New Science September/October 2021 updates
Hi everyone,
We have a lot of news from the last two months.
Organization
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My O1 extraordinary ability visa was approved by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and I moved to Boston 2 weeks ago, becoming New Science's Executive Director.
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New Science has received an extremely generous $200,000 donation from an anonymous donor and a $20,000 donation from Grant Schneider. As always, I'm eternally grateful to our donors, big and small.
Content
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Our Content team (SMTM) is aiming to assemble a collection of writings that would help scientists to think better about their research, and we're extremely happy to start with An Insider’s Guide to Asking the Right Questions During Your PhD by Rishi Kulkarni, in which he shares everything he knows about asking the right scientific questions.
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We'd like to publish more content broadly useful to scientists, whether it's advice, a tutorial, personal experience in academia, or something else. If you'd like to contribute (as yourself or anonymously), email us at sarah@newscience.org, ethan@newscience.org or alexey@newscience.org.
Funding
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We funded Adam Strandberg's Independent Fellowship at the lab of Ethan Garner at Harvard for the next 3 months. Adam is an incredibly original thinker who's been studying biology independently for the last several years. Ethan was able to let Adam do completely independent work in his lab, provided Adam manages to find the funding to support himself. We are providing that funding.
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We are planning to develop a systematic program of supporting people like Adam over the next several years and this grant is the first in line of supporting brilliant scientists who are unlikely to fit in academia long-term.
Media & Events
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I will be speaking at Foresight Institute's Foresight Vision Weekend 2021 in San Francisco. The event will take place on December 4-5 and is one of the most exciting conferences happening all year - I strongly recommend attending.
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I gave a seminar about New Science at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard and participated in the OECD workshop on AI and the productivity of science.
Ecosystem
- Impetus Grants by the excellent Martin Borch Jensen, with support from extremely talented undergrads Lada Nuzhna and Kush Sharma and from Edmar Ferreira:
Impetus Grants provides funding for scientists to start working on what they consider the most important problems in aging biology, without delay. Such work should not be held up by red tape: we offer grants of up to $500k, with decisions made within 3 weeks. Our review process asks "what's the potential for impact" rather than "could this go wrong".
Our goal is to have a broad impact on the field, by supporting projects that challenge assumptions, develop new tools and methodologies, discover new ways to reverse aging processes, and/or synthesize isolated manifestations of aging into a systemic perspective. To ensure that we learn from every project, we’re organizing a special issue of GeroScience to provide an opportunity to publish both positive and negative results from funded studies.
The applications are closed for now but will likely re-open in January. We hope to see more projects like Impetus to appear and to continue changing the broader landscape of scientific funding.
The model seems to have been inspired by Fast Grants for COVID-19 Science, organized by New Science's advisor and first funder Tyler Cowen, Patrick Collison, and Patrick Hsu.
Prompt
A core theme of New Science is that the existing publicly funded structures of science are well-suited only for certain kinds of scientific and technological endeavor. Further, many areas remain out of reach of private for-profit capital investment due to high risk and inability to capture the rewards. In short, areas of research that are outside the reach of a typical principal investigator-based university model are underexplored, making them a potential rich area to invest resources in.
There have been several new initiatives announced recently to explore different models of funding or conducting scientific research, for example:
Our mission is to give a community of researchers freedom and tools to be adventurous and discover and to make scientific exploration financially self-sustaining.
Arcadia Science is inspired by the spirit of exploration and aspires to evolve how science is done, who it attracts and rewards, and what it can achieve.
We want to create a viable path to discovery in emerging research organisms, providing an alternative to traditional academic and biotech research avenues. We will bring together people, capital, and a desire to create an open community -- with the goal to create a platform for breakthroughs to be shared, supported, and shepherded from the lab to commercialization.
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Focused Research Organizations (originally proposed by Sam Rodriques and our board member Adam Marblestone and now spearheaded by Adam Marblestone and Anastasia Gamick at Convergent Research, with financial support from Schmidt Futures
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Altos Labs (funded by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner)
Altos is luring university professors by offering sports-star salaries of $1 million a year or more, plus equity, as well as freedom from the hassle of applying for grants. One researcher who confirmed accepting a job offer from Altos, Manuel Serrano of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine, in Barcelona, Spain, said the company would pay him five to 10 times what he earns now.
“The philosophy of Altos Labs is to do curiosity-driven research. This is what I know how to do and love to do,” says Serrano, who plans to move to Cambridge, UK to join an Altos facility there. “In this case, through a private company, we have the freedom to be bold and explore. In this way it will rejuvenate me.”
Any treatment for a major disease of aging could be worth billions, but Altos isn’t counting on making money at first. “The aim is to understand rejuvenation,” says Serrano. “I would say the idea of having revenue in the future is there, but it’s not the immediate goal.”
(Many of the people working on these appear to have been inspired in part by places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC)
These may be less dependent on the conventional academic career path, exist over longer timescales than typical grant horizons, and bring together a wider range of skills and expertise. However, given that the large majority of R&D investment happens in existing public R&D channels and/or conventional for-profit investment, there is still relatively little thought into what areas could be explored in such a novel laboratory structure outside the constraints of conventional academia.
At New Science we are interested in exploring what areas of science and technology exist in this gap, and the topic comes up in discussions with those interested in funding S&T differently.
We are therefore inviting the community to send in ideas inspired by the organizations mentioned above and are asking:
Given 5 to 15 years of funding for an institute of 50 to 500 people, what area of science and technology would you invest in?
We will appreciate answers varying from a single sentence to a 10 page proposal, for our team to learn from and advise others with.
Finally, if you're reading this, consider this an open invitation to reach out and to either chat about structures of science and science more generally over Zoom or [potentially] in-person, if you are in Boston. I virtually always enjoy talking to people interested in New Science, regardless of the stage of their career.
Stay frosty,
Alexey