The best minds of my generation are (still) optimizing for ad views

how do we get more people working on hard problems in biotech & deeptech?

I recently went to an in-person tech event and met a lot of bright-eyed young people. The demographic was skewed towards entertainment / marketing / social (the event was in Los Angeles, after all). Person after person was working on the ultimate goal of capturing a greater share of consumers’ attention, for the purposes of selling ads - TikTok, OnlyFans, YouTube, Tinder.

This is not a moral judgement of the work these people do. I’m sympathetic to why they do it. It is what their peers are doing, it is where the money is, it is “sexy.” But these are smart, energetic people - these people could apply their attention and brain power in many different ways.

As we talked about different fields of study, their view on biotech / deeptech was “oh no I’m not smart enough for that.” Why is that the consensus? Is it because the gate-keepers of science in academia and industry still require specific degrees to permit you to do science? If you didn’t study some technical discipline, you are not allowed to do this work, you are not smart enough? That perception is obviously false.

You aren’t required to have a CS degree from Stanford to start a tech company. Likewise you do not need a science degree to work on science. These people have business, sales, product, programming, operations skills - all of these are highly necessary in biotech and deeptech today.

If the pandemic has taught us anything it’s that there is no “us and them” in science - trust in institutions is justifiably as low as it’s ever been. We must all become scientists and engage with science, because those in positions of authority know little more (maybe even less) than we do.

How do we convince more young people to work on these hard, meaningful, existential problems?

• We need to do a better job of educating the public about opportunity in our space for everyone, not just highly technical / specialized people. More expansive job boards and better hiring practices focused on key attributes rather than degrees.

• We need to do a better job of lifting up examples and successes of outsiders in deeptech (there are many) - I like Ian Roundtree’s idea for a Techcrunch for Deeptech.

• We need to work really hard at democratizing the tools of research, so you don’t have to be at an elite university to access them. Shared labs, DIYbio spaces, the ever elusive “AWS for bio” are all super important, and we should be funding new models.

• We also need to pay people more to work on more important problems. The rush of biotech and climate funding will help here, but it’s only the beginning.

Most of all, we need to put down our phones and take our attention ($$$$) away from adtech companies - go become a scientist instead.