A Few Billionaires Are Turning Medical Philanthropy on Its Head

NASA got the guys home safe from Apollo 11 because brilliant and I mean brilliant minds worked together. My uncle was one of them and he's the craziest, yet most intelligent person I've ever known.

Teamwork is different than collaboration. In teamwork intellectual pursuits can achieve great success, but collaboration needs to be tempered, because many times collaboration means just talking and sharing with weaker members, but teamwork is an ability to effectively communicate, form and dissolve efficiently collaborative groups to optimize for results... That's how I've always separated the two words, might not be for everyone that definition.

Also the other great provider of innovation is pressure towards a definable goal, which most organizations lack looking at them as an external, which doesn't mean I'm accurate, but does cause me to question whether this could be an issue that'll need to be addressed. The singular approach had this goal oriented approach build in by its very nature and the collaboration leads to security and it can be difficult to inspire the same degree of engenuity.

Wrote from my mobile, so please consider that before you play wack a mole with my comment.

Wait, statins are bad now?

On the contrary, only trivial jobs could be done by individuals. A single person could do very little alone against a really hard problem.

Teams really help immensely. The original definition of corporation was "a group of people that joins together to do something", like making a bridge, or sailing half of the world when those activities were risky, dangerous and hard.

There was a time in which sailing meant 2 of each 3 ships were sink by storms, or pirates. Romans will kill you if the bridge you build was weak.

But the team members must be great individually and complement each other. For example the group that invented the transistor, aerospacial rockets or the integrated circuit, or the microprocessor were a heck of a team.

In the US individualism means the individual mindset is favored over anything else. In the rest of the world it is the other way. For example in Japan going alone is suicidal, "The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down".

I would say the best system is some of both systems.

When Steve Jobs was ousted of Apple his number one priority with Next was having success so he could maintain the best people of his team. And it was not a secret, he will tell you.

It's both. You need intense individual focus, but you also need to get those individuals in a room together so they can bounce ideas off each other, synchronize their work, and hash out issues they weren't able to solve on their own.

You have that backwards. Only the most trivial research is done by a single person. Sure, at an individual level competence is important, but having 50 people all doing their own things is not useful.

I would make the distinction between intellectual tasks involving synthesis vs. analysis. Analysis (observation, experimentation, hypothesis testing) can be chunked down and distributed to team members. Synthesis (hypothesis creation) by definition cannot. Ideal structure in my mind is the most capable person should be in ultimate charge of Synthesis, and analysis should flow downstream and be distributed to team members

Every great technological achievement has been a team effort. The Manhattan Project is a shining example of how you can compress into a few years what otherwise takes decades because scientists and technologists are not making a team effort. None of them alone could have done it or would have made significant progress. If you had left Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Feynman, Bethe, Szilard, Einstein, Wigner, von Neumann and at least two dozen others alone at separate universities around the states, there would not have been an atomic bomb. They needed each other to bounce ideas off, to feed each other related partial results, to correct mistakes.

If you're making an intellectual effort and none of your colleagues have relevant input on (intermediate) results, then either your colleagues are extremely mediocre or you are blind to their contributions. In either case: you could probably produce better results with input from others.

We need more replication and reproducability than new theorizing. There's no point in doing that if your science is built on very shaky foundations.

And even when working in a team, the team members are very often heterogenous.

E.g. a surgery team with a surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a few nurses who are specialized for surgery, etc. Such a team would never work if every member had the same say in the decisions.

Ditto with airplanes and ships where you always have one person with the final say.

If you're able to do a job all by yourself, you need to start doing bigger jobs.

You cannot build a skyscraper without high level collaboration.

It has the potential to be inefficient if they choose the wrong group of scientific advisors. But, for most of these initiatives, they're very careful to choose smart people to actually lead the details of the project and figure out how to best distribute the money.

Sometimes, we're actually within striking zone of these targeted diseases and funding more translational research is good. Other times, we still don't understand the underlying diseases well enough, and so we still need to do an enormous amount of basic science before trying to cure these diseases in the clinic. A team of good scientific advisors who are at the cutting edge of their respective fields can provide the insight and decision-making that this needs, to extract the maximum value from the money provided.

They are not on the driver seat. They fund and observe. This system is better than state or academia.

OK, who should it be driven by then? A monarch? Democratic vote?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

Which approach has a tax advantage?

This article has nothing to do with the election, or politics.

Hacking research, and medical research in particular, is beneficial to everyone. It would be helpful to figure out a way for more people to contribute rather than throwing out your political feelings.

> capitalism is not always inhumane

Though they don't use the terminology, most people have a beef with modern corporatism more than capitalism itself. Things like individual property rights and fairly enforced contract law are certainly humane.

Why?