American Council advisor, and infectious disease expert Dr. David Shlaes has been writing a blog called "Antibiotics—the Perfect Storm" since 2009. Today, he features a guest blogger, Dr.Tamar Ghosh, who leads the Longitude Prize for the Innovation Lab at Nesta, a charity that is devoted to increasing the innovation capacity of the UK.
Dr. Ghosh writes about the biggest science prize in the UK:
"The Longitude Prize is the UK’s biggest science prize, a 5-year challenge with a £10 million prize fund, and a 300 year legacy. It commemorates the anniversary of the Longitude Act of 1714, the first British challenge prize, which offered the public £20,000 to solve one of the biggest global problems of the time, determining longitude at sea. It was eventually solved when a little-known carpenter, John Harrison, invented the first marine chronometer, H4, surprising the establishment which expected a solution to come from the field of astronomy,. This early achievement demonstrated an early principle of prizes that we have seen time and again: if you create a public challenge, of reputation and profile, a far wider group of innovators are likely to get involved in finding solutions to the problem."
The rest of Dr. Ghosh's commentary can be read here.
Josh Bloom
Dr. Jonathan (Josh) Bloom, ACSH's Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, earned his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia and completed postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. During his 20-plus years in drug discovery at Wyeth, his research group discovered the antibiotic Tygacil®, approved in 2005. He holds 25 issued patents and has authored 35 academic papers. Since joining ACSH in 2010, he has written more than 2,000 articles and dozens of op-eds for major newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal and Chicago Tribune.
