Toward a science of service

No one becomes a scientist to get rich.

Children don't gaze at the stars and think "how can I capitalize on the cosmos?"

Teens, exploring genetics for the first time, don't extract the DNA from a strawberry* and ask themselves "what is the fastest route to market?"

Scientists become scientists because we are curious, because we want to solve problems, and because somewhere along the way we have become addicted to awe. (And, although we rarely admit, to showing our peers how smart we are.)

But, like many things people start doing for the love of doing—from writing to acting to sports—money eventually comes into play. It must. World-changing discovery does not come cheap.

My lab at Harvard Medical, for instance, enjoys tremendous support from the National Institutes of Health (thanks to your taxes,) and from private donors. We are so blessed. But that support alone does not fund the salaries of the graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and staff members who toil there. It does not cover the cost of all of the lab equipment they use. If university and private funding alone was all we had, we'd still have a lab, but it would be a much smaller lab, doing much more limited research.

And so it is that, in my lab, we don't just teach science. We teach entrepreneurship — how to move scientific discovery into the public market, where the NIH has far less of a role.

...it's not enough to do well for oneself. We have to pay that success forward. And so we encourage a virtuous cycle — putting money back into research... to drive forward the better world that we dreamed about as children.

We also teach the virtue of science as a service — the idea that profit for the sake of profit is not enough, and that we owe a great debt to the scientists who came before us and to those who will come next.

We pay this debt through research. When that research leads to great and unique discoveries it becomes intellectual property, owned by the university but shared with the inventors. That property can be capitalized through investment and the development of businesses aimed at turning research into products — pharmaceuticals, quite often, but also advances in vaccines, genetic analysis, artificial intelligence, antibiotics and more.

These businesses are not always successful, but when they are, those who took a bet on the tech are repaid. And yes, we encourage our researchers to provide for themselves and their families. Some of the young men and women who work in my lab come from places where the mere idea of having an apartment they do not have to share with several roommates feels like a pipe dream. That they can ultimately purchase a home of their own is the very definition of that thing we call The American Dream.

But it's not enough to do well for oneself. We have to pay that success forward. And so we encourage a virtuous cycle — putting money back into lab research, as I have at Harvard and my other lab at the University of New South Wales, and even launching new labs, as many of my former students have, to support and train even more scientists, engage in even more research, launch innovative companies to transform medicine, create new jobs, and continue to drive forward the better world that we dreamed about as children.

No, world-changing discovery does not come cheap. But, just as research is essential for human progress, venture can be virtuous. When it is, it allows even more people to be curious, to solve problems, and to feed that addiction to awe.

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Want to know what I'm up to? You can follow me on Twitter. Are you a scientist or student who wants to do work in the field of aging? You can connect with me on LinkedIn.

* Strawberries are not just packed with flavor, each cell is also packed with eight copies of each of its 56 chromosomes.