In the mid-1980s, Dr. Reid Rubsamen was working as a medical
intern in San Francisco at the height of the country's HIV
epidemic. "I saw everybody die. 100 percent mortality rate," he
remembers. It helps explain why Rubsamen, an anesthesiologist by
training, who went on to found several pharmaceutical companies,
is now on a mission to wipe out HIV and AIDS with a
groundbreaking vaccine. And that's not the only audacious part
of his nonprofit venture Immunity Project.  Rubsamen's approach
is straight out of Silicon Valley. Rather than seek the National
Institute of Health's approval and grant money, Rubsamen
crowdfunded his research. Heck, Rubsamen and his co-founder
Naveen Jain even went through Y Combinator's incubator program.
"How much great work is sitting around undeveloped because it
couldn't get early-stage funding?" Rubsamen asks rhetorically.
"This crowdfunding thing could be mission critical to allowing
small ideas to bubble up the way they do in the tech space."
Immunity Project's vaccine attempt