SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Flying Syringes and Other Bold Ideas
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
BANGKOK—The charitable foundation founded by Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates has awarded 104 grants, each for $100,000, in a bid to inject entrepreneurial boldness and risk-taking into the often staid world of medical research.
Announced in Bangkok, the grants are the first stage of a $100 million, five-year project the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hopes will encourage research into innovative medical ideas that it feels now have little chance of development, largely because of how funding is distributed.
In making its picks, the foundation has rejected the widespread practice of peer review—assigning other specialists in a field to evaluate research—because, in the words of Tadataka Yamada, the foundation's director of global health, "peer review—by definition almost—excludes innovation because innovation has no peers."
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