Charles Lieber was ready to do something new. A renowned nanoscientist at Harvard, he had developed a number of nanoscale materials for electronic and computing applications, but had long wanted to try his hand at biological problems. He imagined building nanoscale sensors to detect biomarkers and nanowires to probe individual cells, but he had no funding to pursue these ideas.
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Then in August 2008, Lieber learned that a short grant application he had filed was going to pay off in a big way: he was to be awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, a $2.5 million, five-year grant designed for high-risk research projects. According to NIH, these awards fund high-impact ideas that are dubbed too novel, that span too diverse a range of disciplines, or are at a stage too early ...
