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There are lots of amazing companies in biosciences, doing remarkable, ambitious things. If you work in biology, write the scientists Abhishaike Mahajan and Eryney Marrogi, you’ll notice that the founders of biotech companies are usually pursuing “crazy pie-in-the-sky mission [like] curing aging or making de-novo proteins,” something involving huge intellectual input but with a potentially even bigger market payoff. The people involved want to make fundamental impacts on the field and on the world at large. That’s great — but, Mahajan and Marrogi argue on Owl Posting, it would be nice if there were more smart people working on boring stuff too.
In other fields, founders are usually just as smart and hardworking, but they have often chosen areas that aren’t so grandiose. Stripe, for instance: “Stripe is a fundamentally boring business on the surface — you’re making it easier for people to send money to each other.” No doubt Patrick Collison is brilliant and could have done something more exciting-sounding. But payment processing not only made him a billionaire, it also democratized online payments and changed the world for the better in a small, but appreciable, way. Biology startups could aim to do something similar: Slightly improve the drug-discovery pipeline, say. It might not sound so spectacular, but it would be useful.
Chaining reaction
The UK was a pioneer in nuclear research: The first time humans split the atom was in Britain, in 1932. But now, it is the most expensive place in the world to build a nuclear power station. Hinkley Point C, currently under construction — running several years late and nearly double its original budget — will cost six times as much per megawatt produced as an equivalent in South Korea, and double that of reactors of the same EDF design in France and Finland. The economist Sam Dumitriu, in Notes on Growth, asks why.
There are many causes. The overly complex permitting system is one: EDF had to produce a 30,000-page environmental impact assessment and thousands of small changes to the design, rendering it impossible to build a fleet of similar reactors and learn by doing. And regulations are, by design, crippling: The regulator’s own starting position is that safety measures’ costs can outweigh benefits tenfold without being disproportionate. These extra costs, says Dumitriu, make nuclear — a low-carbon, reliable, and very safe power source — uncompetitive, forcing the country to rely on dirty, unsafe fossil fuels.
Dam straight
The Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron, the so-called Dam Busters, was a remarkable outfit. It flew heavy bombers across Germany at treetop height in 1943 and dropped the experimental “bouncing bombs” that wrecked three industrial dams, but their later missions were equally spectacular. As the mathematician Oliver Johnson writes, their combination of cutting-edge weapons and extraordinary physical bravery crippled the V2 rocket system, helped deceive the Nazis about the whereabouts of the D-Day landings, and sank the fearsome Tirpitz battleship.
For much of the war they were led by the impossibly heroic Leonard Cheshire, “a fearsome warrior in wartime and a remarkable humanitarian in peacetime,” who flew more than 100 bombing missions — on average, only 8% of crews survived to 50 missions — and after the war took in a dying man to live with him, which then led him to found what is now a major disability charity. The squadron was full of brilliant, daring oddballs, Johnson notes, and had a “freedom to operate outside conventional standards” which was and remains rare, but perhaps should be a lesson: “It was largely a case of recruiting great people, giving them what they needed, and then mostly staying out of their way.”