Tag: Katalin Karikó

• Who funds quantum research?

  An odd little detail in a Physics World piece on Microsoft’s claim to have made a working topological qubit:

  Regardless of the debate about the results and how they have been announced, researchers are supportive of the efforts at Microsoft to produce a topological quantum computer. “As a scientist who likes to see things tried, I’m grateful that at least one player stuck with the topological approach even when it ended up being a long, painful slog,” says [Scott] Aaronson.

  “Most governments won’t fund such work, because it’s way too risky and expensive,” adds [Winfried] Hensinger. “So it’s very nice to see that Microsoft is stepping in there.”

  In drug development, defence technologies, and life sciences research, to name a few, we’ve seen the opposite: governments fund the risky, expensive part for many years, often decades, until something viable emerges. Then the IP moves to public and private sector enterprises for commercialisation, sometimes together with government subsidies to increase public access. With pharmaceuticals in particular, the government often doesn’t recoup investments it has made in the discovery phase, which includes medical education and research. An illustrative recent example is the development of mRNA vaccines; from my piece in The Hinducriticising the medicine Nobel Prize for this work:

  Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman began working together on the mRNA platform at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1990s. The University licensed its patents to mRNA RiboTherapeutics, which sublicensed them to CellScript, which sublicensed them to Moderna and BioNTech for $75 million each. Dr. Karikó joined BioNTech as senior vice-president in 2013, and the company enlisted Pfizer to develop its mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 in 2020.

  Much of the knowledge that underpins most new drugs and vaccines is unearthed at the expense of governments and public funds. This part of drug development is more risky and protracted, when scientists identify potential biomolecular targets within the body on which a drug could act in order to manage a particular disease, followed by identifying suitable chemical candidates. The cost and time estimates of this phase are $1billion-$2.5 billion and several decades, respectively.

  Companies subsequently commoditise and commercialise these entities, raking in millions in profits, typically at the expense of the same people whose taxes funded the fundamental research. There is something to be said for this model of drug and vaccine development, particularly for the innovation it fosters and the eventual competition that lowers prices, but we cannot deny the ‘double-spend’ it imposes on consumers — including governments — and the profit-seeking attitude it engenders among the companies developing and manufacturing the product.

  Quantum computing may well define the next technological revolution together with more mature AI models. Topological quantum computing in particular — if realised well enough to compete with alternative architectures based on superconducting wires and/or trapped ions — could prove especially valuable for its ability to be more powerful with fewer resources. Governments justify their continuing sizeable expense on drug development by the benefits that eventually accrue to the country’s people. By all means, quantum technologies will have similar consequences, following from a comparable trajectory of development where certain lines of inquiry are not precluded because they could be loss-making or amount to false starts. And they will impinge on everything from one’s fundamental rights to national security.

  But Hensinger’s opinion indicates the responsibility of developing this technology has been left to the private sector. I wonder if there are confounding factors here. For example, is Microsoft’s pursuit of a topological qubit the exception to the rule — i.e. one of a few enterprises that are funded by a private organisation in a sea of publicly funded research? Another possibility is that we’re hearing about Microsoft’s success because it has a loud voice, with the added possibility that its announcement was premature (context here). It’s also possible Microsoft’s effort included grants from NSF, DARPA or the like.

  All this said, let’s assume for a moment that what Hensinger said was true of quantum computing research in general: the lack of state-led development in such potentially transformative technologies raises two (closely related) concerns. The first is scientific progress, especially that it will happen behind closed doors. In a June 2023 note, senior editors of the Physical Review B journal acknowledged the contest between the importance of researchers sharing their data for scrutiny, replication, and for others to build on their work — all crucial for science — and private sector enterprises’ need to protect IP and thus withhold data. “This will not be the last time the American Physical Society confronts a tension between transparency and the transmission of new results,” they added. Unlike in drug development, life sciences, etc., even the moral argument that publicly funded research must be in the public domain is rendered impotent, although it can still be recast as the weaker “research that affects the public sphere…”.

  The second is democracy. In a March 2024 commentary, digital governance experts Nathan Sanders, Bruce Schneier, and Norman Eisen wrote that the state could develop a “public AI” to counter the already apparent effects of “private AI” on democratic institutions. According to them, a “public AI” model could “provide a mechanism for public input and oversight on the critical ethical questions facing AI development,” including “how to incorporate copyrighted works in model training” and “how to license access for sensitive applications ranging from policing to medical use”. They added: “Federally funded foundation AI models would be provided as a public service, similar to a health care private option. They would not eliminate opportunities for private foundation models, but they would offer a baseline of price, quality, and ethical development practices that corporate players would have to match or exceed to compete.”

  Of course, quantum computing isn’t beset by the same black-box problem that surrounds AI models, yet what it implies for our ability to secure digital data means it could still benefit from state-led development. Specifically: (i) a government-funded technology standard could specify the baseline for the private sector to “match or exceed to compete” so that computers deployed to secure public data maintain a minimum level of security; (ii) private innovation can build on the standard, with the advantage of not having to lay new foundations of their own; and (iii) the data and the schematics pertaining to the standard should be in the public domain, thus restricting private-sector IP to specific innovations.[1]

  ---

  [1] Contrary to a lamentable public perception, just knowing how a digital technology works doesn’t mean it can be hacked.

  2025.03.11

• Some thoughts on Robert Downey, Jr.’s science funding idea

  On December 12, Iron Man, a.k.a. Robert Downey, Jr., and David Lang coauthored an op-ed in Fast Company that announced a grant-giving initiative of theirs designed to help fund scientists doing work too important to wait for the bureaucracy to catch up. Their article opened with a paragraph that, to my eye, seemed to have many flaws in reasoning, or at least overlooked them, perhaps in favour of getting to their limited point.

  If there were a Nobel Prize for Overcoming Bureaucratic Adversity, do you know who would win it? Katalin Karikó. Her story of enduring decades of little to no support for her research into the properties of mRNA, which led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, has transcended science. It exposes a blind spot of our current scientific institutions to find and nurture every passionate scientist and line of inquiry.

  Except it isn’t a blind spot.

  I think it’s a romantic ideal that dreams of funding every idea scientists have. You can, there’s nothing wrong with it, except you’d need lots of money. The current system is designed – even if it hasn’t been implemented – to ensure at least a certain percentage of good ideas are identified and funded at the right time and in parallel to maximise that percentage. What Iron Man and Lang imagine in their article is a system that will fund all good ideas, including those that The System has let slip. It’s a welcome move, perhaps, but it isn’t more virtuous, even when it rewards adversity that, again, The System has let slip, simply because The System’s way – which is effectively the tax-funded government’s way in most parts of the world – is the most efficient for its limited corpus of funds and its responsibility to organise research output to maximise societal good, directly or indirectly, instead of letting it all be open-ended.

  Granted, in times of great adversity, it might be foolish to wait for evidence before waiting to act, and a ‘wartime’ funding paradigm during a pandemic makes some sense, even if it’s a solution designed for wartime alone. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic – and the ‘fast grants’ for pandemic research that seem to have inspired Downey, Jr. and Lang – is a different kind of adversity than climate change. The latter is longer-lasting and more persistent, is a wicked problem (i.e. has multiple interrelated and/or emergent causes), has significant social implications that complicate the relationships between causes and effects, and is decidedly inter- and multi-generational. These differences could in turn render unbridled rapidity counterproductive.

  A part of the reason for the authors’ outlook, concerned with ‘catching’ good ideas before it’s too late, sticks out in the first sentence, in which Iron Man and Lang single out Katalin Karikó for praise for her work on mRNA vaccines as well as signal that they consider the Nobel Prizes to be the ultimate reward. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know where I stand on these prizes. But more importantly in the current context, the use of these prizes in particular and the choice of Katalin Karikó as an example of the sort of scientist they’d like to fund is… jarring.

  Iron Man and Lang seem to believe, as they write, that it’s important to catch brilliant ideas quickly (and that “the major impediments” to funding scientific work “are the obvious limitations of decision-making by committee”). First, one cause, among many, of the bureaucracy’s slowness is the bureaucracy’s need to be accountable to the polity about how it spends the polity’s money. And I don’t know if Iron Man and Lang are making room for any kind of slowness, and the corresponding paperwork, in their grant-funding programme. ‘Risk-seeking’ shouldn’t become an excuse for ‘accountability-avoiding’. On a related note, to zero in on ‘speed of funding’ as the principal problem with not funding the “right” kind of environmental research is also to ignore other, potentially more fundamental problems hiding behind the slowness – like “the party currently in power is not interested”.

  Second, many of us have lambasted others for singling out individuals – typically white men – as the sole originators of great discoveries. However, many people have identified Karikó more than anyone else with creating the idea of mRNA vaccines, aided by long profiles published by major newspapers about her work and her role in BioNTech, yet haven’t elicited the same or even similar reactions. If adversity is our measure, i.e. “we’re going to associate the person who struggled the most to make a meaningful contribution to an important idea”, then Karikó is by no means alone – nor is she likely to be, as just the post-war history of science has taught us, if we’re focusing on women. She couldn’t have worked alone, and even if the people we’re ignoring as a result are white old men, it’s still problematic to say Katalin Karikó is deserving of a Nobel Prize – at least not without, at the same time, admitting that it would be legitimate for the Nobel Prizes to award two or three people for the invention of mRNA vaccines.

  (I discovered that Nature News published a deep-dive in October on the “tangled history of mRNA vaccines” after I started writing this post, discussing the work of a long line of people, including Karikó, who contributed to this enterprise. So on a related note, if Karikó’s story is being used to illustrate new science-funding ideas, what might the professional experiences of all those other people say about how science is funded – as well as about how we apportion credit?)

  Third, it’s kind of a bummer that, heartening though it is for major Hollywood actors to get interested in the relatively more obscure problems of science administration and funding, and in turn to become part of a concrete solution instead of running their mouths on Twitter, this new initiative refuses to break from the tradition of devising new solutions to old problems instead of fixing existing solutions – an admittedly much less glamorous enterprise. The only other person who’s compared to Iron Man as frequently as Robert Downey, Jr., one Elon Musk, is infamous for this kind of thinking vis-à-vis ‘revolutionising’ personal transport. Musk wants more people to own cars – especially the ones his company makes – but will go so far as to dream up Hyperloop and The Boring Company to avoid considering fixing existing public transportation options.

  Similarly, Downey, Jr. and Lang, and their supporters, will go to the extent of setting up a whole new platform, or getting on a relatively new platform (same difference), instead of building on the things The System is already getting right. And this is a problem for at least three reasons. First, the new system will set up its own forms of discrimination and in-ness. For example, Downey, Jr.’s and Lang’s idea goes like this:

  FootPrint Coalition is funding early research in brand new environmental fields, and doing it under the direction of esteemed Science Leads who can move quickly and fund at their discretion. The FootPrint Coalition Science Engine builds off suggestions made in the Funding Risky Research paper. It operationalizes the “loose-play funding for early-stage risky explorations” but doesn’t bind it to universities.

  We’re doing it “in public” on the Experiment funding platform, a website for crowdfunding science research projects, so anyone can participate as a cofunder.

  As a platform that you get on, describe your idea and convince potential funders that your work is worth funding, ‘Experiment’ fundamentally requires you to be able to communicate clearly and with the same sensibilities as your future funders, most of whom are likely to be English-speakers of the US or Europe, if you expect to be successful. This in turn quickly eliminates a panoply of scientists who aren’t great communicators or aren’t even fluent in English. And in the specific case of the ‘Science Engine’, your work needs to appeal to the ‘Science Lead’ and fit into their sense of what’s important and what isn’t. A version of this problem already exists with scientific journals – where major journals’ editorial boards are often filled with editors who turn down papers because they’re not as enthusiastic as the authors might be about, say, the nutritional properties of an ant species endemic to Odisha.

  In addition, not all ideas to save the environment are great ideas. For example, climate geoengineering is popular with the US government because it needs to make up for historical emissions without compromising on current economic growth, it needs to placate the local, powerful energy industry and it wields the clout to disregard how much geoengineering solutions could screw up the weather in other parts of the world.

  Second, as a system designed to patch “leaks” in the “scientific talent funnel”, it still presumes the existence of a funnel for its own success even as it does nothing to fix the funnel itself. This is self-serving. And third, allowing scientific work to achieve success based solely on what gets funded quickly – that too based on descriptions on platforms on the internet, unmoderated by the criticism of other scientists (have you visited PubPeer?) or even by the critical attention of competent science journalists, and based on what people who are already rich think is “cool” – can be a short path for things the world could really do without to get funded.

  So, do I think Iron Man’s and Lang’s pitch is a good idea? I still don’t know.

  Featured image: A screenshot of Iron Man in action in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Source: Hotstar.

  2021.12.17