Name: This Venture Capital Firm Is Creating a ‘Helpline’ For Scientists
Uploaded: 2025-09-08T17:06:00Z
Duration: 5 min 2 s
Description: As the budget for government funded agencies such as the NIH and the NSF decline, Josh Wolfe, co-founder and partner of Lux Capital, explains the importance of investing in science and the opportunities.

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"The scale in dollars are huge and the stakes are huge," Josh Wolfe, co-founder and partner of Lux Capital, tells Barron’s Andy Serwer.

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As the budget for government funded agencies such as the NIH and the NSF decline, Josh Wolfe, co-founder and partner of Lux Capital, explains the importance of investing in science and the opportunities.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250908/f04297d5-2ad0-4876-8c24-a8bc6fb91c57/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

This Venture Capital Firm Is Creating a ‘Helpline’ For Scientists

Another area that you've been active in right now, especially recently, is that Lux's Science Helpline, which is providing monies to scientists whose funding has been cut off recently. Talk to us about that, and why is it so important right now?

Well, science, like Vandiver Bush said, you know, is this endless frontier. It are, it is driven not by people always in the virtuous pursuit of truth. Sometimes it's the vain, glorious, ego-driven pursuit of higher status or winning a Nobel Prize or getting tenure, you know, being a named author on a paper. But as an old friend of mine, James Cerwicke wrote, "In greed and avarice lies the hope of progress." I've always loved that line, and sort of an adjacent line that I think speaks to the scientist, which I've been obsessed with, and I think describes why I hope I get to do what I do at Lux with my partners until they wheel me out of here, is this old quote from Linus Pauling. He won a Nobel Prize twice, once for peace, once for chemistry. And he said, you know, I know something that the rest of the world doesn't know, like a scientific secret. And they won't know until I tell them. And that's really powerful, and I love that feeling. You know, it's the same feeling as a journalist that gets a break or a leak or, you know, some insight that nobody else knows, and they won't know until you write that story and hit send and publish it. It's the same thing for me, finding a scientific breakthrough or scientist that hasn't yet revealed to their world their secret. And I have an opportunity to fund them and have a stake in it for my investors. So science is critical and it gives national advantage, it creates economic progress, it creates job opportunity, it creates the very democratization for people in different social stratas to be able to access capabilities that they never had, from mobile phones and video production to, you know, refrigeration and electricity. So it's important. We've had a problem in the past few years where, I don't know, the, you know, 40 of the top 44 scientific areas, China is beating the United States in, and that's new. They have, in some cases, more scientists. They celebrate science. It's a national imperative. So that's number one. Number two, you've had in the US, declining funding for political reasons across multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. But the budget for the NIH or the NSF, the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health has been declining over time. The average age of scientists. It's like 45 when they get their, you know, their grants. And it is, in my world, with lots of exhibits to prove, the young and the naively ambitious, who actually are the ones that come up with, you know, the great things. They ask why, and you know, why not, why won't it work? Whereas the older folks are grizzled and hardened. They're too practical, you know, and so younger people are needed to sort of run full speed ahead and charge. And then when you add in the recent political stresses that people have felt, universities have sort of created not safe environments for many students. Current administration is slapping them and saying, "You gotta get tracked together." And you have research scientists who are suffering because of that. And it's sort of a weird thing because you have pure research institutions like La Jolla, Scripps, and the Kavli Institute, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and then you have, you know, Harvard and Stanford and Columbia, who have research, researchers but also undergrads, and the undergrads are protesting and uncivil behavior. And so these things are getting conflated, and you have people that are suffering because they're losing their funding to do their scientific research. In some cases, it's for very silly reasons, where, for example, people were working on brain research, studying neurotransmitters, and because somebody searched for trans for political reasons and said, we're cutting everything to do with trans, neuro research is getting cut. So, you know, it's frustrating. You have to believe the pendulum will swing back. People will understand the competitive nature of why the US has to be dominant in science because this is really one of the greatest self owns if you care about being a hawk against China, to cede this kind of advantage to them. So we said, at Lux, maybe a 10% of what we do in every fund is starting companies from scratch with scientists and Nobel Prize winners and university professors and their postdocs and their PhDs. But let's double that. Let's go close to 20%, and take earlier stage science risk, where we might know a scientist and maybe they're not fully mature because their funding just got cut. Maybe we can step in and either license their work to an existing company, or we can come in and start a company around them and take some of the more scientific risk than we might normally take. But can we be a sort of helpline to say we're here as a source of funding, out of capital interest, not philanthropy.

Right.

But we think it's doubly virtuous.

This Venture Capital Firm Is Creating a ‘Helpline’ For Scientists

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