Little man shreddin’ the slopes
I know you missed me last week. I was much too busy with family and work and I hope you understand: my family comes before this email. And speaking of family…
My older son has improved at skiing substantially since the new year. This past weekend, he skied his first black diamond – and in the trees! Here’s a video of him shredding:
The Granola-Hippie Link
Did you know? The connection of granola to the hippies began at Woodstock because the organizers couldn’t afford to pay for food, so they gave people granola. That’s the origin story of hippies and granola. Seriously. I just found this out over lunch yesterday, thanks to Mark Nowotarski, who continues to be a wealth of knowledge, particularly on all things patent-related, spinning yarn, and white-tail deer populations and their relation to the prevalence of invasive plant species.
Podcast insight on private investing
Is it right for private companies to receive public grants? What if that company promises to provide a public benefit?
Listening to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Bill Gurley this week was insightful. Gurley is a venture capitalist, author and general partner at Benchmark. Their conversation covered many topics, including Ai, Chinese economic policy and innovation, and the broken American IPO system (how companies go public).
Tim mentioned an thought-provoker, sharing the ethical question of NIH grants funding for-profit companies by placing the expensive burden of early scientific research (a stage where most startups fail) on the taxpayer – that’s you and me – while the company can then go on to keep profits earned on the process/product funded by taxpayer money. The argument here is that these startups wouldn’t get to the stage where private investors would offer funding, without some early funding at the highest-risk stage; and that these startups will produce something that benefits society (sorry, that Snuggie didn’t quite provide the public benefit; you’ll need to self-fund that R&D).
So it got me curious: what does the NIH consider as publicly beneficial. I asked chat GPT-5.2, and then asked it to summarize our conversation. Here it is:
In our discussion, we unpacked how NIH funding actually works in relation to startups and large pharmaceutical companies. NIH primarily funds basic and early-stage translational research through competitive peer review, with “Significance” being one of the core scoring criteria — meaning whether the project addresses an important health problem and could meaningfully advance knowledge or clinical practice. Through the Bayh–Dole Act, institutions and small businesses can retain patent rights to federally funded inventions, which allows startups to later attract private investment and potentially generate private profits. Large pharmaceutical companies typically do not receive standard small-business NIH grants directly; instead, they often license or acquire discoveries that originated in NIH-funded academic or small-business research, and then finance the expensive late-stage clinical trials and commercialization themselves.
We also clarified that NIH does not perform a moral or philosophical ranking of diseases when awarding grants. It does not discount funding because a condition may involve lifestyle or behavioral components (e.g., obesity, smoking, alcohol use). Instead, it evaluates scientific merit, disease burden, and potential health impact. The system is designed around a public health and biomedical framework — advancing knowledge and reducing illness — rather than conducting a societal “deservedness” analysis or a full cost-benefit calculation across all taxpayers. That design choice reduces politicization but leaves open broader ethical debates about how public investment, private profit, and societal benefit should be balanced.
Show and Tell
Are you smarter than a kindergartner? My son is in Pre-K and has to take something from home to school each week and show it to the class. Each item must fit into a gallon-sized bag, and before revealing it, he gives three clues to the class to try and guess what it is. (Reminder: we’re on ‘Q’)
- It is small.
- It’s hard to crack.
- It has black spots on the shell.