The problem with artificial gametes is that there’s not going to be a medical product for many years—and there are complex liabilities, like who is to blame if any eventual baby isn’t normal. Krisiloff didn’t see those as obstacles to organizing a company. Indeed, he believes more startups should be trying to solve “hard” science problems and that discoveries can come about faster in a commercial setting. “My argument is there could be a lot more funding if people turned research organizations into for-profit entities,” he says. “I am a big believer in more basic research going on in a company context.”
And that right there is the issue.
Hard science problem aren’t hard just because of the science. They are hard because they typically carry with them all sorts of thorny ethical and philosophical questions. “Can we do the thing?” is only part of it; there is also “Should we do the thing, and what happens if we do?”
Guys like Krisiloff don’t want any part of that. They want to push this stuff to for-profit entities primarily so that they can make a profit from it, but also because that allows them to ignore all the really difficult questions.