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Over the last two decades, the cost of sequencing a O million DNA base pairs fell from over $5,000 to less
than a penny. That cost reduction enabled research across precision medicine, high-throughput small-molecule screening, species identification from air and water samples, atlases of gene activity and protein content for diverse cell types, virtual cell models, and many other applications, including many totally unanticipated by earlier DNA sequencing technologists. Consider what scientists wouldn't be doing as well or at all without that fundamental capacity.
Low-cost sequencing came about via a fortuitous mixture of the government-funded Human Genome Project, academic discovery, and industry innovation. However, megaprojects like the Human Genome Project or the particle accelerators at CERN, as important and empowering as they have been, are rare one-offs. Many smaller-scale, critical gaps in capability remain, but the scientific enterprise is not set up to systematically identify, let alone bridge, these gaps. Funding for academic research is less stable than ever,
and, generally speaking, academic science institutions don't provide the engineering teamwork needed to produce the platforms, datasets, or tools that might fill these gaps. Likewise, venture capital and industry are poorly incentivized to produce research-enabling tools that are also broadly
accessible. What's needed is a way to stand up dedicated institutions to produce such public goods.
Certainly many inspiring, important ways to foster innovation have arisen in recent decades. Governmentfunded and endowment-supported research centers of excellence remain indispensable and have produced many crucial research tools. Yet, even when they are well resourced, such centers are not ideally equipped to quickly spin up the sort of interdisciplinary teams with sustained engineering support that are needed to tackle newly recognized capabilities gaps.
In 2021, two of us (Marblestone and Gamick) founded the nonprofit Convergent Research to support midscale engineering projects that create tools scientists and technologists can use to advance their fields. We structure these projects as nonprofit start-ups and call them Focused Research Organizations (FROs). Each is tasked with breaking through or routing around a particular bottleneck in the research enterprise. For instance, E11 Bio is building an imaging system to shrink the cost of mapping brain wiring by a hundredfold. Another Convergent FRO, the Parallel Squared Technology Institute, recently described methods to increase by nearly 30-fold...