The Atlantic recently posted
an interview with Eric Lander and managed to capture two very interesting views for anyone looking in on biomedical research from the outside. The first highlights how different it is from most things in for-profit environments:
I’m not Pollyanna. This is not around the corner. It’s not for next
quarter; it’s not for next year. We play for the long game. I don’t want
to overpromise in the short term, but it is incredibly exciting if you
take the 25-year view.
And the second, how similar 'picking winners' in life sciences research is to deciding on projects to invest your money in:
When there’s less money, reviewers don’t want to run the risk of wasting money on something that doesn’t work. I’ve got to tell you, if you aren’t prepared to waste money on things
that might not work, you can’t possibly do things that are
transformative. Because for every successful transformative idea,
there’s five times as many nonsuccessful transformative ideas. Nobody
knows how to figure out in advance which ones they’re going to be.
