Every era of science eventually outgrows the systems built to steer it. In cellular and genetic therapeutics, that moment has arrived. As Dr. Arnold Coller observed recently in The New York Times, the pace of discovery now exceeds the capacity of our institutions to keep up. The question is no longer whether we can make biology do what we want. It is whether we are prepared to learn from how biology already works.

The field has trapped itself in a cycle of brute-force progress, driven by investor imperatives that reward speed, scale, and spectacle. In chasing control, we have drifted away from collaboration with biology itself. Yet biology is the ultimate engineer — refined over evolutionary time to balance adaptability with stability. The smarter path lies in designing innovation systems that reflect that same intelligence: distributed, resilient, and self-correcting.

This tension defines the moment we face. Science now advances in real time, while the institutions that govern and finance it still run on analog timelines. We can design and validate living therapies faster than ever, yet the regulatory and financial scaffolding around them remains anchored in the assumptions of the blockbuster drug era — built for standardized small molecules, not for treatments that evolve, adapt, and persist in the patient.

Coller’s essay illustrated the divide with clarity. He described a patient whose remarkable recovery came through an adaptive, biology-guided protocol — an approach that worked precisely because researchers could respond in real time as her condition changed. Under current FDA rules, that protocol cannot be easily repeated or scaled. The system treats innovation that moves with biology as exceptional when it should recognize it as essential. What Coller’s example reveals is simple: imagination in the laboratory has outpaced imagination in governance.

Lasting progress will depend on how well we design systems that learn and adapt alongside the science itself. In practical terms, that means:

• Regulation and funding that evolve through evidence and feedback, not ritual compliance.
• Decision frameworks built to accommodate iteration, not merely to enforce oversight.
• Collaboration that draws its resilience from biology — working with complex living systems rather than against them.

Evolution has already demonstrated how stability and change can coexist. That balance is the model for the next generation of scientific governance.

The decade ahead offers a genuine opportunity to apply this thinking. If the cell and gene therapy community draws on the same logic that lets biology adapt and endure, progress will become steadier and more sustainable. Our task is to build systems that learn continuously and support responsible growth. When discovery and oversight move in step, innovation will deliver not just moments of brilliance, but enduring capability.

Read the NY Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/opinion/genetic-editing-diseases-health-care.html