The Allen Institute held an inaugural two-day Bioscience and Philanthropy Summit featuring a speaker program of leading research scientists across biology, genetics, engineering, immunology, computational biology, and memory. Over 20 lecture (and q&a) sessions were offered. The stated goal of the summit was to bring together cross-disciplinary work in the spirit of “big science” to better inform philanthropic sources of funding and to offer visions for what large-scale research funding could bring.

The Allen Institute is the umbrella covering several institutes created by Paul G. Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. The institutes include Allen Institute for Brain Science, the Allen Institute for Cell Science, and the Frontiers Group (focusing on “out of the box” science). Paul Allen also created the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), which is a stand-alone AI research center in Seattle. Each of these institutes is funded in excess of $100M with about 15% of the total coming from outside sources. In addition to advocacy and grantmaking, hundreds of scientists work full time at the institutes and collaborate with researchers worldwide.

Read the full article by Steven Sinofsky on Learning By Shipping