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The way we'll know whether Renee Wegrzyn can be successful in her new job as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is if she is allowed to fail.

ARPA-H is a new federal agency focused on biomedical innovation that was made in the image of one of the most secretly successful government organizations in US history: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Officially the R&D arm for the US military, DARPA is a unique fusion of government, academic, and industry brainpower, meant to do nothing less than invent the future. Which it has done -- beyond plenty of military hardware, like the Predator drone, DARPA has helped seed a range of modern innovations that have little to do with warfare, from GPS to the internet to Moderna's mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.

All those smarts and a multi-billion-dollar budget go a long way, but what makes DARPA so successful is a willingness to take major risks that may well never pay off -- something rarely seen in government bureaucracies. That's the kind of willingness that ARPA-H -- which President Biden set up this year with a budget of $1 billion -- must have to succeed.

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