Overview

This can be a golden age for scientific discovery. Technologies such as optimization techniques and machine learning make possible levels of ambition, scale, and efficiency that were unimaginable 20 years ago. However, while a variety of scientific pursuits continue to thrive and deliver results for society, we are failing to achieve our full potential. Today’s breakthroughs do not match either the sea changes of the Victorian and Industrial Revolution eras that modernized Western economies, or the “golden age of innovation” that defined the post-World War II period and pioneered world-changing technologies such as electronics, nuclear power, modern computing, and the birth of the Internet. 

Instead, innovation today is too often defined by new use cases for existing technologies or refining previous advancements, rather than the creation of entirely new fields of discovery. Call it the “silver age” – rather than the “golden age” that we ought to be experiencing.

At Schmidt Futures, we believe in helping the next generation of scientific leaders excel. We believe that interdisciplinarity is the key to unlocking the next generation of scientific breakthroughs. We believe in backing high-risk, high-reward research that others won’t invest in. Through our Virtual Institutes of Science, which are substantial, distributed, managed, intentionally high-risk operation that pursue timely opportunities to increase our knowledge of the natural world and to apply it to human needs, we are working to transform the way science is conducted by working across fields and organizations, and through the infusion of new technological advances such as advanced computing.