Arc Institute – for curiosity-driven biomedical science and technology | Hacker News Reader

Arc Institute – for curiosity-driven biomedical science and technology

arcinstitute.org

141 points_Microft38 comments

Blog post at https://arcinstitute.org/blog/introducing-arc-institute.

(Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29568478, but we merged the threads.)

The about page says that not only did many of the funders make their money in tech (Patrick Collison, Vitalik Buterin, Ron Conway, etc.), the idea for the institute came from the Fast Grants initiative, which offered rapid (<2 weeks) turnaround times for Covid-related projects.

I wonder if this type of independent research institute with a generous budget is becoming more common. [0] Perhaps it's in response to current conditions in Academia. I hope it becomes more widespread.

[0] The model reminds me of the Allen Institutes, e.g. the Allen Institute for AI: https://allenai.org/

The Wellcome Trust, HHMI, Allen Institutes (there are several aside from Allen AI), Gates Foundation, and CZI/Chan Zuckerberg Biohub are all important prior efforts in this space that each made significant innovations in funding and evaluation of scientific output. At minimum, Wellcome and HHMI have "made it" in the sense that they built large parts of the public/private organizational infrastructure that most scientists rely on; their legacy is integral to modern science. The promise of Fast Grants/Arc Institute is technology to speed up the funding cycle itself, as well as experimental iteration time, which is fantastic.

I think a big question is how to tap into geographical areas with less opportunity. Headquartering a new institute in Palo Alto makes sense to tap into existing world class researcher and funder networks, but talent needed to run research labs is overutilized in the Bay Area and will be hard to hire staff. Putting aside the logistics of operating outside the US, there are lots of places like Atlanta, New Jersey, Baltimore, Chicago etc. whose talent pools are relatively less utilized. I hope someone is thinking about placing satellite hubs in those areas.

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.

This is a great idea, and I hope they will be able to scale it beyond UCB/Stanford/UCSF. A little cynically, I wonder whether PIs at these #1-ranked universities in CS/Medicine actually need an additional funding program since they are probably doing just fine with NSF/NIH and other existing funding agencies. On the other hand they are offering more services than your typical funding agency (planning to help with spin-outs, etc). Also being geographically close together and being near the valley all make sense from the POV of quickly pushing research from academia to industry.

NSF/NIH are great funding sources but: overhead! Straight up less paperwork is a serious improvement.

Also, budgeting instability due to political delays in the American government.

Grant writing takes up, what, half of a PI's time typically? Reducing that would be huge.

From the blog on the Fast Grants program they did earlier- "57% of respondents told us that they spend more than one quarter of their time on grant applications."

Also, "According to the NIH, a grant application will typically result in a decision after something between 200 and 600 days."

The whole post is worth reading in light of this new announcement. https://future.a16z.com/what-we-learned-doing-fast-grants/

Professors at top universities waste the majority of their time writing grant proposals.

I'm almost sure they picked it because that region has a lot institutional power around CRISPR. And when you look at the people they hired, you'll find nearly everyone has dabbled with it.

I expect a lot of the funding and research to be directed in those areas.

Some information about the structure and founding, copied from their About-page [0]:

How much funding is behind Arc? - Arc’s donors will contribute more than $650M to the Institute to allow it to fully sustain scientists and their research for renewable eight-year terms.

What is Arc’s growth plan? - The Institute‘s growth through 2025 will be gradual, with the goal of building a culture and organization that can scale. Phase 1 of the institute will involve hiring 10–15 Core Investigators, each of whom may employ 10–20 trainees, researchers, or engineers. We envision the 5 Technology Centers to be of similar size, for a total headcount of approximately 150–350 scientific personnel. We expect to get there within 5 years.

[0] https://arcinstitute.org/about

Gotta say, it's refreshing to see a gradual and sustainable growth plan, especially when it's mainly tech/startup folks behind the foundation. None of this "let's hyperscale" stuff.

You can't really hyperscale research I think. Throwing more money at a problem isn't a solution. A viable approach is probably to try and remove as many administrative barriers as possible so that researchers can focus on interesting problems instead, which is what they seem to be doing.

"Arc gives scientists no-strings-attached, multi-year funding, so that they don’t have to apply for external grants, and invests in the rapid development of experimental and computational technological tools."

Fantastic. This is desperately needed. Thanks Patrick C, Vitalik, et al, for funding this.

Man, I just finished a day polishing our paper [1] as a response to the latest round of reviews, which were idiotic. A place for curiosity-driven research sounds great to me. If I could escape the politics, stupidity and bullshit of academic research! But I'm social science/behaviour genetics & these guys are curing cancer....

[1] https://ueaeco.github.io/working-papers/papers/ueaeco/UEA-EC...

Don't worry and no need for FOMO. I'm in clinical medicine and the situation is no better.

And people thinking that curiosity is bankable in biomed research strike me as idealistic...

I'm curious what you mean by bankable here? While I'd agree that there is idealism, it seems like reasonable efforts to cut through the catch-22 of funding nascent ideas (exemplified by the old chestnut about getting funding for work already done to do your new work under the table) and making stable career positions for folks who don't want to become a PI. I'd like to see what this really looks like after a couple years, but it doesn't seem completely naive.

I mean that the way we assess research output in the current system makes curiosity a liability. This means that even if investors are interested, the scientific community will judge the output from this institute as inferior. Except if the curiosity part is just for show, which I strongly suspect. Investors want results.

I broadly agree, and it's clear they are limiting the scope of curiosity to some directed areas and the long term research agenda makes me think there is an expectation of more directed follow-up. "Curiosity" is likely code for "many more 'fishing expeditions' from low friction funding with the expectation that the likely low hit rate will still have reasonable number of repeatable, translatable findings after eight years". I would personally wager that is correct.

It will be interesting to see the output of this funding mindset more reminiscent of VCs but with a timespan that biological research programs require.

The issue is going to be that this institute will have a very small number of positions for what is incredibly desirable research circumstances, so it will be highly selected, and only the "best" or "hottest" researchers will qualify.

I would get great work done under these conditions but I'd never rise high enough in the application pool to be noticed.

> only the "best" or "hottest" researchers

I'm pretty sure this subset is very similar to the 'least curious' subset...

You could apply to FastGrants, they seem to fund all kinds of people, from highschool hackers to tenured professors.

What a cool idea.

It looks like they’re going to be heavily investing in CRISPR too, by the choice of schools and personnel.

Stripe really is obsessed with pushing progress forward huh? Even their books are dedicated to that genre.

Looking forward to the innovation and the culture this project produces.

If anybody can do it, it’s Patrick and the extraordinary individuals behind this.

Reminded of a friend's scrappier project: https://newscience.org/

Similar but distinct thesis: "We should not be surprised then that the majority of even the most talented and passionate about science young scientists are not supported by the current structures and do not see their future in academia."

Patrick Collison appeared on EconTalk a few years ago a similar/same topic. I recall it was a good episode, might be worth a listen for those interested in these kinds of efforts.

> Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the pace of innovation. Collison argues that despite enormous increases in the numbers of scientists and researchers, the pace of progress in scientific and technological understanding does not seem to be increasing accordingly. The conversation looks at the challenge of measuring innovation and whether the pace of innovation should be a matter of concern and if so, what might be done about it.

https://www.econtalk.org/patrick-collison-on-innovation-and-...

> Arc Institute is partnered with Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. This means that our Core Investigators can hold tenured, tenure-track, or adjunct faculty appointments within relevant academic departments at partner universities [...] Additionally, Arc is starting an Affiliate Investigator program to support faculty who are primarily located at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF, expanding the connection among the four institutions.

If someone is a professor at a top bio-med university, do they really benefit the most from some additional funding, versus funding people from institutions that aren't as well known?

From the article, they said they would substantially change their research goals and projects if they didn't have the restrictions of the current funding process.

Sounds great: a new way to fund the most elite, well funded researchers.

Who is funding this institute.

Looks like the Brazilian Serrapilheira Institute: https://serrapilheira.org/

Patrick Collison, that's why it's at the top of HN rn

This seems excessively reductive. A new life sciences funding and translational model should be at the top of HN. Especially with these institutions onboard.

I didn't mean my post to be conveyed in the cynical curt tone that I appear to have presented :) I was just being compact. (Lovely initiative by Collison!)

Is there an equivalent for Southern California? Cal Tech and UCLA immediately come to mind, but I'm not sure what the third school would be.

USC or UCSD would be good choices. But, I think you’d have a better program if you extended it to any of the med schools in the area.

Which ones would you pick?

For a similar program as this one, UCLA, USC, and UCSD would be my top choices. Given the heavy CRISPR focus, Caltech would also make sense here. But it really depends on goals. All of the outside funding sources (HHMI, Chan/Zuckerberg, Parker) all have their own focuses. I’m not sure funding well established labs or new PIs that have a high likelihood of succeeding with NIH funding is what I’d focus on.

And here I was thinking it would be about the language! Still interesting, of course...

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