Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

That journey culminated in a new idea: underlying everything we see are universal truths that can be determined through measurement and experiment. In other words, laws of nature. We take that idea for granted today. But for all human history up to that time, religious authorities or divine rulers or great-man philosophers decreed what was true and what was false. The idea that truth could be revealed to anyone was radical. Subversive. Its champions were often dismissed as unhinged. That idea, now known by its more modern name, the scientific method, is arguably the mother of all loonshots.

We’ll see why Western Europe, with its hundreds of independent city-states and small kingdoms, including England, was to the large empires of China and India what the teeming market of biotechs in Boston has been to Merck and Pfizer, and what the swarm of small production shops in Hollywood has been to Paramount and Universal.

Kepler’s radical ideas culminated in the widespread acceptance not only of a new astronomy but also a new way of thinking: truths judged by the outcome of experiments rather than the gavel of authority. The rise and explosive spread of the scientific method across seventeenth-century Western Europe, in the decades after Kepler’s death, and the revolution in the tools of industry it enabled sparked a pace and scale of change unlike any other in human history. For ten thousand years, life expectancy barely changed. Between 1800 and 2000, it doubled. From AD 1 to 1800, global population grew less than 0.1 percent a year. By the mid-twentieth century it was growing at 20 times that rate. The world’s average economic output per person was nearly constant for two thousand years—between $450 and $650, in 1990 dollars. Since 1800, it has increased by a thousand percent. The tiny nation-states of Western Europe, particularly England, rode that loonshot to global dominance—the principal reason the global language of business today is English rather than Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi.

Phase separation: separate loonshot and franchise groups 2. Dynamic equilibrium: seamless exchange between the two groups 3. Critical mass: a loonshot group large enough to ignite

The two markets in film, connected by a web of partnerships, are examples of phase separation and dynamic equilibrium within an industry, rather than within a company. The market of hundreds of small production shops finding, funding, and developing small, crazy film projects is an example of an industry’s loonshot nursery. Government intervention—the breakup of the studio oligopoly—sparked phase separation in film. In the biomedical world, the spark was a new technology.

Insulin changed medicine. Proteins were no longer just the targets of drugs; they could be drugs. Rather than block a misfiring robot with a tiny wrench, we replace the entire robot. But there was a problem. Harvesting animal pancreases for every diabetic is no more practical than chopping down willow trees to make aspirin for every patient with fever. It took 50 years to find a solution. Developed in the 1970s, genetic engineering—which made it possible to grow mass quantities of purified human proteins in a lab—turned Banting’s discovery of insulin into practical therapy.

Most of the big pharma Majors passed on the idea of a lab-grown protein as a new kind of medicine. The idea of engineered proteins as drugs was not too crazy, however, for a handful of entrepreneurs in the early 1980s, who started what became known as biotechnology companies. The success of their initial public offerings—most famously Genentech, described in chapter 5—established a market for a new type of company: one with no revenue, no profits, no sales force, and no certainty when, if ever, its technology would become a product. Those early entrepreneurs had created what was then, and is still today, a publicly traded market of loonshots.

Boston has achieved critical mass and ignited. Detroit has not.

But here’s the crucial difference: After Tycho left Denmark, he hunted around Europe for a new patron. King Rudolf II in Prague eventually raised his hand. Tycho moved his observatory there, which is where he brought Kepler and continued the work that ultimately led to Kepler’s War on Mars and his “reformation of all of astronomy.” After Shen left government, on the other hand, he had nowhere to go. There were no other rulers who could support astronomy. And private support for astronomy was illegal—the study of the heavens was reserved for the emperor.

The empires of China, Islam, and India were the Majors of nation-states. The simmering stew of Western European nations was, at the time, the world’s loonshot nursery for new ideas, just as the hundreds of small production shops serve as a loonshot nursery for new films, or the hundreds of small biotech companies serve as a loonshot nursery for new drugs.

England did one thing quite differently—much better than its neighbors, which set it up to be luckier than its neighbors. England established the earliest example of a successful loonshot nursery inside one country. The Royal Society of London, created in 1660, brought together nearly all the founders of modern science in England, including Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton. It famously played a crucial role in helping and inspiring Newton. Without the Royal Society, as one historian noted, “It is doubtful that … there would ever have been a Principia.” In other words, what we know today as Newton’s laws most likely would go by some other name—or names. Gottfried Leibniz, for example, developed calculus independently, in Germany, around the same time as Newton. Christiaan Huygens, in the Netherlands, developed the idea of centripetal force, the wave theory of light, modern probability theory—and he invented the pendulum clock. Daniel Bernoulli in Switzerland, Leonhard Euler in Germany, Pierre-Simon Laplace in France—all were giants of mathematics and physics who arrived not long after Newton. The Royal Society helped Newton and England win a race against time, a competition to discover truths of nature. But the Society didn’t come together purely for basic research: “Science was to be fostered and nurtured as leading to the improvement of man’s lot on earth by facilitating technologic invention.”

The Royal Society of London; Vannevar Bush’s wartime loonshot nursery, the OSRD; and Theodore Vail’s Bell Labs—all three had something in common. They were the greatest loonshot nurseries of their time. They were, arguably, the three greatest loonshot nurseries in history. They produced the Scientific Revolution, victory in a world war, and the transistor.

Why did the empires of China, Islam, and India miss the Scientific Revolution despite their wealth and historical advantages? For the same reason that Microsoft missed mobile, Merck missed protein drugs, and the film Majors missed My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Loonshots flourish in loonshot nurseries, not in empires devoted to franchises. Being good at loonshots and good at franchises are phases of an organization—whether that organization is a team, a company, or a nation. That’s what the science of emergence tells us.