Opinion Some ideas work better than others. Take DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Launched by US President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 in response to Sputnik, its mission is to create and test concepts that could be useful in countering enemies. Along the way, GPS, weather satellites, PC technology and something called the Internet have helped happen.

The country's current president, Joe Biden, brazenly stole the idea of DARPA (only without the deadly stuff in favor of health) to model a new research agency to help the human population better optimize for the meat bags we were born into. Two years ago, ARPA -H was born.

ARPA-H is a fascinating device; check out this video interview with its inaugural director. Its mission is to find areas of health science and technology that have the potential to have a large, long-term impact on the population, but that have not attracted commercial or academic attention. After finding ten to 20 of these, ARPA-H gives project managers money, autonomy and support and presses the go button. The idea is to create something that can survive in the wild and attract enough investment to fulfill the original idea.

This is by no means limited to developing drugs or technology for end-user patients, but also creating tools and frameworks that can accelerate such development across the board. If it makes health work better and no one is already doing it, then it is worth investing in – with the utmost security including cyber security. After all, it has made healthcare IT staff sick for years.