Could the next technological breakthrough akin to the invention of the internet, or the mRNA vaccine, take place in Britain?
The latest cohort of scientists and engineers joining the UK government’s ‘moonshot factory’, ARIA (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), certainly hope so.
At a media roundtable hosted last week, eight newly-recruited programme directors introduced themselves, and their big ideas, to a handful of journalists — like bright-eyed contestants on a (rather nerdy) reality TV show.
There’s Ivan Jayapurna, an academic turned founder, who wants to help the world move on from plastics. Next, there’s Rico Chandra, a CERN researcher turned serial founder, who wonders what we could achieve if we could fly, forever.
Then there’s Nicole Wheeler, a Kiwi biochemist who developed the UK’s first software for screening synthetic DNA for potential biohazards, and now plans to figure out “how to neutralise emerging threats before they become biological crises”. And Brian Wang, yet another academic turned founder from the US, who wants to put our innate immune system to work tackling cancer and infectious diseases.
DARPA (the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) is very much ARIA’s grandparent, and a constant reference point for what the latter is trying to achieve. We have DARPA to thank (at least in part) for GPS, Moderna’s Covid vaccine and the world wide web — and it’s the model ARIA is trying to innovate upon.
Everyone at ARIA appeared hugely enthusiastic about making a similarly transformational breakthrough — and doing so in the UK. (Interestingly, just one of the eight ‘PDs’ is British.)
Had the PR team prepped them hard — or was there another reason for that? Aside from the obvious reason someone might want to get the hell out of America right now, “there’s a flood of ‘ARPA’s in the US — from intelligence to health and energy,” explained Nathan Wolfe, a jacketed and bespectacled virologist, epidemiologist and entrepreneur. “There’s much more open ground here.”
But unlike DARPA, or ARPA-H (for ‘health’), or ARPA-E (for ‘energy’), ARIA’s programme directors aren’t limited by any particular sector — and seem especially excited by the opportunity to work in such a multi-disciplinary fashion.
It’s easy to feel inspired by their bold ideas, looking at the blue sky out of the window of ARIA’s new office in London’s King’s Cross. But it’s still early days for the organisation, which launched in 2023 — and plenty of questions remain about whether the £800m or so in funding it’s received from the UK government will be considered worth it in the end.
“The worst case scenario is that we fund all this amazing research and it never translates into real world value,” says Pippy James, chief product officer at ARIA, and another former founder. (Whether the tax payer would see it that way remains to be seen.)
The best case scenario is that someone at ARIA creates “the next trillion pound industry”.
Amid inflation and stock market turmoil, earthquakes and war, there’s something shiny and hopeful about ARIA. The “wacky ideas” in the room are exciting — and, crucially, not the kind that usually get funded by a venture capitalist investing on a five-year timeframe.
ARIA, which was created by an Act of Parliament, has a mandate to unlock step-change breakthroughs, as its CEO, Ilan Gur, explained on the Sifted Podcast last year. Unlike just about every other government department, this mandate protects it from being examined in terms of its “effectiveness” for its first 10 years.
From one point of view, that’s either a singular opportunity to redirect public resources towards genuine technological innovation, unencumbered by government bureaucracy and electoral timetables; from another, it’s a reckless doling out of public money with much too little accountability.
Britain’s got talent; I just hope ARIA doesn’t waste the opportunity. We could all do with a little more hope.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/aria-new-programme-directors/
