If I Had a Billion Dollars… Part Two
If you had a $1 billion research grant, what would you do? Our 2024 Power Listers share their answers.
| 2 min read | Discussion
Martin Gilar: As an aspiring SF writer, I am curious about extraterrestrial life. I don’t mean “ET phone home” or little green men, but the origins of life. With a $1 billion research grant, I could apply the proteomic and genomic methods to study the most primitive forms of bacteria, their molecular machinery, and metabolism. The results will be handy in future when we discover (microbial) life on Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa (I bet life is everywhere). Once we understand the basics, we can advance human life and health on Earth. Sure, the discovery of life in other places would throw a monkey wrench into the human space exploration/colonization programs, but hey, nothing is for free.
Zheng Ouyang: To launch the “Human Lipidome Project,” which would be highly complementary to the Human Genome Project and the Human Proteome Project. It’s the last missing part in human omics!
Alexander Makarov: I would create a massively parallelized high-resolution mass spectrometer on a chip!
Wim De Malsche: I would spend half of it to build analytical flow devices with the highest possible separation efficiency and detection sensitivity. The other half I would use to simplify instrumentation for routine analyses, to reduce the cost and make systems as portable as possible so that remote and less equipped areas can be better served.
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Perdita Barran: If I had that type of funding, I would invest it to determine the role of lipid protein interactions in aging related diseases and to use the information to improve people’s quality of life for as long as possible.
Lloyd M. Smith: I would set up a Human Proteoform Project modeled after the Human Genome Project, with the mission of developing a powerful, evolving, and widely accessible suite of technologies to be able to comprehensively identify and quantify proteoforms, and to establish the supporting informatics tools and infrastructure to put that deep proteoform-level knowledge in the hands of researchers world-wide.
Jonathan V. Sweedler: This funding level could enable a new national effort (think the human genome project) where I would be helping to lead one of the thrusts. I support Neil Kelleher’s idea to create a comprehensive proteoform atlas and tie this unmatched protein detail to the small molecule repertoire within cells. Can we use this chemical information to predict cell physiology and activity in health and disease?
Juergen Popp: The LPI, which has emerged from Jena's unique interdisciplinary research network for optical health technologies, can serve as a model for tackling other medical challenges such as cancer and neurodegenerative diseases and overcoming the "valley of death" in clinical implementation. With a $1 billion research grant, I would expand the LPI principle to create an infrastructure for translating optical and photonic approaches for comprehensive disease diagnosis and therapy.
