Science with purpose
At Open Philanthropy, we have given away $600 million in biomedical research since 2016. That funding has supported the work of thousands of scientists across hundreds of universities, nonprofits, and companies around the world. Science is hard to predict. Most hard problems are hard for a reason, and we'
Lana Del Rey’s “ Young and Beautiful ” starts with piano keys, church bells, violins soaring through the first verse. Then a drum roll, and Lana belts out: Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when
I work on funding science for the sake of medical progress, but only 10% of our science funding at Open Philanthropy is related to AI. The whole premise of Open Philanthropy is we try to allocate money across causes to get as much bang for buck as possible. That leads
Rapid AI progress does not automatically mean rapid medical progress. If the point of AI progress is human flourishing, we must make other complementary investments too. Even with extremely powerful AI, people will still get cancer and Alzheimer’s – unless those investments are made, and unless broken “
I assume many people working in medical research fantasise about talking to Saloni Dattani. I assume that because I did, after reading Saloni's writing and listening to her interviews . Now, I thought, there is someone who focuses on issues that matter and pays attention to the details! Someone
This list consists of writing that ticked two boxes: 1) did I think about the article again more than a week after reading it?, and 2) was it written for a popular audience? So, academic papers, including review papers, don't count. Books are out too. Blog posts, magazine
It is always easiest to insult your own work, so let me tell you what's wrong with the piece Rafael Dib and I just published on vaccine R&D . Our analysis is driven by a practical question: how should Open Philanthropy spend money on science if we
Why should we have to pay for projects in foreign countries with our tax dollars? Well, we don't have to. It is a decision. At the moment the decision costs $15 per month each, $200 per year . The United States represents around 25% of global GDP, with around
This decade brought two inventions that will prevent a million deaths in America. One came from a German company who partnered with Pfizer to make Comirnaty available nine months into the COVID pandemic, becoming the most used vaccine in the U.S. at its peak (vs Moderna’s and
The most striking fact about philanthropy to me is how little money rich people give away. It is well known that we all die , and that leaving overwhelming wealth to your children can make their lives worse not better, so the alternatives don't seem that hard for philanthropy
CDC 6. Start convening ACIP Work Groups on diseases/infections that have no vaccines, many years ahead of there being particular candidates to assess. Publish the rough parameters under which ACIP would expect to recommend a vaccine rollout. [ This whole post is personal, not written as part of my job.
Tom Kalil responded to my first blog post on 10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years , asking: OK, how do we make them happen? Ashish Jha responded saying we as a society can decide to make new lifesaving technologies, and it’s a policy choice: True
I last got strep throat the first month out of lockdown. I had been indoors, in public, and was being punished. It was cruel and unusual to check me just when we were allowed to enter the world again. I went to my doctor with three negative COVID tests to
Scientific conferences are great even if you’re an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are useful guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could
I hang out in one particular corner of the world that talks about how to fund science, manage research, and build new research institutions . There are different intellectual tendrils that draw people into this happy muddle, but the shared interest once you get here is in scientific and technological progress