For now, I suggest you make it real. Ask President Obama to issue the challenge. Type II Diabetes, for instance, is a global, rapidly expanding, truly catastrophic disease with a wide range of neuropathies.

Though, no matter which disease you might select to serve as the elicitation of the type of thinking required to transform how we do biomedical science and how we deliver the results of discovery and development, you might want to also consider the scale of illiteracy and the total failure to develop critical thinking and decision making skills as perhaps the gravest threats to the sustainability of our species – far more so than any known disease.

No need to wait until 2020 – encourage President Obama to issue the challenge, now.

Happy Thanksgiving

2. Encourage philanthropists to fund multiple models of medical research; ones that include collaboration, in real time, and foster cross-pollination between different types of scientists (immunologists + virologists, New York labs/Paris labs, physicians/PhDs). Investigator-initiated research ideas are especially important, as are opportunities for young researchers (not to be nice, but because these ideas may be the most important ideas).
Don’t go for one perfect model for research–let 1,000 flowers bloom. This openness can allow room for innovative research that can lead to cures. The first and only person to cure an AIDS patient was a leukemia doctor, not an AIDS researcher, and the therapy took place in Berlin, not Rockville, Maryland. That said, when something works (like the MRF model), spread the word.

3. Encourage philanthropists to fund new research advocacy organizations–they are not in conflict of interest with researchers, drug companies, or bureaucracies and can be important catalysts for research, help troubleshoot time-wasting research obstacles, act as intermediaries, provide a reality check about what is working, get the ball rolling even Think the Big Ideas. Oh, here’s one! http://www.AIDSPolicyProject.org

Hope this helps.

My own inclination would be to combine this with the Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) invented by Werner Kunz and Horst Rittel as an approach to solving “wicked problems”. More recently, Jeff Conklin wrote “Dialogue Mapping” to show how to apply this way of recording many viewpoints in a single document without having it degenerate into mush. A key feature is that the question to which some idea is an answer must be spelled out. It is amazing how much the clarity of an idea is enhanced by knowing the question that it tries to answer.

Research fails often. Lack of failures indicates lack of stretch and virtually guarantees lack of breakthrough successes. Indeed, when we look, the great breakthroughs often come from scientists steeped in another field and thus not burdened by the deeply held beliefs which accumulate to eventually stall progress in any field.

The attitude which fosters great progress is one that makes affordable wagers on many promising but long-odds leads. Just arrange that each effort is designed to yield maximal learning. There is truth to the maxim that we learn more from failure than from success. We need to exploit that truth.