Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project. Organizationally, Calico seems to be built in the exact opposite way from the Manhattan Project.
Imagine you were building the first fission bomb, but doing it the Calico way (which is the way most science is done these days). You'd say: we need enormous progress in a wide variety of very distinct fields: nuclear physics, isotope chemistry, metallurgy, high-speed photography...
So you'd ask PIs in all these fields to send you grant proposals related to the problem of building an atom bomb. They would take their existing grant proposal template, rewrite it to talk about atom bombs, and send it in. You would send them money. They would deliver progress reports.
What would happen? Probably, you'd build an atom bomb. The first test would be in 1986, after 45 years and 500 billion dollars. It would cause major damage to three creosote plants and severely startle a jackrabbit.
Next, imagine Calico's funders said: we will take this same amount of money, and pour it into a single problem -- rejuvenating a dog. Much like Manhattan's single product deliverable.
Moreover, we will not hire existing players to repaper their existing lines of research. We will hire the best new PhDs and tell them to do whatever want to do, so long as it represents one piece of a reasonable strategy for, or step toward, an realistic engineering procedure for rejuvenating dogs. (Or at least mice, if long-lived animals are too hard a first step.)
In this kind of organization -- ie, a hierarchical company-shaped structure with a company-shaped goal, delivering a product -- the standards of relevance and collaboration will be much, much higher. Los Alamos hired the best people in the world, but no one took their existing research and tried to shoehorn it into the Manhattan Project.
No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. We actually put a lot of money into science and technology, and the personnel are just as talented as ever. Every PI is an Oppenheimer. But there is no General Groves.
If there had been no urgent reason to be the first to get an atom bomb, wouldn't the world be much better off if the Manhattan Project had taken the Calico strategy? We'd have a much wider array of advances in many different disciplines, and the knowledge would be spread out among many institutions, rather than locked away under one roof. And maybe we wouldn't have an atom bomb, which is a good thing in my hypothetical world where nobody else is trying to make one.
> Calico probably thinks of itself as the Manhattan Project.
I think it's clear that they don't. Their stated mission is not "cure death", it's "devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives." They hope to "build a Bell Labs of aging research." This is not Manhattan project talk, this is what you say when you want to support an ecosystem of research, and you have no idea what the outcomes will be.
If you're trying to improve the world, which is what they say, I think Bell Labs is a much better model than the Manhattan Project.
> No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't.
What do you mean by this? Do you not see stuff like LHC and LIGO as "big things"? What big problems do you see today that our grandparents would have solved by now?
Right, but there's not going to be one solution to "diseases caused by aging". If you spend 5 years exclusively trying to rejuvenate a dog, and you actually succeed, are you really better off than if you had spent that time and money exploring a number of strategies and using existing research infrastructure?
I mean if somebody theorized a single device that might cure aging, then the Manhattan Project might be a good model. But nobody even knows what the goals should be, what projects will work, what areas should be studied. We don't know enough to start a singularly focused project.
I don't think that a strategy designed for a specific engineering problem is likely to succeed on a huge scientific problem. In fact, if you prematurely treat a scientific challenge as an engineering one, you'll generally just end up wasting your money, with little incremental progress or positive side effects. Has top-down science ever worked?
(For example, you can throw away a huge amount of money developing chemotherapy regimes by just screening tons of random chemicals and running large trials. But the amount of progress you'll make will be trivial compared to what you could do by spending the same money on understanding the mechanisms of specific cancers.)
The world's population is greater today, with a significantly higher proportion of scientists (and highly educated people in general), far easier access to the world's information and 75 years or so of further scientific research.
Musk's synergistic portfolio of companies, each derived from relatively specific and ambitious goals, seems similar. He is the common thread between all his companies and is thus is arguably able to marshal their strategies in subtle and important ways.
> The logic of the buyout never made much sense in the first place, unless you looked at the hundreds of millions of dollars Elon Musk, Peter Rive, and Lyndon Rive would lose in stock and bond value if SolarCity went under. This is looking more and more like a bailout and Tesla may eventually have to take a massive loss on solar operations.
It always bugs me when I hear someone who I know knows better use a line like: "Just do it legally, for Pete's sake! Go to the SEC" -- as though this was a matter of dropping a postcard in the mail. I'm confident that these writers know better.
The real situation -- as you can see in any of the stories about Blue Bottle's non-IPO, Hedosophia, etc -- is that "just do it legally" is rapidly approaching the regulatory singularity of "just get the NRC to license your new nuclear reactor design." Even for multibillion-dollar companies, "just do it legally" is becoming prohibitively costly. Compare to the 1990s, when sub-100M IPOs were not that weird.
This has enabled VCs to earn enormous monopoly fees, originally as gatekeepers to the IPO process, now as gatekeepers to a gigantic secondary market in "unicorns." Lambos all around.
As in taxi medallions, this bottleneck creates immense profits. Naturally, the spectacle of Uber versus the taxi mafia, or ICOs versus the VC mafia, creates a lot of passions. Especially among those with axes to grind.
There is one big difference: Uber provides a consistently excellent transportation experience. Whereas most ICOs are straight-out terrible. Let's hope that the sheep get separated from the goats, as fast as possible.
Imagine you were building the first fission bomb, but doing it the Calico way (which is the way most science is done these days). You'd say: we need enormous progress in a wide variety of very distinct fields: nuclear physics, isotope chemistry, metallurgy, high-speed photography...
So you'd ask PIs in all these fields to send you grant proposals related to the problem of building an atom bomb. They would take their existing grant proposal template, rewrite it to talk about atom bombs, and send it in. You would send them money. They would deliver progress reports.
What would happen? Probably, you'd build an atom bomb. The first test would be in 1986, after 45 years and 500 billion dollars. It would cause major damage to three creosote plants and severely startle a jackrabbit.
Next, imagine Calico's funders said: we will take this same amount of money, and pour it into a single problem -- rejuvenating a dog. Much like Manhattan's single product deliverable.
Moreover, we will not hire existing players to repaper their existing lines of research. We will hire the best new PhDs and tell them to do whatever want to do, so long as it represents one piece of a reasonable strategy for, or step toward, an realistic engineering procedure for rejuvenating dogs. (Or at least mice, if long-lived animals are too hard a first step.)
In this kind of organization -- ie, a hierarchical company-shaped structure with a company-shaped goal, delivering a product -- the standards of relevance and collaboration will be much, much higher. Los Alamos hired the best people in the world, but no one took their existing research and tried to shoehorn it into the Manhattan Project.
No wonder our grandparents could get big things done, and we can't. We actually put a lot of money into science and technology, and the personnel are just as talented as ever. Every PI is an Oppenheimer. But there is no General Groves.