Bill Anderson, CEO of Genetech, on the role of the corporation in the competitive, cutthroat business of drug discovery
While much of this year’s Shift Forum focused on the ever-expanding intersection of technology and politics, investigating the shifting role of business in society also requires we talk about established businesses, in particular those who might teach us lessons we can apply to today’s most pressing issues. In the interview below, the New York Times’ Corner Office columnist David Gelles speaks with Bill Anderson, CEO of life sciences giant Genentech.
John Battelle: We’re here. We’re in San Francisco. We’re in the Valley. We’re in the center of technology. Yes, we’ve heard from a lot of people in tech.
Our faith in the process of science is damaged, and it could be replaced by something worse
In a desperate attempt to curb the negative wave of attention it garnered in 2017, Facebook stepped into 2018 announcing its own resolutions. The big one is backing away from news publishers, and favouring content that user’s friends and family put out. Here are a few other alarming headlines from this past week:
A tech giant partners with a bioinformatics pioneer to create an entirely new kind of genetic map.
T cells attack a cancer cell.
I believe that all reality is information, and all information creates reality. I am not alone in this belief, but it is nevertheless controversial. Regardless, around this maddening thesis revolves nearly all the intractable problems, paradoxes, and opportunities of modern science, technology, and quite possibly policy and politics. The more we informatize the physical world, the more we can ply its unknown depths.
But there’s so much of it, this information. The recursive joke of an acroamatic god — we understand that information drives everything, but there’s simply too much information to understand. Start with our very minds — comprised of 100 billion neurons connected in no less than 100 trillion paths. Each synaptic firing across one of those hundred-trillion possibilities comprises an informational declaration — and each neuron may fire up to two hundred times a second. Don’t ask me how much potential information that is — I can’t do the damn math.
My response to François Chollet’s “The Impossibility of Intelligence Explosion”
Francois Chollet argues in his recent essay that an intelligence explosion is very unlikely. So the fast progress we see today is a chimaera, more linear than we think and more likely to slow down, because:
Doing science in a given field gets exponentially harder over time — the founders of the field reap most the low-hanging fruit, and achieving comparable impact later requires exponentially more effort.
And that even the open-source networked approach to research that has driven so much recent progress has limits because:
The big questions that medicine is still struggling to answer
NewCo Shift produces a number of Medium Premium series, articles created in conjunction with noted authors and journalists. One such series is What We Don’t Know, by Thomas Goetz. This series explores the reasons why the most basic problems in medicine are some of the hardest to solve. The first article in the series explores the reasons why we really don’t know how to count dead people.
In 2010, the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report put the number of annual global deaths caused by malaria at 655,000, but that number, however, turned out to be wrong. A correction by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that the actual number was closer to 1.2 million deaths. Goetz asked himself, how could the mortality estimate for malaria, a disease that gets a great amount of attention and resources, and a disease that has such long history and distinct pathology, be so wrong? And how was it possible to get the number right?
Read the first article here to find out why getting the numbers right is really hard to do, and why we must get it right in order to understand human health. The second in the series is due this week, so stay tuned!
Terrorism, super AI risk, and how Sam Harris became Sam Harris
I recently recorded a luxuriously unhurried conversation with author, neuroscientist, and public intellectual Sam Harris. Sam first entered the public eye with the release of his 2004 bestseller The End of Faith. A rumination on 9/11 and an endorsement of atheism (though that word is used precisely once in its text), The End of Faith peaked at #4 on the New York Times bestseller list. Sam’s subsequent bestsellers have included Letter to a Christian Nation, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, and the collaboration Islam and the Future of Tolerance.
To access our interview, either:
Type “After On” into your podcast app’s search field, or . . .
Click the “play” button at the top of this page, or . . .
Click here, then click the blue “View on iTunes” button in the upper left corner of the page (requires iTunes, of course),
Quantum computing is the wild card in technology’s deck
I recently recorded a wide-ranging conversation with venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson on the weird, even spooky topic of quantum computing. Steve is a long-serving board member at D-Wave Systems — the world’s oldest and largest quantum computing company. He and I go back a ways. We overlapped as undergrads at Stanford, then worked together in our first post-college jobs at Bain & Company. Our paths have crossed and re-crossed ever since, in and around the tech scene.
To access our interview at your leisure, either:
Type “After On” into your podcast app’s search field, or . . .
“After On” Podcast: Episode 2 (first published to Medium member July 21)
One of the world’s top peer-reviewed journals thinks it’s possible
I recently recorded a 90-minute interview with a man who might one day cure dementia by using that classical clinical tool: the video game. Seriously! Originally available just to Medium members, it’s now available to everyone as part of the After On podcast. To access it, either:
Type “After On” into your podcast app’s search field, or . . .
Click here, then click the blue “View on iTunes” button in the upper left corner of the page (requires iTunes, of course),
Anyway, meet my interviewee, Adam Gazzaley:
>Dr. Adam Gazzaley of UCSF
Adam runs a giant research lab at UCSF, and is emerging as one of the top neuroscientists of his generation. This Nature cover about his agenda-setting work started cementing his reputation a few years back:
But if we do, we’ll at least have pretty things to look at while we deal with our chemically-induced cancer.
“The global population is skyrocketing, the climate is changing, and diets are shifting. So how do you tackle the problem of feeding 9 billion people by 2050? Assemble an elite team of scientists for a year-long brainstorming session… What’s needed is akin to a moonshot. Or as committee co-chair John D. Floros put it, a “green revolution 2.0.””
This is from a month-old article in the Washington Post entitled “This quiet agricultural ‘moonshot’ could change the future of food.’ They are some of the scariest words I’ve seen put together in quite some time.
I’m consider myself lucky that I’ve been able to call many places home over the years — Utah, California, Maryland, and DC. I recently had a chance to go back home to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where I received my undergraduate degree and spend time with the students and faculty. And I’ll be honest, it was awesome.
Not just because UCSD was also nice enough to give me an award (because I’m the one should be thanking them), but there’s something about being able to visit a campus where so much of your early thinking is framed (especially with your kids in tow). For example, meeting the students reaffirmed my faith that we’re on an awesome path forward if we keep investing in the future. The next generation of scientists, innovators, and artists are breaking new ground in ways that I could have never anticipated (there are also many more people skateboarding on campus which I fully endorse!). And here are my thoughts that stuck with me:
We need make opportunities available for everyone
There’s nothing like being part of the club called being an alumni, but what about those that didn’t even get a chance to try? What about their shot?
We need to think about our education system with greater flexibility. And I’m a prime example, when I first graduated from high school, I wasn’t ready for college. Lucky for me, I had a great community college that got me ready by teaching me how to write and set me up for a love of math and getting ready to make the most of UCSD. There are too many people out there who need a shot. Their access to opportunity shouldn’t be determined by the zipcode they were born in. The answers to these issues aren’t easy. We need to be aggressive and have the courage to make provide opportunities for everyone. As a country we’re a team; and a good team never leaves a teammate behind.
