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Thread: Great episode of @TWiStartups featuring the amazing entrepreneur and investor, Brad Gerstner ( @altcap) of Altimeter Capital, who also had a great appearance on the @theallinpod with the #Besties @jason, @chamath, @DavidSacks & @friedberg (1/16)
But Gerstner & @jason were wrong about one thing. In the last 10mins of the pod, Gerstner says "vaccines were developed in record time, that is the byproduct of capitalism..it was Moderna that came up with the vaccine in 3 weeks. It wasn't the National Institute of Health" (2/16)
As a point of fact, the @moderna_tx vaccine was co-developed with the @NIH, which also funded Moderna's human trials. Moderna also received 3 separate grants from Operation Warp Speed & BARDA for almost $2.5 billion to fund various activities from R&D to production (3/16)
Looking even further upstream, @NIH funding has been key to the development of #mRNA science & tech (Nature: "The NIH funded two research projects in 2002 that laid some of the foundation for today’s highly effective mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines") (4/16) https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01076-x#ref-CR1
Moderna also received significant support from major philanthropies, including the @GatesFoundation, which provided the company at least $20 million in 2016 (5/16) https://www.modernatx.com/ecosystem/strategic-collaborators/foundations-advancing-mrna-science-and-research
So a full accounting of the amazing success of the @Moderna_tx vaccine should credit the deep partnership btwn the private sector, philanthropic sector & - critically - the USG (NIH, BARDA, Warp Speed) which provided extraordinary support for all successful vaccine efforts (6/16)
And all US success in the #pharmaceutical & #biotech sectors is enabled by a world-leading government R&D budget & research apparatus. The NIH alone spent $42 billion in 2020, funding that supports basic research, building and running labs, training human capital & more (7/16)
Brad Gerstner ( @altcap) is a great business leader who comes from a humble background and is doing amazing work bringing minorities and people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the world of 21st century opportunity, so this thread isn't meant to criticize him personally (8/16)
But @altcap, @jason, @chamath, @davidsacks & @friedberg have been putting forward a view of "capitalism" in their recent @theallinpod appearances that is narrow & does not account for the critical role government has played in advancing US science, innovation & prosperity (9/16)
The incredible successes of Silicon Valley have been intimately linked to the efforts of institutions like DARPA, BARDA, NIH, NSF, NASA, DOE, the Pentagon, the US national lab network, the Univ. of California system (think Berkeley, UCSF, UCSD) & other public institutions (10/16)
Case study 1: take arguably the US's most innovative science and engineering university, #MIT, which has received around half or more of its research funding over the years from the Pentagon (11/16)
Case study 2: take arguably the most important hardware product ever developed, the #iphone, which integrated and innovated on core technologies that were developed in the government system or through government-funded projects ( @MazzucatoM) (12/16)
Case study 3: Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin did some of their early work on search engine technology while students at @Stanford on an @NSF grant (13/16) https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660
Case study 4: The key technologies that eventually led to the shale energy revolution were developed over decades w/ critical early support from the Dept. of Energy, including slick-water fracking, directional drilling & monitoring/mapping tech (14/16): https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-boom-in-shale-gas-credit-the-feds/2011/12/07/gIQAecFIzO_story.html
In reality, we have a complex & dynamic innovation ecosystem that involves gov. and private sector partnership. Entrepreneurs tinkering in garages are important, but so are NIH/NSF administrators & scientists, DARPA project managers, DOE super computers & more (15/16)
Finally, here is a great 2017 @WashingtonPost op-ed on these topics by @Eric_Lander (currently Biden's top science advisor) and @EricSchmidt (fmr. Google CEO) titled "America’s ‘Miracle Machine’ is in desperate need of, well, a miracle" (16/16) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-miracle-machine-is-in-desperate-need-of-well-a-miracle/2017/05/05/daafbe6a-30e7-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html
