New Science December 2021 updates
Hi everyone,
As usual, so many exciting developments, both at New Science and in the broader ecosystem! πππ
2022 Summer Fellowship
Applications for our summer fellowship are due January 19th! You can apply here: https://newscience.org/summer-fellowship/.
As a reminder, we are looking for early-career scientists in any area of the life sciences to come to Boston for 12 weeks over the summer of 2022 and work on a high-risk basic science idea of their own, with us providing the fellows with lab space, a $6k/month stipend, $5k/month for project costs, mentorship, and more. We aim to give fellows both complete intellectual freedom to pursue and to direct a project of their own creation and as much on-the-ground support and mentorship from New Science as possible.
If you know a really talented young scientist who you think would be a good fit, let them know!
We are super excited to start to directly enable the next generation of scientists to pursue basic research and are looking forward to running a longer program after the summer fellowship, starting to build our own scientific infrastructure in ~2023 and starting to support scientists at bigger scale, while being part of and supporting the broader ecosystem of new organizations reimagining how science should work.
Organization
- Chris Lakin has joined us as Operations Manager. Chris studied physics at Carnegie Mellon University and used to organize workshops and events in critical thinking and liberal arts, before deciding to go full-time with New Science. In 2018, SEC ordered Tesla’s lawyers to make sure that Elon Musk slows down his imprudent tweeting. I’m not Elon Musk, of course, but when we get to the scale of Tesla and SpaceX, Chris will be there for me, and for New Science, making sure we maintain exactly the right balance between lawful good and chaotic good.
- Vitalik Buterin (creator of Ethereum) and Maksim Stepanenko (CTO of Primer) have become our newest donors. As always, we are incredibly grateful to everyone supporting us – you make New Science possible.
Ecosystem
- Patrick Collison (CEO Stripe), Silvana Konermann (Stanford), and Patrick Hsu (UC Berkeley) have announced Arc Institute. Arc is “a new institution for curiosity-driven biomedical science and technology … operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley … gives scientists no-strings-attached, multi-year funding, so that they donβt have to apply for external grants, and invests in the rapid development of experimental and computational technological tools. … Arcβs mission is to accelerate scientific progress, understand the root causes of disease, and narrow the gap between discoveries and impact on patients.” Arc has more than $650m in committed funding from Vitalik Buterin, Patrick Collison, John Collison, the Ron Conway family, Crankstart, Elad Gil and Jennifer Huang Gil, Daniel Gross, Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, and Hemant and Jessica Taneja. Jobs at Arc Institute here.
- Arcadia Science is growing rapidly and, half a year after its announcement, is at more than a dozen people now, who you can learn about here. Jobs at Arcadia here.
- We keep track of the jobs in the ecosystem in this Airtable published on our site.
- Niklas Rindtorff (who is amazing) is building LabDAO: “a craigslist for life scientists: if you are a researcher/founder and would like to offer or purchase laboratory services from a peer in your community, fill in the notion board below or comment on this tweet with offer/want“
- Martin Borch Jensen offers a retrospective on awarding 98 longevity grants totaling $21m over the last few months. Of note:
21% of the grants went to grad students and postdocs, who normally wouldn’t even be allowed to apply.
5 grants were awarded to PIs less than a week into running their own lab.
3 grants went to non-academic institutions with good ideas for accelerating the field.
Miscellaneous
- Sasha (our Head of Research) is looking into different tools that can be used for routine lab notebook / journal keeping and/or sharing results and is interested in getting input on any products or self-made systems that have worked well (or areas that have been lacking) for other people. If you have thoughts, Sasha’s email is sasha@newscience.org.
- David (our Head of Strategy) wonders: “If universities are to play accelerator, transparency and competition go a long way. To what extent do they exist already?”
- Robin Hanson: “ambitious project that set out 8 years ago to replicate findings from top cancer labs β¦ reports today that when it attempted to repeat experiments drawn from 23 high-impact papers published about 10 years ago, fewer than half yielded similar results.” π₯
- A video of how a salamander grows from a single cell.
Until next month!
Stay Frosty,
Alexey