Dorothy Chou On How tech can earn public trust and why 21st century science needs 21st century funding

Dorothy Chou, who ran Google DeepMind’s Public Engagement Lab for nine years, discusses two of the biggest problems of the tech industry: it doesn’t know how to fund twenty-first century science, and it has never been good at talking to the public it builds for. She breaks down why AlphaFold could solve the shape of 200 million proteins in one shot and still not unlock more biotech investment, and why AI companies risk repeating a public trust mistake the biotech industry already made once.

Dorothy now advises Google DeepMind and chairs UCLPartners, an organization connecting new technology to the UK’s National Health Service. In this conversation, she explains what made AlphaFold possible in the first place and how that same recipe could work in other fields, proposes a blended finance model that could fund biology on biology’s actual timeline, and argues that AI could redirect money toward the ideas that would help people most, not just the ones that are easiest to fundraise for.

You can find the full transcript and resources for this episode at www.existentialhope.com/podcasts/dorothy-chou