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Renee Wegrzyn spent her career building the future of American science—including the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, the White House agency created to accelerate health breakthroughs.
Then the Trump administration showed her the door. Wegrzyn cofounded Transfyr to tackle what she calls one of the most overlooked issues in science: the magic hands problem. She explains why fixing this unglamorous bottleneck is the prerequisite for everything AI promises to deliver in medicine, and why she can feel the next Sputnik moment coming—even if she can’t quite name it yet.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by Robert Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You were at ARPA-H, the inaugural director of a White House effort to accelerate health research. You were amped up about the possibilities, but with the Trump administration, you had to pivot. Was it hard not to take it personally that they wanted different leadership?
I’ll tell you, I’m still amped up about it. It’s still an amazing idea. Obviously, DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] has been around for almost 80 years. I hope ARPA-H will have the same longevity and continue to live on today.
I’m a builder. I love to take things forward and really show what’s possible. So was it hard when I left? Of course it was hard. I had a really unusual appointment: I was a presidential appointee, but I was term-limited, so I served through the transition and had a few weeks in the new administration. I served in “Trump one,” by the way, as well.
So it was a great opportunity to make sure they really understood why we built the agency. We needed an ARPA-H because there was something missing in the way we were doing science broadly, which was: How do you move really quickly? How do you get focused on a problem versus building a general knowledge set? I was able to show them what we were building and convince them that it was worth keeping around. I couldn’t be more proud of the agency and its perseverance.
So your new business, Transfyr—The New York Times wrote about you, and the article kept referring to “magic hands.” I’m curious what magic hands are. What problem is Transfyr trying to solve or address?
You probably have your favorite dish, or your parents’ or grandparents’ favorite dish. Sometimes they just have the magic hands. Nobody can cook it like they do. Nobody can make it taste the special way they can. And that happens in science as well. There are some scientists who just have the knack and can deliver really great science over and over.
The challenge is that a lot of those scientists are such experts they can hardly describe what they’re doing. It’s an art in some ways. And so the magic hands idea was really a testament to what those scientists can do in the lab.
The pipeline we’re creating at Transfyr is: Can we create computer vision and perception tools to capture the work of science as it’s being done so that we understand, if the protocol says, “Mix the cells,” whether someone is inverting the tube in a certain gentle way, while another researcher may be rigorously shaking or vortexing it, which could destroy the sample?
Those little things, compounded over the many decisions a scientist may make over the course of several hours of experimentation, lead to what is called magic hands.
Was this an issue you saw at ARPA-H, the sort of breakthroughs that were trapped in a single lab in some ways?
Where that manifested at DARPA and at ARPA-H was in a realization, through my career, of how fragile breakthroughs are. Usually, the way a breakthrough is first communicated to the world is through a research publication, a Science or Nature paper. That paper is not a product. It’s not commercializable. It’s not ready for a patient that day. That’s the starting gun for what is going to happen.
The ARPAs of this world are really fantastic at getting to that initial breakthrough and demonstrating what is possible, but following through and delivering is not a 100% guaranteed activity.
When I started ARPA-H, we wanted customers, who would be the final users of that technology, to give us feedback on what we were developing so that when we got to the last day of the experiment, they were demanding that product, versus having that be the first contact with a customer, which unfortunately is pretty common around traditional grant-making organizations.
It’s rethinking how you make sure you can transfer that knowledge off the back end of a program.
Because the folks at the lab aren’t necessarily worrying about, or prioritizing, how to make it scalable. They’re just trying to see if it works. But of course, eventually we want it to be scalable.
Sometimes the folks in the lab don’t even have the expertise or understanding of who they need to talk to next to do that, right? We think about science and those transfers as handoffs. We deploy our technology to an originating lab to understand the science and what was important about that discovery, but we can also deploy it in a receiving lab so that we can see how they’re reproducing it.
And instead of the way we transfer science today, which is looking over each other’s shoulders and saying, “Oh, you’re doing it a little wrong,” we have this video-connectedness that lets us help accelerate those iterations of transferring the science.
Do you ever get frustrated about how resources are allocated in our world? You’ve put your life toward this work, and yet so much money is devoted to, I don’t know, space exploration or the next hot social app, the Meta Muse craze. How do you deal with government and how it prioritizes things?
Yeah, it’s maddening. One of the things that has me nervous right now is that I look back on the last 80 years following the Second World War. We’ve led the globe in science and engineering and innovation. Nobody who’s practicing science today has practiced science in the United States at a time when we weren’t, quote-unquote, winning from a competitiveness perspective, when we weren’t at the top.
I genuinely believe we may lose that competitiveness, that edge, that incumbency, and I’m not sure I see us fighting for it in the way that we should be. We have to deliver on what we’ve promised to do, and that’s a commitment not just to my country, but to my kids and my family.
What I think a lot about is Sputnik moments. We’re going to look back at this moment in time like there’s something happening, and it’s going to impact whatever’s happening 20 to 50 years from now. You can feel it in the moment.
Where that happened before, of course, was Sputnik. The United States didn’t know the Soviet Union was developing that capability, and we didn’t have a counter-capability. What I realized is that each individual person has a Sputnik moment in their life that is usually health-related. My Sputnik moment was when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. That stopped everything.
Everybody has a story, whether it happened to them or their family, or if you talk to a member of Congress, something’s happening in their state that they can’t deal with.
So I’m like, “What is the Sputnik moment now?” If ARPA-H was bringing people from an unhealthy state to a healthy state, what’s happening now is taking us beyond that. If we can figure out and solve health and wellness, a lot of people talk about abundance. What is the next trajectory? What is the Sputnik that we’re working toward?
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