Three Big Ideas #13
Medical experimentation, AI adoption, and how cruise liners are sailing past stagnation
Welcome to our weekly Three Big Ideas roundup, in which we serve up a curated selection of ideas (and our takes on them) in entrepreneurship, innovation, science and technology, handpicked by the team.
🧑⚕️ Philip Salter, Founder
My big idea this week comes from a visit to London’s Hunterian Museum, where we joined a free curator-led tour as part of an unconventional Christmas office party.
The museum, named after the 18th-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728–1793), features over 2,000 anatomical specimens from Hunter’s original collection. It also showcases surgical instruments, models, paintings, and archival material that trace the history of surgery – from ancient procedures to modern robot-assisted operations. It’s fascinating and gruesome in equal measure.
One thing’s for sure – you’ll leave the Huntarian grateful for the progress we’ve seen since Hunter’s time, with the modern miracles of anesthesia, antiseptic, antibiotics, and advanced imaging.
Hunter himself played a pivotal role in this journey of progress – he was a pioneer who transformed surgery from a craft into a science, emphasising the use of research, experimentation, and teaching. One notable experiment may have been on himself. He believed that syphilis and gonorrhea were caused by the same pathogen, so he reportedly deliberately inoculated himself with pus from a patient who had one of these conditions.
Hunter wasn’t the first nor last to experiment on himself. In a recent example, virologist Beata Halassy treated her own breast cancer with experimental oncolytic virotherapy (OVT). After undergoing a mastectomy and chemotherapy, she injected her tumor with viruses known to attack cancerous cells.
Other famous examples include Werner Forssmann, who pioneered cardiac catheterisation in 1929 by threading a catheter into his own heart, earning him the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Similarly, Barry Marshall ingested Helicobacter pylori bacteria in 1984 to prove it caused stomach ulcers, a discovery that won him the 2005 Nobel Prize. And Daniel Bovet’s groundbreaking work on antihistamines and nervous system drugs earned him the Nobel Prize in 1957.
Such self-experimenting scientists may not be outliers. A paper found that half of the scientist respondents performed self-experiments, and roughly one-fifth had conducted serious self-experiments. And while concerns are raised around biologics injections, radiation exposure, and surgical implants, most scientists who responded thought self-experiments were valuable.
🧑💻 Anastasia Bektimirova, Researcher
To lead in capital-intensive areas of science and technology, countries need strategic discipline and focus. There is more than one way to approach this, and what might work for, say, semiconductors might not work for AI.
Eric Schmidt recently proposed his “playbook for a category of countries that have the capacity to do something meaningful with AI—that is, those with disproportionate capital or large enough domestic labour and consumer markets, plentiful talent and a high demand for AI…These countries should first find a niche somewhere along the AI value chain, from regulation to software to data centres. Britain, for example, is positioning itself as a leader in AI governance. Its AI Safety Institute gets ten times the funding of its American counterpart. Saudi Arabia launched a National Semiconductor Hub in June, focusing on simpler chips than those of market leaders. Ireland is making use of its clean-power abundance by building large data centres and shipping out processed data as a product.”
But the argument for countries to focus on isolated nodes misses a critical point about the economics of AI. Unlike industries where controlling key supply or value chain components can yield strategic advantage, the same logic doesn’t fully apply to AI. Its value is realised through application, adoption, and diffusion rather than concentration in one layer of the stack.
The AI Safety Institute is, in fact, a case in point. The previous government focused closely on AI safety, but not as an end in itself. Rishi Sunak told the AI Safety Summit last November that building a strong AI safety state capacity “will attract even more…new jobs and investment.” Unless AI is trusted, advancements, adoption and diffusion will be curtailed.
AI’s potential lies in how it integrates into and reshapes industries, R&D, and public service design and delivery. Countries should prioritise structural changes and downstream reform needed to create an environment that enables widespread AI adoption for these purposes and across industries, rather than focusing narrowly on dominating specific value and supply chain points.
🛳️ Eamonn Ives, Research Director
Regular readers will be painfully aware of how bad much of the Western world seems to have become at building things. Whether its homes, roads, rail lines or power stations, infrastructure is only being constructed with an increasingly heavy price tag, if it’s getting constructed at all. It is enormously refreshing, therefore, when a correction to this narrative presents itself – and in writer Michael Hopkins’ recent article for Works in Progress, I found one.
While we’ve stagnated elsewhere, in the world of cruise liners, it appears we’re merrily sailing along. “Since the SS Great Eastern in 1858,” Hopkins writes, “the gross tonnage of the largest passenger ships has grown an average of 1.59 percent per year.” He contrasts this to the growth rate of the height of tall buildings – which in America grew by an average of a mere 0.24% a year between the completion of the Empire State Building in 1931 and the One World Trade Center in 2020. Moreover, if you look at the data on passenger ship tonnage from the mid-1990s, the rise in size is borderline exponential.
Of course, building stuff on land faces different challenges to building stuff to float on the open ocean. But what the experience of ship manufacturing suggests is that we haven’t necessarily lost the fundamental ability to design and assemble big bits of infrastructure. Rather, there’s something else getting in our way – NIMBYs.