Peter Thiel on medicine and longevity

Or is it that there’s something wrong with culture, with the funding?  Almost no grants go to younger scientists.  When it’s scientists under age 40 that make […] of the most big discoveries, 2% of NIH grants go to scientists under age 40.  That seems a little bit off.  You have a peer-review process where anything heterodox can’t get funded.  You have sort of a publish or perish dynamic where you have to do small, incremental things to publish lots of articles that don’t add up to anything ever…

And again, my sort of libertarian cut on what happened would be the history of was that we had a healthy, scientific world that was non-governmental.  It was decentralized.  It was idiosyncratic.  Different people were doing different kinds of things.  And in the 1930s, 1940s, it got centralized accelerated.  The Manhattan Project…there was actually a way you could accelerate science temporarily by adding tons of money and centralizing…

So the centralization worked.  But to use an ecological metaphor, it worked by creating a monoculture.  And we’re now two generations in to where that monoculture has been just catastrophic.

That is from this taped dialogue between Peter and Bill Hurlbut, previously linked on MR.