Washington pulled tens of billions from national health funding just as healthcare and biotech hit its ChatGPT moment. At Fortune Brainstorm Tech in Aspen this week, the people building AI drug discovery said (more or less) that the U.S. government picked the worst possible moment to blink.
“Falling below the scientific intelligence of one’s adversary at a corporate level, at a sovereign level, is almost like an unimaginable competitive disadvantage,” said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, co-founder and CEO of Lila Sciences, at the conference on Tuesday. NVIDIA’s Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare, was more direct: “If we defund now, while the rest of the world leans in—which Europe is leaning in, which a lot of the Asian countries are leaning in—we will be left behind.”
