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Education Medicine The Almighty Buck Science

The Billionaires Spending a Fortune To Lure Scientists Away From Universities (nytimes.com) 77

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: In an unmarked laboratory stationed between the campuses of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a splinter group of scientists is hunting for the next billion-dollar drug. The group, bankrolled with $500 million from some of the wealthiest families in American business, has created a stir in the world of academia by dangling seven-figure paydays to lure highly credentialed university professors to a for-profit bounty hunt. Its self-described goal: to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies, and discover scores of new drugs (at first, for cancer and brain disease) that can be produced and sold quickly.

Braggadocio from start-ups is de rigueur, and plenty of ex-academics have started biotechnology companies, hoping to strike it rich on their one big discovery. This group, rather boastfully named Arena BioWorks, borrowing from a Teddy Roosevelt quote, doesn't have one singular idea, but it does have a big checkbook. "I'm not apologetic about being a capitalist, and that motivation from a team is not a bad thing," said the technology magnate Michael Dell, one of the group's big-money backers. Others include an heiress to the Subway sandwich fortune and an owner of the Boston Celtics. The wrinkle is that for decades, many drug discoveries have not just originated at colleges and universities, but also produced profits that helped fill their endowment coffers. The University of Pennsylvania, for one, has said it earned hundreds of millions of dollars for research into mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19. Under this model, any such windfall would remain private. [...]

The five billionaires backing Arena include Michael Chambers, a manufacturing titan and the wealthiest man in North Dakota, and Elisabeth DeLuca, the widow of a founder of the Subway chain. They have each put in $100 million and expect to double or triple their investment in later rounds. In confidential materials provided to investors and others, Arena describes itself as "a privately funded, fully independent, public good." Arena's backers said in interviews that they did not intend to entirely cut off their giving to universities. Duke turned down an offer from Mr. Pagliuca, an alumnus and board member, to set up part of the lab there. Mr. Dell, a major donor to the University of Texas hospital system in his hometown, Austin, leased space for a second Arena laboratory there. [Stuart Schreiber, a longtime Harvard-affiliated researcher who quit to be Arenaâ(TM)s lead scientist] said it would require years -- and billions of dollars in additional funding -- before the team would learn whether its model led to the production of any worthy drugs. "Is it going to be better or worse?" Dr. Schreiber said. "I don't know, but it's worth a shot."

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The Billionaires Spending a Fortune To Lure Scientists Away From Universities

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @10:34PM (#64154905)
    that they can't get free high profit research out of it anymore? I can't think of any good reason to do this otherwise.

    Then again there's been a few high profile cases of professors getting to keep their inventions (which has it's own issues when the research was paid for by public money...), so maybe they're tired of paying patent license fees for something they can own outright

    One thing I'm sure of is it's not competition. Billionaires don't compete, they either buy out or under cut.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @10:49PM (#64154927)

      Billionaires don't compete, they either buy out or under cut.

      "Buying out" (offering higher salaries) and undercutting (selling for less) is exactly what competition is.

      The universities are whining about this because they profit from research but don't want to pay market salaries to the researchers.

      • Remember who you're taking to. Only he would simultaneously complain about student loan debt AND actually believe that the university system is underfunded.

        • Only he would simultaneously complain about student loan debt AND actually believe that the university system is underfunded.

          You think massive student loan debt actually means universities are well funded? That is not actually where the money goes.

        • Weird. How do European universities work, I have to wonder? Students don't have to load up crippling debt, yet the degrees have international reputation that attracts students from all over the world and lets you work pretty much anywhere if you can claim you have one... maybe because the reason you hold one is that you're actually good and not just rich?

          • by ghoul ( 157158 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @04:42AM (#64155301)
            European Universities dont build billion dollar Football stadiums and dorms with heated floors and private bathrooms. They keep the money in the classroom and the lab. Also they get funded a lot more by their govt.
            • Basically I fund the universities. Which is quite sensible if you ask me, after all that's where I got a considerable portion of my education from and what allows me to now hold a job that puts me in the 3% income bracket of the country.

              One could think of it as some sort of "paying off" my tuition fees. The difference is maybe that even with every portion of my tax allocated for any kind of education or school funding considered, we're a FAR cry from the 100+ grand that I'd probably have to pay off had I st

              • You don't have to borrow anything at all in the US so long as you don't buy into the false idea that the hardest universities to get into provide the best education. IIRC I spent $20k or so for mine. This is why I'm fundamentally opposed to student loan forgiveness -- the only reason to have that much debt is if you made some really poor decisions. Oh, and I'm also within the top 3 percentile, so if you want to argue with results, be my guest.

                • Not arguing results, but where does that mountain of student loan debts come from? Is it only specific types of education or what causes people to go under for a few 100 grand?

                  • Different schools charge different tuition rates, and most people refuse to shop around. That's pretty much as simple as it gets. The state university I went to in particular not only had low tuition rates, but they allowed me to transfer 90 community college credits and I only had to take the core 30 credits at their degree program. So many people say humanities and liberal arts are important, which I strongly disagree with, but if they are, why not take those credits at community college rates and save th

            • While college football is tremendously profitable they don't pay for their own stadiums even though there's plenty of money for them to do so.

              But as for the private bathrooms and heated floors those cost money. I just put a kid through school and if you want to go into those dorms you're going to pay for them and you're going to pay through the nose. It was much cheaper to put my kid up in a okayish apartment. Honestly it wasn't that much more than the kind of crappy dorms that looks like a medium secu
          • To be fair, European universities mainly teach and a lot of research is done elsewhere, like research institutes.

            • Every European University conducts research, it's just that we _also_ have research institutes.
          • What Universities in the world can you name off the top of your head, which ones are in Europe, which ones are government funded. European universities still cost money to the people that go there, they are funded at much lower amounts, they are paid for by taxes and have literally nothing to show for it.

            Universities have become a credentialing scam, University of Prague has a lot less ring to it than Harvard or Stanford.

      • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

        by christoban ( 3028573 )

        The universities are whining about this because they profit from research but don't want to pay market salaries to the researchers.

        Yup!

        (OP) So is the University system so underfunded now...that they can't get free high profit research out of it anymore?

        Underfunded?? Universities rake in cash by the hundreds of billions. And if they want a $10M, they just raise tuition a bit more and watch as the students squirm, and the banks hand it to them eagerly since their risk is now ZERO as the government guarantees virtually all student loans.

        Whereas student loans were once extremely risky since you can't repossess knowledge or student brains (insert joke here), now our government guarantees nearly all loans so now there's zero risk so banks and colleges the

      • You're still thinking like an employee not an employer.

        Buyouts are what you do to companies when they have something you want. Undercutting is what you do when you can't buy a company at a good price and it means cutting your prices until the other company goes out of business.

        It has absolutely nothing to do with employees and everything to do with whole companies.

        Like I said your second comment is just as likely to be the answer the CEOs got tired of the universities making the money.

        My compl
      • by dargaud ( 518470 )
        If they stopped giving fortunes to coaches and started paying their researchers more, maybe... Full disclaimer: I work in public research and the pay is ridiculous.
        • If they stopped giving fortunes to coaches

          The money for the coaches comes from ticket sales and TV rights, not from the academic budget.

          I work in public research and the pay is ridiculous.

          If capable people are willing to do the work for the pay offered, then it isn't ridiculous.

    • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @12:25AM (#64155051) Journal

      Then again there's been a few high profile cases of professors getting to keep their inventions (which has it's own issues when the research was paid for by public money...)

      Most universities I know have some form of incoming sharing for patents. Usually along the lines of a third to the inventor(s), a third to the institute and a third to whomever is developing the patent commercially (which can be the inventors too). If there were no profit sharing then there would be no incentive to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of registering the patent or to develop it commercially since this would take time away from research which, unsurprisingly, is what most academic researchers want to do, not spend time thinking about how their research could be commercialized. If you want them to do that there has to be some incentive.

    • I can tell you 3 reasons at least: People are greedy. Industry work is fun, because you get things done. University also prefers that staff write grants and manage people rather than doing (sometimes fun) work
    • Believe it or not, there's also PhDs in private industry already that find their degrees as much a hindrance as anything else. If this group is scraping up people with advanced degrees, the easiest ones to snag will be the ones not doing research for universities.

  • by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @11:28PM (#64154987)
    If you lure a scientist with a big payday, even if the work they do for the company has little public benefit, they'll fund their own projects later. And meanwhile they'll be making professional and financial associations that they normally wouldn't, which will advance their work.

    And nothing stops them from going back to academia, teaching about their experiences in both contexts.

    People should try to seek a diversity of skills.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      This is what we did. We left, started a company, brought in a substantial amount of research grant funding and acquisition support funding, sold off the associated intellectual property, and repeated the process a few times. We then got bought out, waited for our equity in that company to fully vest, sold the shares, quit, and then set up a joint, corporate brokerage account to invest the proceeds.

      The only exception is that we didn't go back to academia for long. It's too mired in bureaucracy compared to

      • Bureaucracy is a product of size, not sector. You usually don't want to be a vassal to a giant corporation either. But if you really want to do something serious, you can chart a course among the options at different times and really do something important. And the best ones remember their own confusion at key moments and feed their windfalls back to help others at those times.
    • by PJ6 ( 1151747 )
      Private wealth is not the real engine of innovation, it generally just profits from the fruits of publicly funded research and takes credit for it.

      Most of our economy's infrastructure depends on is the results of research which never would have been funded by private industry.

      So I disagree. This is a short-term benefit to someone's bottom line, and a long term problem for the country.

      They never go back to academia. The damage is incalculable.
      • I agree, there's a lot of justice in what you say. There has to be a strong academic sector, but there also has to be some kind of boundary where the investment transmits into the private sector or its potential is never actually realized. ARPAnet was a college toy for nearly a decade before it was released into the wild, and would never have turned into the internet if it had stayed that way.

        As much I agree that business cannot be considered an end in itself - that it must transmit its results to civi
  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @11:46PM (#64155007)

    I've always felt that a university's first mission should be to teach, but being a good teacher will not get a faculty member promoted - at my university, at least. Getting research funding is good (for promotion and tenure). Spinning out startups is even better. When P&T comes around, I've seen faculty get dinged for focussing "too much" on teaching.

    A lot of faculty do put significant time and energy into teaching courses, but I could list several in my own department who readily state they feel teaching is a waste of their time. I feel - and have said this to them in response - if you don't want teaching to be part of your duties, I'd think the corporate world is really where you should be. But then, I guess you don't get tenure at Microsoft Research...

    • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @12:30AM (#64155061) Journal

      I've always felt that a university's first mission should be to teach, but being a good teacher will not get a faculty member promoted

      A university's first mission is teaching AND research together. Research without teaching means that important knowledge and understanding can be lost and teaching without research means that education will always be at least a generation behind the state of art in the field. Yes, universities prioritise research over teaching because it is harder to find good researchers than teachers but, at least where I work, bad teaching will hurt your chances of getting tenure or promotion.

      • Undergrad level teaching shouldn't be tied to research. The syllabus doesn't have the depth that would justify it.

        • by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @08:51AM (#64155547) Journal
          Undergrad teaching absolutely should be tied to research and there are very good reasons it has been like this for over 1,000 years. First, it allows us to include examples from our research into lower-level teaching so students can get an idea of what state-of-the-art is and can see where cutting-edge research is happening. Without this education would continue to give the picture that everything is known.

          Secondly, undergrad courses are deep enough and go very close, and in many cases right up, to the level of knowledge in the field. I have had to change the material I taught on several occasions because of research I or others did. Most memorably when we discovered the Higgs boson and I had to significantly change the lectures in my particle physics course covering the higgs mechanism course to literally show off the evidence we found for the Higgs. A non-researcher could not do that since they would not have had access to the internal plots and material that those of us working on the experiment had nor the detailed knowledge of the analysis.

          I suppose it might be slightly different in the US since your undergrad degrees are very broad but as a consequence also quite shallow in your chosen degree subject. However, in all the other countries whose systems I know graduate-level courses consist of a summer school or two up to a handful of courses because undergrad degrees are far deeper but less broad than the US.
        • That is probably the second most stupids thing I ever have heard.

      • by Shemmie ( 909181 )

        "it is harder to find good researchers than teachers"

        We're pumping out post grads at a crazy rate. If it's really difficult to find good researchers, something is broken.

        Now, a good researcher may be worth more to a university. But the number of people who are good at teaching is, in my experience, pretty darn small. And the number of people who are good at research, and are also good teachers - they are essentially unicorns.

        • We're pumping out post grads at a crazy rate. If it's really difficult to find good researchers, something is broken.

          Most people with a grad degree only have a masters which is not enough to run your own research program. Second, most people with PhDs end up working in industry because while they have the research skills that industry finds very useful they are not at a level where they can drive their own research program.

          Being a faculty-level researcher is not just doing research you have to identify new problems to tackle, put together experimental approaches to do that, write grants to get funding and then find go

      • Having worked in a University, the primary mission is to get grant funding and donor money. Nothing else really matters, hence why you see DEI programs started that cost billions but donâ(TM)t advance anyoneâ(TM)s research, it placates the bureaucrats in government and pacifies the masses which influences the donors. Itâ(TM)s why sports programs, fraternities, food courts and dormitories are better funded than any lab.

        • Perhaps in the US, in most other countries that's not at all true. University sport gets very little funding indeed and with only a few rare exceptions - like the Oxford and Cambridge boat race - there is zero media interest and hence no funding beyond the basics. Fraternities don't exist at least not to the same degree/extent and while food courts and dormitories do get some extra funding it comes from the commercial side from companies wanting to make a profit charging for food and rent.

          As for focussin
      • Yes, universities prioritise research over teaching because it is harder to find good researchers than teachers

        Also because research brings in money, but to a large extent teaching does not in that for many universities the name of the university not the quality of the teaching is what brings in students.

        at least where I work, bad teaching will hurt your chances of getting tenure or promotion

        That's good to hear. I know of one university, highly ranked in the UK and worldwide had the genius idea of ranking s

        • most academic staff are not psychopaths and care way more about doing a good job for its own sake than the central management team do.

          I think that's true at just about every university on the planet!

  • It's a good thing! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by methano ( 519830 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @11:47PM (#64155009)
    Truth is that discovering new drugs is really hard. If all these billionaires want to toss their filthy lucre back into the game, I'm all for it. It will be better for mankind than building yachts. And yeah, they're not gonna get rich doing it. A few will, most won't. But all you'll hear about is the one who did.
    • Tgis is exact opposite of good, bexause a drug that would be developed a bit later for public good will be developed sooner by a private company, patented and blocking everyone FOREVER from frewly inventing it for public good, because that's how patents are conceptyally flawed
      • Tgis is exact opposite of good, bexause a drug that would be developed a bit later for public good will be developed sooner by a private company, patented and blocking everyone FOREVER from frewly inventing it for public good, because that's how patents are conceptyally flawed

        Not forever - 20 years at most, since that's how long a patent lasts. And there's no guarantee that the people developing it "for public good" would get there in 20 years, or ever.

  • billion-dollar drug = us price $10K canada price $10

    • by dryeo ( 100693 )

      You haven't seen the prices in the country with the 3rd highest drug prices in the world. We do have to pay out of pocket instead of paying a fortune for insurance that is willing to pay that 10k, so prices have to be lower. No marketing allowed either which saves the drug companies a fortune, some of which is passed on.

    • Healthcare = us price for MRI = $$$, canada price for MRI = you want a what? if you want that in less than 3-6 months, go south and pay for it.

  • Ethics panels (Score:5, Interesting)

    by clawsoon ( 748629 ) on Friday January 12, 2024 @11:58PM (#64155019)

    to avoid the blockages and paperwork that slow down the traditional paths of scientific research at universities and pharmaceutical companies

    Am I wrong to assume that we'll be hearing about some major patient care ethics scandal from this group in a decade or so? Because trying to keep people safe while testing new drugs is by far the biggest blockage and source of paperwork for drug development.

    • Re:Ethics panels (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @12:02AM (#64155025)

      Their mantra: Move Fast and Break People.

    • Wasn't that pretty much what drove Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos? I'm pretty sure we've seen this before.
      • Except the VCs behind Holmes didn't end up in jail. As far as this new venture goes, I'm sure the billionaires behind it see that fact quite clearly.

        • by Barny ( 103770 )

          Yup. There'll be shell companies and protective fall-guys between the people with money and the people dying.

    • It's far more than that - MAPS has been going on 40 years to get the FDA to recognize MDMA as safe and effective which everybody already knew in the 70's.

      Their *second* Phase III is wrapping up so all those people whose suicide was written off as unimportant might finally get some posthumous justice.

      This is bureaucract Hell, not protecting people. Jobs in DC, though!

  • Where's the nearest Legal Seafood? If it isn't within walking distance, then count me out.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    When I first saw the name, I thought it must be a continuation of Arena Pharmaceuticals (AP) from La Jolla California. Looking it up, Pfizer acquired AP and Arena BioWorks seems to have no connection to the California company. The fact that both are doing research into new pharmaceutical compounds can definitely put them on a collision course before the USPTO or a court. Then again Pfizer might not care at all, since shortly after the acquisition, they axed all drug development except for etrasimod. If

  • Wasn't " The Wealthiest Man in North Dakota" a movie starring John Astin?

    I definitely remember the townsfolk complaining about "molly-be-damned!"

    Or maybe it was Don Knotts . . .

  • ... that the universities have become primitive temples of sympathetic magic.
  • This is healthy, as schools have become businesses. I hope Michael and his gang go big, and in the process, properly pay researchers knowing many schools have missed the mark. Either way, many seem to think schools are a healthier environment, and I strongly disagree having seen many strange behaviours in there...
  • Heaven forbid that a scientist would work outside academia...... I have worked with plenty of MS and PhD scientists who were "lured away" from academia to work in industry. Not by billionaires. Turns out there's lots of interesting work outside of academia, and not everyone wants to play the academia political games.
    • by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Saturday January 13, 2024 @10:15AM (#64155657)
      Theres tons of interesting work outside academia, but if someone thinks that industry is a political-game-free zone, they’re going to be very, very dissappointed.

      There are plenty of good reasons to avoid academic. For starters, you mention MS-degrees holders. Without the PhD, it’s almost impossible to be an actual research scientist. For the PhDs, maybe someone doesn’t want to get up in front of a class and teach, or maybe they want the possibility of a multimillion dollar payout, or they don’t want to spend 20 solid hours per week writing papers and grants, or they want a normal work-life balance, or maybe (through no fault of their own) their PhD/postdoc research wasn’t high-impact enough to get the publication list required. Tons of reasons why someone doesn’t want or couldn’t get an academic job. They’re just as smart/competent, they go into industry and they do their work there.

      But “work politics” is literally everywhere. It can be WORSE in a company, because your job is on the line literally every day. In academia, if I insult my bosses clothing choices, I might lose my job in 12 months when my contract comes up. In industry, I can get a pink slip in the next 30 minutes if I piss off the wrong executive.
  • There are so many universities, creaming off rockstars might even be healthy for academia. Individually this company is just a blip.

  • Ohh, so if it were developed by a professor during his/her time at the university, what they developed is free for anyone to use or at least not for profit? Think again, in most cases what they develop at the university is put into a commercial entity with a hefty salary going to the professor. Universities is all about money.

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