This example is kind of cherry picked. Life science research has no geniuses. Although it is not possible to run the counterfactual, if Kariko quit then it is almost certainly the case that someone else would have discovered the same thing within a reasonable time frame. Life science research is very forgetful, and new discoveries are often not actually new. If you look carefully it is not infrequent that your brilliant idea was had by someone in 1970. In my field I found a paper from 1922 which basically revealed the key point the field is based on, but it was forgotten for nearly 100 years. That paper was before modern statistics were even in use so they did no statistical tests, it was that obvious. None of the many other people in the field knew about this paper.
Diveristy in funding sources is important and should be encourgaged. The main issue with these alt funding initiatives is that they lack scale and the sustainability is uncertain. I heard the head of research at a very large and storied biotech dissing Sean Parker's $500 million cancer immunology initiative as being a drop in the ocean, to give you an idea. Life science research is incredibly expensive and wasteful, like setting money on fire. Yet medicine is still so backward we need at least 10X more to really dent human suffering. If you disagree come to my clinic and see what you think.
During my PhD i not only found a paper from thirty years earlier describing exactly what i had discovered, but a footnote in that paper noting a paper from thirty years before that describing the same thing!
> If you look carefully it is not infrequent that your brilliant idea was had by someone in 1970. In my field I found a paper from 1922 which basically revealed the key point the field is based on, but it was forgotten for nearly 100 years
This is common outside the life sciences, too, FWIW. It seems that we're doing a very poor job of organizing the existing body of research in ways that could benefit the field as a whole. Not to mention that older papers/monographs/etc. are generally not even digitized, which makes them essentially inaccessible by modern standards.
Diveristy in funding sources is important and should be encourgaged. The main issue with these alt funding initiatives is that they lack scale and the sustainability is uncertain. I heard the head of research at a very large and storied biotech dissing Sean Parker's $500 million cancer immunology initiative as being a drop in the ocean, to give you an idea. Life science research is incredibly expensive and wasteful, like setting money on fire. Yet medicine is still so backward we need at least 10X more to really dent human suffering. If you disagree come to my clinic and see what you think.