Science and futurist investing is a big, big trend in VC. Maybe that’s obvious.
Here is Thiel’s “late stage fund” investing in a futuristic technology for cancer. Nanotech that sends vibrating tiny jackhammers to cancer cells, then activates them with magnetism.
The deal got funded this week. I literally just read about this technology as a “future direction” today, in one of a pile of futurism books I received this week.
My ignorance about the area isn’t all that surprising.
What is surprising is how well-known and clearly defined the agenda of futurist investing (“jetpack vc?”) actually is. It’s page by page laid out in a handful of books written by science popularizers.
(In this case, p211 of Michio Kaku’s 2011 book “Physics of the future”. He describes U Chicago scientists that have sent the compound in sunblock to cancer cells, then used UV rays to create cancer-cell-destroying heat. They are working on the magnetic system too. And there’s a third system that you use IR waves to activate, also producing heat and blowing up cells.)