U.C. Berkeley champions entrepreneurial science as laureates urge labs‑to‑market push

The boundary between the lab bench and the marketplace is narrowing at U.C. Berkeley, where leaders and laureates say entrepreneurship is becoming integral to the research mission.

At a February 2026 discussion in New York, Nobel Prize winners Jennifer Doudna and Omar Yaghi argued that when discoveries point toward societal benefit, scientists should help carry them into the world—and do so with clear-eyed realism about what current technology can and cannot do.

Doudna recalled that early in her career, exploring industry was frowned upon. As a Harvard doctoral student, she once slipped out to visit a biotech firm and returned to a mortified adviser. Today the co-inventor of CRISPR genome-editing technology, who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is a professor of chemistry and of molecular and cell biology at U.C.

Berkeley—and, as of January, a co-founder of her seventh start-up. Yaghi, a U.C. Berkeley chemist who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize for pioneering a subfield of chemistry that assembles organic and inorganic molecules into useful configurations not found in nature, said his view of “applied” work changed after his own breakthroughs.

If research signals real-world use, he said, scientists have a moral responsibility to pursue it. One example from his lab: COF-999, a material designed to pull carbon dioxide from the air, is being commercialized for direct carbon capture. The New York gathering drew funders, entrepreneurs, foundation staffers and researchers from industry and academia.

Joining Doudna and Yaghi on stage were U.C. Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg and the university’s chancellor, Rich Lyons. In a nod to past innovation, the event was held in a midtown Manhattan building where, in 1973, the first cell phone call was placed. Lyons, an economist who previously served as U.C.

Berkeley’s first chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer and as dean of the Haas School of Business, said the campus has been reshaped to span “from discovery to delivery.” Entrepreneurship is now encouraged as part of an undergraduate education, he said, grounded in values such as individualism, resourcefulness and freedom of thought.

According to Lyons, the university’s undergraduates now found more venture-funded start-ups than students at any other institution.

Goldberg showcased videos of humanoid robots executing backflips and martial arts moves—and even sparred with a robot boxer—but then lifted the curtain: many of those machines, he said, are guided by human operators at computers, making them “expensive puppets.” While he believes humanoid robotics will have its own “ChatGPT moment,” he argued it will not arrive as quickly as some industry leaders suggest.

For robots to navigate the physical world where people make, move and maintain goods, he said, true autonomy remains out of reach for now. An AI laundry robot from his lab underscores both the promise and the limits: it can fold 30–40 disheveled garments per hour.

Together, the speakers sketched a model in which universities cultivate discovery and help deliver it, from genetic medicine to humanoid robotics and carbon-capture materials. The challenge ahead, they suggested, is sustaining that momentum while being candid about the readiness of emerging technologies.