Our future depends on our ability to make better molecules - more effective medicines for various cancer/gene therapies, more efficient energy conversion materials, proteins for treating more disease and making biodegradable plastics, and catalysts for cheaply inducing chemical reactions.

The only way to rationally discover and design such molecules is with a mixture of simulation, physics, and chemistry. More recently, machine learning and AI is absolutely revolutionizing this area. This field is known as “computational chemistry”.

This is the most impactful field of research but not many people can handle it. You need to be good at software. You need to know advanced math and physics. You need to know systems level biology and engineering. This is the future and it’s what we need.

That’s it. That’s the most impactful field. All money should go towards improving computing power so we design better molecules and live forever.