We believe that scientific progress has been, and will continue to be, one of the biggest contributors to improvements in human well-being, and we hope to play a part in accelerating it. We’re currently in an exploratory phase with respect to scientific research. We have not yet identified focus areas, as we have for U.S. Policy and Global Catastrophic Risks.

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Our exploration of scientific research to date has focused mostly on the life sciences. Our interests are not limited to any particular field, disease, biological condition, or population. Instead, we seek to identify the approaches to scientific research that are most promising and under-supported by other funders. We hope to find opportunities that are potentially transformative, and appear after substantial scrutiny by world-class scientists to be compelling — if sometimes high-risk — philanthropic investments. We are committed to identifying the most promising science, regardless of how unconventional it may be. Our preliminary interests include:

  • Supporting attempts at Breakthrough Fundamental Science — research that aims to achieve important, broadly applicable insights about biological processes. Such insights can bring about many new promising directions for research. However, at the outset, it’s often difficult to anticipate all the specific ways in which the insights will be applied, and thus to be assured of “results” in the sense of new clinical applications.
  • Supporting attempts to improve the policy and infrastructure around scientific research. Doing so could improve scientists’ incentives and their ability to pursue breakthroughs.
  • Supporting research toward neglected goals — goals that are undervalued by government and commercial funders. Such goals could include, for example, research targeting diseases and conditions of the global poor; creating meat alternatives to reduce the negative impact of meat consumption on animal welfare and the environment; developing biological interventions focused on enhancing people’s abilities (versus counteracting diseases and conditions, which is the goal of most biomedical research today). We are developing a process for investigating the importance, neglectedness and tractability of the areas that seem most promising.

Read the source article at Open Philanthropy Project

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