Maybe. Does China do less networking? I don't get networking. Like, I vaguely understand that you make friends with people and somehow that leads to employment, but I don't actually know how to make friends with people. Sometimes when I talk at people they like me, but more often they seem to find me annoying... There's some guessing here, but it's not insecurity or whatever it's a genuine inability to like intuit what's going on in most situations. I do think I'm getting better at both talking to people and intuiting things as I get older. There's a lot of me shutting up earlier and stopping to think rather a lot on people's words and the implications of their words and the nine things they might have meant and what's most likely -- kinda a lot of work, so I do better in repeated interactions. Like, now that I've sent a number of emails inquiring about post-doc positions, I get more responses. Now that I've had a few interviews, I have some idea of what not to say what to emphasize or mitigate. It's all needlessly complicated in my opinion.

I think that’s intentional to keep the knowlege in the process and rely on simple, inevitable progress and thus prevent scientists from gaining more influence than necessary.

No, I think that's conspiratorial. I agree that social structures could be used to push innovation much more effectively, but I think this is more a matter of mass ignorance and intellectual laziness than deliberate scheming. Then again, given current political leadership in the US flip a coin to see if it's scheming or stupidity.

Do you have a good team or can you reliably acquire a good team? That should be the most important part for getting your funding.

Don't have friends or the money to buy them.

Do you need specialized machines or rooms?

Depends on how you define specialized, but to some extent yes definitely. Gotta do cell culture, gotta do crystallography and BLI, protein purification, basic ecoli stuff for cloning. A surprising amount of this can be done at home or in a DIY setting, but some stuff is just too expensive.

R01 is $500,000 per year for five years. So you are looking for at most $10,000,000, which would include rent for machines and labs and include all wages?

Hmm, Seems a bit high. For grad-students 50k salaries * 1.5 for benefits = 75k/yr plus the reagents ~60k?/yr maybe I don't have a good enough grasp on regent costs? There is definitely equipment costs, but those are one time purchases and few are over 50k. Yeah, I don't know what the correct answer here is. I know most of these are in line with R01 sized projects, but I don't know where the additional costs are coming from in a standard R01. I think R01 are up to 500k/yr, so that might explain part of it, and they often also cover professor salaries which are another 150k-200k/yr + benefits, so that might explain more of it. Context matters. If it was me coming up with the money, I don't have to pay myself. If someone else is paying me, then more money is required and I get to put that pay into my own research endowment fund thing. I'm pretty sure I could do it eventually with a 1M endowment, but speed is the other context issue.

create an organelle that stores and replicates the DNA to be delivered.

Is that already a product? Can that end aging by providing cells with missing molecules? It sounds more like the first step, as you said elsewhere, it’s basic research. What is missing afterwards?

No, this is not a product at least not in anyway that I'm talking about. The central dogma of molecular biology is DNA->RNA->Protein, so if we can change someone's DNA we can change everything about them. The challenge here is changing the DNA in very cell (or every relevant cell) in the body. It's a delivery problem. If we could reliably modify the DNA of large cell populations, we could cure almost any disease. It would revolutionize medicine, especially preventative medicine. It is a first step in that other scientists would go on to test what different DNA sequences they might add to get different results, but there are plenty of obvious changes that would dramatically extend lifespans. One thing I wish other scientists would do is push to duplicate genes or install gene sets in model organisms (i.e. modify the embryos by adding genes). While that's done occasionally, it's generally seen as irrelevant because we can't do that in fully grown humans and won't do that on human embryos (for good reasons).