As part of its Grand Challenges Explorations program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded 104 grants in the amount of $100,000 to fund some of the wilder ideas to come from medical researchers in years.

How wild are they? Hiroyuki Matsuoka believes mosquitoes can be recruited into flying syringes that deliver vaccines rather than diseases. Nobel Prize winner Andrew Fire thinks it’s possible to fight viral infections by deactivating a single gene, and another researcher wants to develop “stealth weapons” against HIV.

The Gates foundation rarely funds fringe ideas like this, but the concept behind the program is similar to that used by venture capitalists: if one or two of the funded ideas bear fruit, the entire investment may prove worthwhile. 

The 2-page online application did not require lengthy arguments or data to support a hypothesis, only a legitimate way to test it. And the selection process did not involve peer review. That’s because, “peer review-by definition almost excludes innovation because innovation has no peers,” Tadataka Yamada, the Foundation’s Director of Global Health told the Washington Post.

Yamada ought to know. A gastroenterologist by training, he ridiculed a hypothesis put forth by Australian researchers Robin Warren and Barry Marshall that peptic ulcers were caused by bacteria rather than stomach acid. Marshall eventually swallowed a carafe of the bacteria to prove his point, and nearly died from an ulcer before being cured with antibiotics.

The Australian pair won the Nobel Prize a few years later.

Last Sunday Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency announced that Communist Party leaders approved a historic land reform policy allowing farmers to lease, exchange or transfer land-use rights for the first time.

The major economic reform capped a week of speculation after leaders hinted at breakthroughs in their thinking about rural property rights.

The new policy allows peasants to consolidate small, inefficient plots into larger, more productive combines, monetize their property in other ways and achieve significantly increased income for the first time in decades. It is also likely to increase per capita agricultural output just as domestic demand for food has surged.

Until now, Chinese farmland had been owned collectively. Local party officials could, at their discretion lease land to peasants on 30-year contracts but the land could not be mortgaged, traded or sold. Worse, the local officials often repossessed land for urban expansion projects without compensating the farmers.

The government’s announcement was timed to correspond with the 30th anniversary of China’s last major land reform policy initiated by Deng Xiaoping. Those reforms triggered a brief jump in rural income, but this has stagnated for two decades while urban income has exploded.

The marked rural-urban income discrepancy and the corrupt practices of local officials had triggered hundreds of protests from Chinese farmers as well as a mass exodus into its cities. Despite the migration, more than 700 million Chinese still live in rural areas.

People have suspected for at least 2000 years that mental illness is disproportionately common among artists. Aristotle for one believed that great philosophers and artists alike had to endure some form of melancholy. Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, a 1934 tome about Vincent van Gogh’s lifelong struggles with psychosis (and the 1956 film adaptation starring Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn) helped popularize the presumed association.

Writing in this month’s Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin, psychiatrist Richard Kogan explores the link for classical music composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and others.

Kogan has particularly interesting anecdotes about the Russian composer, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Among other things, Tchaikovsky was convinced that his head was about to fall off his neck. He was chronically depressed and expressed suicidal ideation many times in his diary. He self-medicated with alcohol and once confessed, “I’m drunk every evening, and I cannot live otherwise.” (aha! Pizaazz now understands why the man felt his head was about to fall off his neck)

Kogan tells us that composing music did alleviate Tchaikovsky’s suffering. Tchaikovsky’s ballet masterpieces such as Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty are musical fantasylands where, it is said, Tchaikovsky could escape his own despair.

Tchaikovsky also lived in constant fear of being outed as a homosexual, and with good reason. In czarist Russia, this behavior was punishable by banishment to Siberia.