[caseyross]

Rather than scrolling through the obligatory endless speculation in the comments, I encourage all of you reading this to open up the section entitled "Long time coming" at the end of the article, and reflect on the fact that worthwhile science is hard and takes a long time to do, and nearly every incentive in academia or industry works in opposition to this.

How many other teams could we get working on projects in this field, were it not for funders preferring less risky but far less valuable studies?

[93po]

It's sad that we so often have to rely on billionaire's pet projects for work like this. An example being Elon's Neuralink, which from an investment perspective looks like an awful return, but does have insanely high upside if successful.

[bjornsing]

This.

And more generally: I think a lot that’s wrong with this world stems from the fact that humans are risk averse. This served us well in evolutionary times, when failure often meant death. But in modern societies it causes a lot of problems.

[robwwilliams]

The NIH and NIA support work of this type reasonably well. And they make risky investments. They have funded our work on aging genetics for 10 years.