Scientific research is plagued by a lack of financing, as Vox discovered when interviewing scientists a few years ago. Academic researchers in the sciences rely on outside grants to pay wages, purchase equipment and conduct their investigations, but this isn’t always the case.

The academic sciences are profoundly influenced by these awards. Many leading academics spend as much as 50% of their time writing grants, according to some estimates. Interdisciplinary research is less likely to receive financing, which means that crucial research is not conducted. The researcher’s ongoing battle for funding encourages researchers to overpromise and participate in unethical activities, encourages researchers to over incentivize the publishing of their work at the top journals, and discourages the replication of prior work.

Biomedical research institution Arc Institute, a new organization founded by Stanford, Berkeley, and San Francisco universities and supported by some of the world’s most prominent tech companies, is aimed at addressing some of those issues.

Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and one of the Institute’s founders, described Arc as “an institutional experiment in how science is conducted and funded.” As a result of this policy, researchers are given eight-year funds rather than three-year grants connected to a particular project.

For those who prefer to focus on enhancing the most important biological research tools rather of doing experiments and publishing publications, the institute is also looking to hire. It’s a costly approach that can only help a small percentage of the researchers who are affected by the existing system’s flaws. However, the project’s creators believe it will at least demonstrate that solutions are conceivable and motivate additional investigation.

The primary premise of Arc is that the current system for biomedical professionals has allowed for a large deal of excellent research. However, there is a general consensus among scientists that some important work is being lost in the shuffle.

More than half of the time we spend as top investigators is raising money. The rest of the time, we’re dealing with heavy management, operational, and logistical responsibilities,” Arc co-founder and U.C. Berkeley assistant professor of bioengineering Patrick Hsu told me.

When it comes to pursuing their own greatest ideas, the system “doesn’t empirically seem to enable people,” Collison said.

An effort to provide funds to scientists working on Covid-19 was made possible in part thanks to Collison’s participation in FastGrants, a significant scientific grantmaking initiative last year. They used the money to send out a survey. “If you had the same amount of funding, but could use it however you wanted, and it was stable, would you change your research program?” asked Silvana Konermann, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Stanford University and the new executive director of Arc, who informed me.

Most scientists who responded stated they would drastically alter their research agendas, with 80% saying they would do so.

As a matter of fact, Arc is a bet on that. The core investigators it recruits will receive eight-year grants that are less restrictive. “The flexibility and freedom to pursue the research they’re the most passionate about, take risks, and take on projects that might fail,” as Konermann put it, will allow them to focus on what they believe is most important.

A “technology development center” is also being set up at the institute to help support biomedical researchers by developing improved tools and processes. Because it doesn’t lead to scholarly articles, it isn’t seen as a realistic career path in the field of science.

I spoke with Hsu, and he informed me that “there aren’t long-term careers for those doing it.” Working on anything as fundamental as cutting and pasting DNA, for example, may take up to two decades of dedicated effort. Slow, incremental technical advances to a critical problem are now lacking in the academic biosciences. It would be good if something could be done about it.

While operating out of Palo Alto in California, Arc will be a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization partnering with the biomedical departments at Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF).

It’s going to cost a lot of money, which is why no one has ever solved biomedical science. Vitalik Buterin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Cari Tuna are among those who have pledged money to the project, which is backed by Konermann’s husband Patrick Collison and his brother, Stripe co-founder John Collison, as well as others.

Tenured professors who conduct research in a wide range of scientific subjects are expected to manage a lab of their own. Employing graduate students and postdocs, as well as purchasing materials and paying publication fees, are all part of the process.

Some of these costs are covered by universities; however, most of them are expected to be covered by research funds. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds biomedical research, while the National Science Foundation (NSF) provides funding for a large portion of other types of research in the United States (NSF).

There is a lot of “preliminary work” that goes into a grant application, which implies a lab must have have invested significant resources into a research before they can request for further funding, Hsu told me.

While funding hasn’t kept pace with increasing grant submissions to entities such as the NIH, project rejection rates have skyrocketed. The percentage of NIH grant applications that are granted has dropped from from 35 to 40 percent to roughly 20 percent since the program began in the 1970s. As a result, a large portion of the time and effort expended on grant applications is a waste.

In addition to taking a long time, the process is incredibly unpredictable. According to one study, there was no association between the NIH’s grant approval process and whether the research it funded was mentioned.

There was essentially no consensus on the merits of high-quality submissions in another study; two academics may arrive at dramatically different views about whether the grant should be accepted. In another study, 59% of successful grants may have been refused due to a lack of consistency in evaluation. Hsu described the experience of observing the assessment process for NIH funding as “very eye-opening” in a bad sense.

Then there’s the issue of grants that run out after a certain period of time. In other words, researchers are more likely to focus on short-term problems, as University of Bristol neurobiology postdoc John Pooley said to Vox. However, it will take a lot longer to solve some of the most difficult medical conditions.

To be sure, there is a great deal of cutting-edge biological research taking place in academic labs. The United States is the world’s leading biomedical powerhouse, and significant discoveries like CRISPR were made in US labs. Despite the system’s shortcomings, no one wants to lose the advantages that have made US biomedicine the best in the world.

“It’s not that the current model is really bad for everyone—I think the current model actually works really well for some people,” Konermann told me. A “healthier overall ecosystem” isn’t possible if every model is exactly like Arc, but if each one has its own drawbacks and benefits.

In the event that the existing system has weaknesses, Arc may not necessarily fix them. Because it’s so little, most biomedical researchers won’t be able to use it, no matter how much they’d like to. Furthermore, Arc represents a wager on the conditions that create good science, and while their argument for this wager is convincing, it’s possible that allowing scientists more freedom and autonomy will not result in the lifesaving breakthroughs we expect from biomedicine.

Lotteries and page limits for grant applications are only two of the many suggestions made for streamlining the scientific grant application process. FastGrants, which aimed to send Covid-19 research money out in 48 hours instead of weeks or months, has moved more than $50 million so far in private attempts to do better.

Collison, on the other hand, underlined to me the importance of having additional options. The NIH grant process is a legitimate method for researchers to get funding for new ideas. Any research that does not fit neatly into NIH processes will not be done at all when it is required.

Only a few core investigators and a restricted number of full-time positions will be funded by Arc, which is another alternative.

It is for this reason that Collison points out that “other funders, other institutions, other stakeholders in our prevailing systems, are compelled to themselves pursue other experiments and other models” as a measure of Arc’s success, along with the more obvious ones, like whether its researchers report that they are able to focus on science and discover new things that make the world a better place. Is there anything else that might be used in the same way as Arc? The existing system is missing out on a lot of possibilities.

It’s an experiment that everyone who benefits from biomedical research should keep an eye on.