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Gates Foundation Funds Research, Venture Capital Style
There’s no shortage of good researchers with groundbreaking, unfunded ideas. So the Gates Foundation will dole out $100,000 to 104 scientists around the world with the aim of cultivating novel new preventive methods or cures for treating a variety of diseases, including HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The Wall Street Journal reports:
The program, which has been planned for a year and is called Grand Challenges Explorations, aims to operate more along the lines of Silicon Valley’s investment approach, in which venture capitalists provide relatively small amounts of capital to a large number of ideas in the hope that just a few will succeed and become the next Microsoft or Google.
This is also an instance of a major foundation endorsing the “high-risk, high-return” approach which understands both that the road to scientific breakthroughs winds past some unmitigated failures, and that pursuing ultimately unsuccessful projects is perfectly healthy when there are multiple paths to a solution. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute sent 56 researchers down this track earlier this year.
The Explorations proposals funded in this first round include researching “living antibiotics” that will send predator microbes to destroy harmful infections, employing mosquitoes as “flying syringes” to distribute vaccines, and investigating genetic resistance to HIV and tuberculosis.
The Gates Foundation press release describing the project is here.
Comments on this article
Thank you for your reply.
regard
VC Goh
October 27th, 2008 at 10:12 amventurecapital88@gmail.com
I’ll share it on Twitter.
April 14th, 2009 at 3:10 pmThanks for the tip!!!
April 24th, 2009 at 3:03 pmDear Sirs,
Lots of times it was proved that any blind gene manipulating would give either internal, kind of cancer, or population, kind of viruses’ aggressivity etc., misbalances only. The fact is that all ща contemporary gene manipulating are still blind. Such is because an existing science technology paradigm is going from experimental grounds and self-regulation theory faults so a Genome Map projects on powerful but in principle limited and retarding knowledge base
However a principle Sense of a Genome processing is in giving a birth and adapting to self-identification system structures. They could be rolled in types and classes, however they always are unique and specific. All attempts to combine them would give an effects kind of cancer, because cancer, in it Essence, is the control self-regulation fault in that ground parts, which are responsible for an adequate specific structure identification. Thus to reach a fundamental diagnostic and therapy position, including problems of protein synthesis, cancer, viruses, aging and death, possible working in the another technology and another Paradigm.
Such a solution was given in 1987 in a military research department. It was an Information Synthesis Technology Processing that going from of theoretical to technology grounds and having a human brain analogue. Then it was laid in a State Programs including Cancer Institute researches. It was invented a procedure and specific technology processing medium.
However this country was the USSR and it was crashed and new countries there still are not able to realize anything like that. The tens years are passed and the time proved a critical need to renew all of this investigations and combine them with the accelerating processing progress. Such a combination would give another quality of a human Information Metamorphose Life Securing Ability. Otherwise we would follow along Statistic evolutionary way of new Illusions and a Mortality.
I still can to renew researches that would give both the Fundamental Treating Solutions for a nearest time and business and social solutions right now. If you interested in the cooperation so I’ll wait for your response infovision2007@yahoo.com. Thank you.
November 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm