US President Joe Biden’s administration wants to create a US$6.5-billion agency to accelerate innovations in health and medicine — and revealed new details about the unit last month1. Dubbed ARPA-Health (ARPA-H), it is the latest in a line of global science agencies now being modelled on the renowned US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), whose work a generation ago laid the foundation for the modern Internet.
With more DARPA clones on the horizon, researchers warn that success in replicating DARPA’s hands-on, high-risk, high-reward approach is by no means assured.
“The ARPA model has been successful, and we’ve learned a lot,” says Laura Diaz Anadon, who heads the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance at the University of Cambridge, UK. “But ARPA is not a magic bullet that will apply to everything.”Enamoured with the innovation that DARPA fostered in the United States, governments around the world, including in Europe and Japan, have attempted to duplicate the agency within their own borders. Most recently, the United Kingdom announced plans to create its version, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), with an initial allocation of £800 million (US$1.1 billion). And the Biden administration has proposed launching a second US agency, the $500-million ARPA-Climate (ARPA-C), to spur technologies for fighting climate change.
Scientists who have studied the DARPA model say it works if applied properly, and to the right, ‘ARPA-able’ problems. But replicating DARPA’s recipe isn’t easy. It requires the managers who build and run an agency’s grant programmes to have the freedom to assemble research teams and pursue risky ideas in promising fields that have typically been neglected by conventional industrial research and development programmes. Critics aren’t yet sure how ARPA-H, ARPA-C and ARIA will fare.The US Department of Defense established DARPA in 1958, one year after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The goal was to avoid falling behind the Soviets, and to ensure that the United States remained a world leader in technology. DARPA was instrumental in early computing research, as well as in developing technologies such as GPS and unmanned aerial vehicles (See ‘Following in DARPA’s footsteps’).
DARPA functions differently from other major US science funding agencies, and has a leaner budget ($3.5 billion). Its roughly 100 programme managers, borrowed for stints of 3–5 years from academia or industry, have broad latitude in what they fund, and actively engage with their teams, enforcing aggressive deadlines and monitoring progress along the way. By comparison, projects funded by agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) typically see little engagement between programme managers and the researchers they fund, beyond annual progress reports. Projects funded by these agencies also tend towards being those that are likely to succeed — and thus typically represent more incremental advances, says William Bonvillian, a policy researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has studied DARPA.The DARPA model doesn’t work if programme managers aren’t given the space to fail, says Bonvillian. When the US government applied the model to developing national-defence technologies through the Homeland Security ARPA in 2002, he adds, this was the problem. The effort eventually collapsed. “If you don’t get the culture right on day one, you have got a problem,” says Bonvillian.
Researchers also point out that a successful ARPA needs a customer for the technologies it develops. In the case of DARPA, the US military was ready to purchase many promising inventions. ARPA-Energy (ARPA-E), which was launched in 2009 under former president Barack Obama to advance low-carbon energy technologies, addressed this challenge by helping grant recipients to develop plans for commercialization from the outset — a model that Bonvillian says DARPA has also now imported.
ARPA-E had the independence it needed to function well, researchers say. Still running today, the agency, housed within the US Department of Energy (DoE), has invested $2.8 billion in nearly 1,200 projects, which have attracted another $5.4 billion in private-sector investments and led to the creation of 92 companies. Last month, one of those companies, 1366 Technologies in Bedford, Massachusetts, announced plans to build a $300-million facility for manufacturing solar cells in India. The company, now known as CubicPV, received $4 million from ARPA-E in 2009 to develop a cleaner, faster, cheaper way to manufacture the silicon semiconductors that go into solar panels.Because it can take decades for new technologies to have commercial and societal impact, whether ARPA-E will transform the energy industry remains to be seen. But scientists have documented preliminary signs of its success2,3, as measured by patenting, publishing and, in some cases, attracting venture capital for technologies originally funded by the agency.
“The answer is yes, the [ARPA] model works, or at least it did in this case,” says Anna Goldstein, an energy researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has analysed ARPA-E’s worth. But that does not mean the model will solve all problems, she warns.
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