October 9, 2020
Want to hear a crazy idea:
"Let's edit DNA using gene splicing scissors found in bacteria!"
Sounds crazy, right? Most brilliant ideas do at first. Then one day they become mainstream. Wednesday, it was announced that Professors Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, pioneers of revolutionary CRISPR gene editing, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Little known fact, my undergraduate degree was Chemistry, so imagine my excitement when I woke up to the news. Also fun fact, my friend from Peru, Jorge Bardales, had Dr. Doudna as co-advisor at Berkeley in his doctoral dissertation. He now edits genes in order to fight antibiotic resistance. Jorge is another academic turned entrepreneur; one of many in my GSP rock-star family ❤️.
This year's award is unusual for several reasons, Nobel Prizes are typically awarded for widely accepted discoveries and lifetime achievements. Translation, decades after a discovery is made. CRISPR was discovered 8 years ago, and in that short period has become ubiquitous sweeping through research and commercial laboratories worldwide for the development of new drugs and treatments with countless applications. Second, the chemistry prize has been awarded to 186 laureates and until last year it had only been awarded to 5 women, ever… since 1901!! Third, in the history of the Prize, this is the first all female science team to be awarded.
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Doctors Doudna and Charpentier from University of California, Berkeley (USA) and Max Planck Unit (Germany), respectively, are reminders that crazy ideas are worth pursuing and worth nurturing.
There is this idiom among entrepreneurs and startup ecosystems that "great ideas are worthless"... and let me tell you, in the time I spent in Silicon Valley, I was bothered by how religiously people repeated this phrase. I get it! The sentiment in SV is ALL about execution. But I also get how damaging it can be to other ecosystems to take SV's word as the bible on innovation. I don't subscribe to measuring the value of an ideas solely by its monetary value and I can think of a hundred reasons why scientific explorations shouldn't either.
Spoiler alert: there is a lot of startup wisdom I don't subscribe to but that's because I've seen a good deal of worthless ideas executed beautifully, and worthy ideas completely neglected.
I subscribe to Safi Bahcall's view that there are creative “artists” and execution-oriented “soldiers.” Bachall also provides examples of ideas that take times to shape and require decades of nurturing. These are what he calls Loonshots, the crazy ideas behind many indispensable technologies we enjoy today. For more examples of such crazy ideas, and ways to nurture them, check out this review of his book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.
So don't dismiss crazy ideas that have not been executed yet. Instead, find the people and communities that help you nurture them. My Loonshot is to create a community of experts working at the intersection science, tech & policy. I'm looking for people to beta test this community. Does it sound like you?
Cheers to pursuing and nurturing crazy ideas, together!
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PS: I use to talk myself out of all my crazy ideas, now I put them out into the world because my craziest ideas have been my most successful ones.