Jeff Holmes: evaluation

Transcript context

…Including Fast Grants, but not only, the world has seen it can address critical problems much more quickly than it had thought. The use of the internet to spread science was a big factor. Philanthropists stepping up. My own effort, Fast Grants — the idea that you would get grants to top researchers within a number of days, and make these submission forms super easy. Not that people have to worry about what kind of font was being used on the submission. Not that they would have to wait six months for an answer, but they would hear back in a few days and get the money a day or two later. We showed that can work. We did that to a scale of about $43 million and could have done more. It had a pretty substantial impact. Not just that, but everyone sees when you put your mind to it, you can be a lot better and do things more quickly. I hope we keep that lesson emotionally internalized and don’t just do it for the stuff that feels pressing now, but do it for many more things. Take dengue — always with us. It’s not a new thing. It doesn’t command the headlines. It’s a very high number of people each year — it can ruin their lives. We should do more. We can do more. I think the pessimistic case would be, one reason we were able to act so quickly on COVID is because it became this clear focal point where that was the thing to do, to figure out this problem. Once we figure out this problem, that energy will dissipate in ways that will prevent the kind of speed that we saw. Do you agree with that take or disagree? It’s certainly true that is a big advantage. But I think as people expand the size and scope of their mental models, they will see you can carve out subsectors of academia, of philanthropy, of government, of private sector that take other maladies very seriously. They’re not going to quite have the same urgency. One big advantage, if you would call it that — not advantage — but other labs were closed unless you were doing COVID work. At least for a while, there was a big substitution into COVID work, and that’s not going to be very common. But I also think the other tasks will benefit a lot from the work done on COVID. The notion of a semi-universal vaccine, a testing to find other viruses, using mRNA vaccine platforms to combat other things — all those will be offshoots of the COVID triumphs. I believe. I hope. I think. We need to see those through and not just give up on them.…

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