Alec Stapp

New research by Pierre Azoulay, Danielle Li, Bhaven Sampat and me.

Earlier this year, the President’s budget proposed a 40% cut to the budget of the NIH. This motivated us to ask: what if the NIH had been 40% smaller?

What is America’s Infrastructure Cost Problem? “I'm part of the problem”

I had a great time talking with Santi Ruiz @ifp.bsky.social about how to reduce infrastructure costs. Here's the podcast.

www.statecraft.pub/p/what-is-am...

Works in Progress - Now in print.

Five years after we started it, I'm super happy to share that Works in Progress is now available as a print magazine! 🥹

It'll have everything on web and more. You can subscribe today for $100/£75 to receive 6 beautiful, 120-page issues of our magazine a year.

worksinprogress.co/print

Global emissions from heating are about 4x those from cooling.

Air conditioning is an important and lifesaving adaptation to climate change.

Decarbonize the grid.

🎯

NHGRI (at NIH)'s chart on the declining cost of sequencing a human genome from 2001 to 2021, falling faster than Moore's law.

The "$1,000 genome" catchphrase was first publicly recorded in December 2001 at a scientific retreat to discuss the future of biomedical research following publication of the first draft of the Human Genome Project (HGP), convened by the National Human Genome Research Institute at Airlie House in Virginia.[5] The phrase neatly highlighted the chasm between the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion over a decade, and the benchmark for routine, affordable personal genome sequencing. On 2 October 2002, Craig Venter introduced the opening session of GSAC (The Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference) at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston: "The Future of Sequencing: Advancing Towards the $1,000 Genome." Speakers included George M. Church and executives from 454 Life Sciences, Solexa, U.S. Genomics, VisiGen and Amersham plc.[6][7] In 2003, Venter announced that his foundation would earmark $500,000 for a breakthrough leading to the $1,000 genome.[8] That sum was subsequently rolled into the Archon X Prize. In October 2004, NHGRI introduced the first in a series of '$1,000 Genome' grants designed to advance "the development of breakthrough technologies that will enable a human-sized genome to be sequenced for $1,000 or less."[9]

Sad news:

The dataset behind this famous chart on the decline in costs of genome sequencing has had its NIH funding cut.

I loved this chart because it was the first that made me appreciate the impact of dataviz. But it also tracked progress towards an ambitious goal ($1000 genome) that succeeded.

What’s the return on government support for R&D?

To try to get a credible answer, Open Philanthropy and the Sloan Foundation are committing up to $1 million to trying something new: we call it a Pop-Up Journal.

Science writing from the last two years that stuck with me This list consists of writing that ticked two boxes: 1) did I think about the article again more than a week after reading it?, and 2) was it written for a popular audience? So, academic papers, inclu...

New blog post, on 52 pieces of science writing I've learned from over the last two years.

Thank you, from one reader, to all the authors! blog.jacobtrefethen.com/science-writ...

Lenacapavir: The miracle drug that could end AIDS Hard Drugs · Episode

LAUNCH DAY 🚀

Today I’m launching a new podcast, Hard Drugs, with Jacob Trefethen (@jacobtref.bsky.social)

Our first episode is about lenacapavir — a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and which could completely change the fight against HIV worldwide.

California has got really good at building giant batteries At peak times they provide 30% of the state’s electricity

www.economist.com/united-state...

Not sure how many people realize that battery storage already supplies 30% of California’s electricity demand at peak.

Batteries aren’t the future — they’re here now.

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wtf are you talking about: x.com/search?q=fro...

The Texas M.U.D. Model How Special Districts Paved the Way for Housing Abundance in Texas Cities

Chart from @kevinerdmann.bsky.social via this piece by Connor Tabarrok: alltrades.substack.com/p/the-texas-...

Wonder what Austin is doing differently than other cities, guess we'll never know

Impressive effort mapping gaps across 100 areas of science and technology to work on. I’m going to make a big pot of coffee and click around:

Come Work with IFP | IFP IFP is currently hiring — join the team!

🚨 We're hiring!

Join @ifp.bsky.social’s metascience team to rethink how science gets funded and organized.

Fellow & Senior Fellow roles open — $3K referral bonus if we hire your recommendation.

Apply by May 11:

ifp.org/come-work-wi...

James Harrison, whose blood donations saved over 2 million babies, has died Harrison, whose plasma contained a rare antibody, rolled up his sleeve 1,173 times from 1954 to 2018. The Australian is credited with helping 2.4 million babies and advancing scientific research.

Harrison, whose plasma contained a rare antibody, rolled up his sleeve 1,173 times from 1954 to 2018. The Australian is credited with helping 2.4 million babies and advancing scientific research.

This year's Econ job market has, by all accounts, been brutal. If you're still not sure what you're doing next year, applying for external funding to continue your work is a great way to buy yourself time & options. It's a way to "build your own post-doc." Check out AV's open RFPs!

In the coming years, HIV/AIDS research—to take just one example—could be similarly stifled, Amy Fairchild, a historian at Syracuse University, told me. Epidemiologists who study sexually transmitted infections in general tend to diligently track gender, because patterns of transmission can differ so greatly along that axis. But under Trump’s leadership, that scientific rigorousness has turned into a potential vulnerability. Already, the administration has issued guidance limiting PEPFAR-funded pre-exposure prophylaxis to only “pregnant and breastfeeding women,” excluding by omission other populations extremely vulnerable to infection, including both men who have sex with men as well as transgender people. And several sexual-health researchers told me that the Trump administration recently issued a termination order for their large, CDC-funded study that focused on reducing health disparities among populations affected by multiple STIs. (A judge has since issued a temporary restraining order allowing the study to resume.)

Sorry, but we now have a once-per-six-months PrEP injection with a 96% efficacy in reducing HIV infections, and the response is to limit PrEP to only pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers? What?!

It's going to be much more expensive to provide lifelong treatment than work on prevention.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark, February 14, 2025 – Bavarian Nordic A/S (OMX: BAVA) announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved VIMKUNYA™ (Chikungunya Vaccine, Recombinant) for injection, the first virus-like particle (VLP) single-dose chikungunya vaccine in the U.S. for persons 12 years of age and older. The FDA approved VIMKUNYA under Priority Review, based on results from two phase 3 clinical trials which enrolled more than 3,500 healthy individuals 12 years of age and older. The studies met their primary endpoints, with results showing that 21 days after vaccination, the vaccine induced neutralizing antibodies in up to 97.8% of the vaccinated individuals and demonstrated a rapid immune response starting to develop within one week. The vaccine was well-tolerated and vaccine-related adverse events were mainly mild or moderate in nature1. VIMKUNYA is a VLP vaccine, which means that it uses virus-like particles designed to mimic the chikungunya virus without the ability to infect cells, replicate or cause disease.

Some great news: the FDA just approved a new chikungunya vaccine for people aged 12 and older.

NBER Innovation Boot Camp is back this summer for a 4th run (thanks open_phil!)! Lectures by Heidi Williams, Pierre Azoulay, Ina Ganguli, Ben Jones, Chad Jones, Kyle Myers, and me, a great policy panel and keynotes, plus attendance at Summer Institute innovation session. www.nber.org/calls-papers...

Graduate students with interests in innovation, permitting or immigration policy who would like to work on fiscal and economic impacts -- apply now! Applications close on 1/16.

Opinion | The legacy of Bidenomics: Maybe not much at all Biden struggled to implement economic policies that will endure past his presidency.

@crampell.bsky.social on Biden's legacy: "Despite the $7.5 billion allocated for EV charging stations, only 44 stations have been built nationwide so far. A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service still has not connected a single household." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Ty for flagging

Mandating all-in upfront pricing is such an obviously good rule

Very glad to see this trend finally reversing

The polio vaccine works.

1/ I wrote for NYT on a 3-prong strategy for climate progress under Trump.

-innovation & industrial strategy
-pragmatism on fossil fuels
-expand interests that benefit from decarb

This same approach led to IRA/IIJA.

But it did not pass the test for many activist groups.

Opinion | Climate Activists Need to Radically Change Their Approach Under Trump (Gift Article) Climate purity is a recipe for failure.

A pragmatic suggestion from @arnabdatta.bsky.social: "As we look toward an uncertain political future, one lesson is clear: The path to lasting climate progress lies not in oil and gas antagonism, but in transforming our opponents into stakeholders in a clean energy future."

Thinking again about how one of the most influential environmental activist groups in DC opposed the Inflation Reduction Act