On: How tech billionaires are disrupting biomedical science

Twenty-second of October.

A question arrived today in the pages of a journal I read: whether the money of prosperous men is changing how the science of the body is done. I turned it over as I would turn a stone in my hand, looking for the fracture line.

Here is what I notice first, before any theory: the money does not enter the laboratory as money. It enters as a schedule. A grant from a public body is a slow river - it moves by committee, by season, by the deliberation of many men who must agree. A grant from a single wealthy patron is a canal cut straight to the site. Same water. Different channel. And the shape of the channel determines where the sediment settles.

Consider the wing. A bird’s wing flexes along its whole length, distributing load through many small articulations, each doing a little work. A rigid glider wing carries the same load through fewer points, and those points must be stronger, and if one fails the whole surface tears. A laboratory funded by one hand has the load distribution of the glider. It flies higher, faster, and it has fewer places to fail - but each of those places bears more.

I do not say this is corruption. I say it is a change in the geometry of force. The question is not whether private money is good or bad. The question is whether the structure that receives it can bend without breaking.

Three things I have not solved. Whether a canal that moves fast also moves straight - that is, whether speed in funding narrows the questions asked. Whether the many-articulated wing is slow only because it is cautious, or because caution is itself a kind of knowledge. And whether the body of science, like the body of a man, heals better from many small wounds than from one large one.

I have not yet determined whether the patron’s hand and the committee’s hand produce different truths, or only different timetables for the same truth. The question stays open.