Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Openness to Creative Destruction Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019

Abstract

As of 1:30 pm on April 5, 2021, COVID-19 has claimed 2,856,237 lives worldwide. According to the John Hopkins University Corona Virus Resource Center, there are currently 131, 548, 086 global confirmed cases. The world economy has been deeply affected by the pandemic. Economists report that the total cost of the pandemic in the trillions. COVID-19 vaccines represent a major win in the fight against the virus that has caused much widespread misery. The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine is 90 percent effective in protecting against COVID-19. It would not have been possible without the tireless effort of Professor Katalin Karikó, a scientific innovator fitting the mold of dynamic inventor Arthur Diamond presents in his book, Openness to Creative Destruction Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. Not only did Professor Karikó persist in her beliefs in the therapeutic potential of synthetic messenger RNA over the course of four decades, but she did so despite the criticisms of other scientists and despite lack of financial backing for large parts of her career. Professor Karikó is a good example of the unconventional picture that Diamond paints of entrepreneurs in a specific version of market capitalism he terms, innovative dynamism. Specifically, she is an example of someone who does not hold prevailing academic theories in too high a regard and instead privileges her tacit knowledge (knowledge gained from years of working with mRNA in the lab) to persist believing in the potential of a therapy that now could quite literally save the world. Most surprisingly, she, like most of the entrepreneurs surveyed in the book, seem not primarily motivated by profit, though the money their projects eventually attract is integral to disseminating their creative ideas to the masses. Are the many examples offered by Diamond that are similar to Professor Karikó’s story evidence against the long-standing suspicion that there is something morally damning in the self-interested motivations of innovative entrepreneurship? Is it the case that others would have inevitably pursued the cure that Karikó pursued,