Pierre Azoulay

Corporate labs' retreat led basic research to become much more reliant on government-backed efforts. In the view of private-science advocates, that is lamentable. A study of 100,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications by Pierre Azoulay and co-author found that projects that took out-of-consensus approaches were less likely to have their funding renewed. 

The average U.S. founder is 42, and even in software — the industry we most associate with very young founders — the average founder at the time of incorporation is 40 years old. Those figures come from a paper by professor Pierre Azoulay and co-authors. The researchers attribute the age advantage to accumulated human capital, social capital, and financial capital.

A recent study co-authored by professors Pierre Azoulay and Danielle Li looked at drugs that were developed through NIH-funded research and approved by the Food and Drug Administration since 2000. More than half those drugs would probably not have been developed if the NIH was operating with a 40% smaller budget. "We can't say, 'But for that grant, that specific drug would not have come into existence,'" said Azoulay. But fewer drugs overall would have made it to market, he said.

A new study found that more than half of drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 used NIH-funded research that would likely not have happened if the NIH had operated with a 40% smaller budget. "We can't say, 'But for that grant, that drug would not have come into existence,'" said professor Pierre Azoulay, a co-author of the study. "But it makes us at least want to pause and say, 'What are we doing here? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?'"