Recently, I had coffee with former Intel chief executive Andy Grove moments after he had admonished a room full of scientists about being too good at what they do.

"They are so caught up in doing the best science that they are failing to translate that science into anything useful," he said, his Hungarian-lilted voice rising and blue eyes intense.

"When we set out to develop the microchip," he had just told a packed room at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego, "we did not try to make the best chip, but one that worked for as little cost as possible." If one chip idea didn't work, he said, they tossed it and built a better one, learning from their mistakes.

Grove, who is 71 and has Parkinson's disease, suggested that bio-scientists should follow the same example. He called for a "cultural revolution" that rewards curiosity, risk-taking, and lessons learned from failure.

Currently, he said, the culture rewards work that pleases reviewers, takes few risks, and retains an Ivory Tower mentality that puts elegant science above finding speedy treatments that work.

During the follow-up question-and-answer session, someone in the audience gave the obvious retort to Grove: That drugs and medical devices are not microchips. They have to work in humans, with no margin for error.

Yet Grove has a point, if for no other reason than that something is seriously amiss when the number of drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration each year is going down at the same time the money research and development spending is going up.

Combined spending on R&D at the National Institutes of Health and in the pharmaceutical industry has tripled in 20 years. In 2007, the Food and Drug Administration will approve fewer than 20 new drugs, less than half the number per year just a decade ago.

At the same time, science has produced a raft of pure research discoveries that boggle the mind. From learning how cancer forms to developing a recipe for transforming skin cells into embryonic stem cells capable of growing into any organ or cell in the body.

Delving into reasons for the gap between research and product development is the sort of topic this column will address, along with analysis and ideas posited by the likes of Andy Grove and others in and out of the life sciences.

In a proto-column for Portfolio.com I wrote about the first-ever pill in human clinical testing that is designed to extend lifespan. Sirtris Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, created this "fountain of youth" drug. It has a chemical structure similar to resveratrol, a natural substance found in red wine, and has slowed aging in mice by up to 27 percent.

In another precursor column I described a team at New York University led by neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps that used fMRI brain scans to discover that humans are relentlessly optimistic about the future.

Phelps scanned regions of the brain that view upcoming events as either rosy or bleak, and discovered that our brains love thinking about the former, and suppress thoughts about the latter. This suggests how our frail, hairless species with small teeth and no claws came to dominate the planet—and why we sometimes willfully ignore inconvenient realities, ranging from stock downturns to global warming.

I wrote about a new F.D.A. report that describes an agency in disarray and so underfunded that it cannot keep up with its mandate to regulate $1 trillion in consumer goods.

A blue-ribbon panel of experts preparing the report also found that the agency was failing to stay up to date with advances in genetics, bioinformatics and other rapidly expanding discoveries and technologies. That deficiency, they say, is slowing approval of drugs and medical devices. They offer reform ideas and suggest a substantial increase in funding.

These are examples of stories I plan to write that cover the realm that Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has dubbed "disruptive technologies"—those that cause profound change in specific industries and in society. I will take this one step further to investigate what comes next in business, politics, law, and for individuals.

For instance, what will happen if Sirtris succeeds with its longevity pill that slows aging and the diseases of aging? And what will we learn about our fundamental nature as we peer into our brains to learn about our behavior, personality, and predilections? Finally, do politicians and pharmaceutical companies have the courage to embrace new ways to fund and truly reform the F.D.A.?

Andy Grove may be oversimplifying the challenges of understanding and applying the intricacies and implications of molecular biology, which make the most advanced microchips seem simple. Yet he is expounding on a simple evolutionary truth first proposed almost 150 years ago by Charles Darwin: "Survival will be neither to the strongest of the species, nor to the most intelligent, but to those most adaptable to change."

This is the essential question posed by this column: Can we adapt to the rapid-fire changes that we ourselves are promulgating? Can we be as clever in our responses to profound new technologies as we have been in creating the technologies themselves?