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Beyond the Lab
"Any strategy that involves crossing a valley--accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance--will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done."
-Author Neal Stephenson, "Innovation Starvation," World Policy Journal, Fall 2011
One of the greatest challenges facing the sciences, and materials science in particular, is the difficulty in developing truly new concepts in research environments where there is a demand for immediate and applications-ready results. Surpassing this myopic funding climate requires not just foresight, but also a willingness to take risks to "cross the valley" to the next great discovery.
In gaining the momentum to reach that next "hill," the aid of private outside funding agencies has become critical to the work in materials research. San Francisco's Thiel Foundation has recently inaugurated their Breakout Labs program with the goal of funding innovative research of independent scientists who are not necessarily entrenched in the structure of either academic or corporate development, or scientists who are waiting to "break out" of academia with their start-up idea.
Hemai Parthasarathy, the science director for Breakout Labs, sat down with me to talk about the importance of the program, as well as her own perspectives on the world of scientific funding, publication, and literacy. From her start with a PhD degree in systems neuroscience from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to her time as both a postdoctoral fellow and a founding editor of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Parthasarathy has had a chance to experience science from both the laboratory bench and the evaluation side of science.
Her 10 years at PLoS convinced her of the importance of open access to scientific information to facilitate the advancement of science: Researchers who can communicate and ask each other for help are dramatically more productive and successful than researchers in isolation.
The Breakout Labs program is unique in that it funds for-profit start-up ideas in the open marketplace. Founder Peter Thiel, a co-founder and former CEO of Paypal...