to imply drug repurposing was straightforward, certainly as you say this is very challenging. I guess my thinking was that there might be relatively lower hanging fruit here (if Pharma companies have very little incentive to exhaustively search for repurposing targets for off-patent meds, maybe only a non-profit would be willing to do this) than say de-novo development.
This is one of the many reasons that causing plant and animal species to go extinct is bad for humans. We really have no idea how many potentially live-saving/health-enhancing/etc. medicines we are annihilating!
Out of curiosity, what does your work entail with single cell stuff from a computational perspective? I've been doing some research into molecular docking as a drug discovery method, but its all single protein.
There are a lot of modalities being integrated, things like spatial/temporal, ADT/protein, etc. Integrating all of this data is a computational challenge, and of course there are lots of methods for analyzing it that vary in computational demands. It's not simulation, but still a lot of processing.
So you're taking all wet bench data and analyzing or integrating it rather than modeling? That's interesting!
Are there any possibilities that you see from your experience in using modeling or other in silico methods to reduce time in the lab, find new leads in drug development, or otherwise enhance research capabilities?
Yes, essentially, though you may create models of interactions etc., but the main idea is to extract information from various aspects of the cell.
As far as in silico, I think absolutely there are probably opportunities here. Generative models might be useful for some type of counterfactual (automated) reasoning with respect to disease course/treatment. I think we're in the relatively early days of collecting high resolution cellular data, so I think in silico approaches like this will be more and more relevant.
What I find interesting is that most western countries have this kind of government funded programs of one kind or another... and yet they hardly produce any medical breakthroughs.
Perhaps the interesting thing would be to ask what particular thing makes the US different to other western countries, rather than cherry picking one particular thing that happens to agree with whatever ideology is popular today.
> The most widely used rewriting engines often sit at the heart of programs and languages used for logic programming, proof assistants and computer algebra systems. One of the most popular of these is Mathematica and the Wolfram language.
What would a low capital biological research institute look like? Like nothing?....because it can't exist? (This is the answer in my experience). I ask only to see if anyone has any ideas. The consensus seems to be that you will always need 100s of millions of dollars to do something like this.
