WaPo | “If you think you can only do very little and be very incremental,
then you’ll work only on very incremental things. It’s self-fulfilling,”
Thiel, who is 47 and estimated to be worth $2.2 billion, said in an interview. “It’s those who have an optimism about what can be done that will shape the future.”
He and the tech titans who founded Google, Facebook, eBay, Napster
and Netscape are using their billions to rewrite the nation’s science
agenda and transform biomedical research. Their objective is to use the
tools of technology — the chips, software programs, algorithms and big
data they used in creating an information revolution — to understand and
upgrade what they consider to be the most complicated piece of
machinery in existence: the human body.
The entrepreneurs are driven by a certitude that rebuilding,
regenerating and reprogramming patients’ organs, limbs, cells and DNA
will enable people to live longer and better. The work they are funding
includes hunting for the secrets of living organisms with insanely long
lives, engineering microscopic nanobots that can fix your body from the
inside out, figuring out how to reprogram the DNA you were born with,
and exploring ways to digitize your brain based on the theory that your
mind could live long after your body expires.
“I believe that evolution is a true account of nature,” as Thiel put
it. “But I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our
society.”
