As a Harvard faculty member who taught about AI in the 1980s (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17747494/), I'm not surprised that others did the same as me and started companies. Indeed, the SBIR program encouraged that.
Thiel made some good points about barriers to innovation, but there has long been a tendency to assume that discoveries have slowed to a trickle and we are coasting off older breakthroughs. But part of the reason for this tendency is that it is hard to know if recent discoveries will become major changes. A good examples is the work of HMS professor Bruce Yankner that suggests that lithium deficiency is what enables Alzheimer disease to progress (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/could-lithium-explain-treat-alzheimers-disease). It is not yet clear whether this is correct, but if it is it will be a huge breakthrough.
The following is just my personal opinion, but I think there is quite substantial basis to back it up:
Peter Thiel, who actually is a quite smart man unlike some of the others of his ilk, points to some real symptoms here but within this interview never moves through them to look at the underlying disease which is the post WW2 in-general US System consolidation and as a big part of that the consolidation of science into a centralized, state–corporate, mediated-by-centralized-finance (public, private, and in-between finance), gate-kept by private and public powerful and cynical special interest groups, and with a cynically imposed monoculture; this form replaced the earlier plural, distributed, semi-autonomous ecosystem of labs, firms, municipalities, independent institutions, etc..
He states cultural (“people became risk-averse”), regulatory (“FDA/NRC bottlenecks”), and sectoral explanations (biotech, nuclear, academia), but never provides the information that all of these are downstream of a single architectural transformation in which decision rights over science were removed from a wide field of diversified actors and pluralistic structures and then concentrated into a small number of national and quasi-private gatekept bodies. Even his apt critique of “bureaucratization” tthat the bureaucratization wasnt an just an accident or unintended consequence, t'was structural reorganization linked to Cold War planning, industry consolidation, governmental consolidation (we didnt just consolidate industry, we consolidated gov too into the national level, and those two consolidations go hand in hand) and later financialization. And quite importantly, that very bureaucratization generated large material benefits for the afore referenced cynical and powerful special interest groups (again, and this is important, its public AND private AND in-between interest groups there)
I agree with many of Thiel's observations, but I caution that the computer business is not a complete model for research as a whole. Drawing again on the lithium-Alzheimer research, if the hypothesis is correct it will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year (https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/dementia-alzheimers-cost-model-2025/) but no private company will invest in such research because one can't patent lithium.
The private sector is best for many types of research, but not all. Government and philanthropic support are needed, and Thiel is surely correct that they can be improved.
Hi Michael, thanks for the reply! IMO, I'd say your lithium example here is actually a very good example of part of what I was trying to get at and my overal the structural point. Within the system architecture of the American Old Republic such research would likely be much more likely to move forward due to the Old Republic's geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of both access to financing and decision making regarding that financing's deployment; and its more locally based, multiple overlapping funding channels (municipal, state, mutuals (which were actually quite robust and sophisticated), local banks, various kinds of robust civic institutions, etc, ect), and far more plural access to decision-making.
Research funding didnt hinge on whether the words of a relatively small number of centralized gatekeepers (NIH, FDA pipeline, deeply concentrated venture capital, patent regimes, etc, etc) called something monetizable or acceptable (because sometimes they deny things not because it isnt monetizable but instead because it could harm the resource intakes from a totally different thing elsewhere. Common portfolio.); it could emerge through many smaller, semi-autonomous nodes pursuing partial, non-monopolizable gains that still created enormous social value. In that system, non-patentable or diffuse-return discoveries like lithium dont depend on a single national funding bottleneck or IP logic or other unnecessary hurdles; they could be advanced by hospitals, local governments, physician networks, state boards, philanthropic associations, locally regionally embedded capital pools, and other things, all acting in parallel
Very interesting to read Peter Theil's thoughts on these important topics.
I am a graduate of Harvard College in biology, after which I went to the NIH and worked on vaccine development. Strange as it may seem, I came out of vaccine development with some wild ideas about using microorganisms for various applications such as biofuels. The connection between the two topics may appear, especially to humanities majors, as a non sequitur, but it is probably better understood by microbiologists, molecular biologists and biochemists.
The molecular makeup of the microorganisms for which we were developing vaccine candidates includes several different kinds of high-energy and nutritious molecules, such as lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates, which can be extracted for use as raw material for energy production. Moreover, by focusing on photosynthetic microorganisms, one can harvest solar energy and convert it into chemical energy using the biosynthetic pathways that are embedded into the genomes of these organisms.
To make a long story short, I have been fascinated by the commercial and industrial potential of these concepts for many years. And, getting back to Peter Theil's interview, this is a scientific topic in which America lags far behind other countries. China, for example, is well ahead of us in this space, as are India and some European countries.
What makes China and India more interested in this topic is their high population relative to land area. As the Chinese economy grew over the past 3-4 decades since its free market reforms, one of the first "luxuries" that the rising Chinese masses sought after was more food ... especially protein rich foods. They were starving after Mao's disasterous and hard-edged socialist policies.
But, even today, they still cannot meet the protein needs of their vast population; hence their desire to purchase US farmland and to import US pork and soybeans for their protein content. The situation in India is similar. Recognizing their protein needs cannot be met with conventional farming, both China and India have invested funds into the study of photosynthetic microorganisms such as spirulina and chlorella as sources of edible protein.
As it turns out, these photosynthetic microorganisms are excellent protein sources, at least from a productivity standpoint. The flavor and gustatory attraction of these organisms fails to arouse much interest for obvious reasons (who wants to select "algae" from a menu?), but these issues can be overcome by using such proteins as food ingredients, not as foods by themselves. Moreover, gustatory trends can be changed with impactful marketing, and some cultures already enjoy eating spirulina as a food. In fact, certain tribes in Africa and South American have been doing it for centuries!
It is estimated by some that edible and nutritious spirulina protein can be produced at a rate of 200x more per acre than the average American beef cattle farm produces protein. And, this now leads me to my own startup.
I am developing a new kind of tubular photobioreactor (tPBR) that is now proven to increase Spirulina productivity by +41% over the previous generation of tPBR. That boosts the 200X protein advantage up to 282X compared to the average American beef cattle farm. And, I have some ideas about further technical improvements in these productivity measures.
PS: With four kids and limited risk capital available, I am seeking investment in Chromaphorix. So, Peter, if you are reading this, please get in touch: jlglex99@chromaphorix.com.
Jonathan L. Gal
Harvard AB Biology Class of 1989 (graduated in June 1990 due to a year off)
Peter Thiel, who actually is a quite smart man unlike some of the others of his ilk, points to some real symptoms here but within this interview never moves through them to look at the underlying disease which is the post WW2 in-general US System consolidation and as a big part of that the consolidation of science into a centralized, state–corporate, mediated-by-centralized-finance (public, private, and in-between finance), gate-kept by private and public powerful and cynical special interest groups, and with a cynically imposed monoculture; this form =replaced the earlier plural, distributed, semi-autonomous ecosystem of labs, firms, municipalities, independent institutions, etc..
He states cultural (“people became risk-averse”), regulatory (“FDA/NRC bottlenecks”), and sectoral explanations (biotech, nuclear, academia), but never provides the information that all of these are downstream of a single architectural transformation in which decision rights over science were removed from a wide field of diversified actors and pluralistic structures and then concentrated into a small number of national and quasi-private gatekept bodies. Even his apt critique of “bureaucratization” tthat the bureaucratization wasnt an just an accident or unintended consequence, t'was structural reorganization linked to Cold War planning, industry consolidation, governmental consolidation (we didnt just consolidate industry, we consolidated gov too into the national level, and those two consolidations go hand in hand) and later financialization. And quite importantly, that very bureaucratization generated large material benefits for the afore referenced cynical and powerful special interest groups (again, and this is important, its public AND private AND in-between interest groups there)
As a Harvard faculty member who taught about AI in the 1980s (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17747494/), I'm not surprised that others did the same as me and started companies. Indeed, the SBIR program encouraged that.
Thiel made some good points about barriers to innovation, but there has long been a tendency to assume that discoveries have slowed to a trickle and we are coasting off older breakthroughs. But part of the reason for this tendency is that it is hard to know if recent discoveries will become major changes. A good examples is the work of HMS professor Bruce Yankner that suggests that lithium deficiency is what enables Alzheimer disease to progress (https://hms.harvard.edu/news/could-lithium-explain-treat-alzheimers-disease). It is not yet clear whether this is correct, but if it is it will be a huge breakthrough.
The following is just my personal opinion, but I think there is quite substantial basis to back it up:
Peter Thiel, who actually is a quite smart man unlike some of the others of his ilk, points to some real symptoms here but within this interview never moves through them to look at the underlying disease which is the post WW2 in-general US System consolidation and as a big part of that the consolidation of science into a centralized, state–corporate, mediated-by-centralized-finance (public, private, and in-between finance), gate-kept by private and public powerful and cynical special interest groups, and with a cynically imposed monoculture; this form replaced the earlier plural, distributed, semi-autonomous ecosystem of labs, firms, municipalities, independent institutions, etc..
He states cultural (“people became risk-averse”), regulatory (“FDA/NRC bottlenecks”), and sectoral explanations (biotech, nuclear, academia), but never provides the information that all of these are downstream of a single architectural transformation in which decision rights over science were removed from a wide field of diversified actors and pluralistic structures and then concentrated into a small number of national and quasi-private gatekept bodies. Even his apt critique of “bureaucratization” tthat the bureaucratization wasnt an just an accident or unintended consequence, t'was structural reorganization linked to Cold War planning, industry consolidation, governmental consolidation (we didnt just consolidate industry, we consolidated gov too into the national level, and those two consolidations go hand in hand) and later financialization. And quite importantly, that very bureaucratization generated large material benefits for the afore referenced cynical and powerful special interest groups (again, and this is important, its public AND private AND in-between interest groups there)
I agree with many of Thiel's observations, but I caution that the computer business is not a complete model for research as a whole. Drawing again on the lithium-Alzheimer research, if the hypothesis is correct it will save hundreds of billions of dollars a year (https://schaeffer.usc.edu/research/dementia-alzheimers-cost-model-2025/) but no private company will invest in such research because one can't patent lithium.
The private sector is best for many types of research, but not all. Government and philanthropic support are needed, and Thiel is surely correct that they can be improved.
Hi Michael, thanks for the reply! IMO, I'd say your lithium example here is actually a very good example of part of what I was trying to get at and my overal the structural point. Within the system architecture of the American Old Republic such research would likely be much more likely to move forward due to the Old Republic's geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of both access to financing and decision making regarding that financing's deployment; and its more locally based, multiple overlapping funding channels (municipal, state, mutuals (which were actually quite robust and sophisticated), local banks, various kinds of robust civic institutions, etc, ect), and far more plural access to decision-making.
Research funding didnt hinge on whether the words of a relatively small number of centralized gatekeepers (NIH, FDA pipeline, deeply concentrated venture capital, patent regimes, etc, etc) called something monetizable or acceptable (because sometimes they deny things not because it isnt monetizable but instead because it could harm the resource intakes from a totally different thing elsewhere. Common portfolio.); it could emerge through many smaller, semi-autonomous nodes pursuing partial, non-monopolizable gains that still created enormous social value. In that system, non-patentable or diffuse-return discoveries like lithium dont depend on a single national funding bottleneck or IP logic or other unnecessary hurdles; they could be advanced by hospitals, local governments, physician networks, state boards, philanthropic associations, locally regionally embedded capital pools, and other things, all acting in parallel
Very interesting to read Peter Theil's thoughts on these important topics.
I am a graduate of Harvard College in biology, after which I went to the NIH and worked on vaccine development. Strange as it may seem, I came out of vaccine development with some wild ideas about using microorganisms for various applications such as biofuels. The connection between the two topics may appear, especially to humanities majors, as a non sequitur, but it is probably better understood by microbiologists, molecular biologists and biochemists.
The molecular makeup of the microorganisms for which we were developing vaccine candidates includes several different kinds of high-energy and nutritious molecules, such as lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates, which can be extracted for use as raw material for energy production. Moreover, by focusing on photosynthetic microorganisms, one can harvest solar energy and convert it into chemical energy using the biosynthetic pathways that are embedded into the genomes of these organisms.
To make a long story short, I have been fascinated by the commercial and industrial potential of these concepts for many years. And, getting back to Peter Theil's interview, this is a scientific topic in which America lags far behind other countries. China, for example, is well ahead of us in this space, as are India and some European countries.
What makes China and India more interested in this topic is their high population relative to land area. As the Chinese economy grew over the past 3-4 decades since its free market reforms, one of the first "luxuries" that the rising Chinese masses sought after was more food ... especially protein rich foods. They were starving after Mao's disasterous and hard-edged socialist policies.
But, even today, they still cannot meet the protein needs of their vast population; hence their desire to purchase US farmland and to import US pork and soybeans for their protein content. The situation in India is similar. Recognizing their protein needs cannot be met with conventional farming, both China and India have invested funds into the study of photosynthetic microorganisms such as spirulina and chlorella as sources of edible protein.
As it turns out, these photosynthetic microorganisms are excellent protein sources, at least from a productivity standpoint. The flavor and gustatory attraction of these organisms fails to arouse much interest for obvious reasons (who wants to select "algae" from a menu?), but these issues can be overcome by using such proteins as food ingredients, not as foods by themselves. Moreover, gustatory trends can be changed with impactful marketing, and some cultures already enjoy eating spirulina as a food. In fact, certain tribes in Africa and South American have been doing it for centuries!
It is estimated by some that edible and nutritious spirulina protein can be produced at a rate of 200x more per acre than the average American beef cattle farm produces protein. And, this now leads me to my own startup.
I am developing a new kind of tubular photobioreactor (tPBR) that is now proven to increase Spirulina productivity by +41% over the previous generation of tPBR. That boosts the 200X protein advantage up to 282X compared to the average American beef cattle farm. And, I have some ideas about further technical improvements in these productivity measures.
Please visit our website for more information: https://chromaphorix.com
PS: With four kids and limited risk capital available, I am seeking investment in Chromaphorix. So, Peter, if you are reading this, please get in touch: jlglex99@chromaphorix.com.
Jonathan L. Gal
Harvard AB Biology Class of 1989 (graduated in June 1990 due to a year off)
Peter Thiel, who actually is a quite smart man unlike some of the others of his ilk, points to some real symptoms here but within this interview never moves through them to look at the underlying disease which is the post WW2 in-general US System consolidation and as a big part of that the consolidation of science into a centralized, state–corporate, mediated-by-centralized-finance (public, private, and in-between finance), gate-kept by private and public powerful and cynical special interest groups, and with a cynically imposed monoculture; this form =replaced the earlier plural, distributed, semi-autonomous ecosystem of labs, firms, municipalities, independent institutions, etc..
He states cultural (“people became risk-averse”), regulatory (“FDA/NRC bottlenecks”), and sectoral explanations (biotech, nuclear, academia), but never provides the information that all of these are downstream of a single architectural transformation in which decision rights over science were removed from a wide field of diversified actors and pluralistic structures and then concentrated into a small number of national and quasi-private gatekept bodies. Even his apt critique of “bureaucratization” tthat the bureaucratization wasnt an just an accident or unintended consequence, t'was structural reorganization linked to Cold War planning, industry consolidation, governmental consolidation (we didnt just consolidate industry, we consolidated gov too into the national level, and those two consolidations go hand in hand) and later financialization. And quite importantly, that very bureaucratization generated large material benefits for the afore referenced cynical and powerful special interest groups (again, and this is important, its public AND private AND in-between interest groups there)
One of the perks of being part of an organization at Harvard is that you can contact notable people and they will agree to a meeting.
In 2015 one such organization even got a private meeting with Donald Trump: https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2015/08/03/harvard-students-pull-elaborate-prank-on-donald-trump-rival-newspaper-2/