New Science aims to build new institutions of basic science, starting with the life sciences.
Hey everyone,
It’s finally the time to announce New Science!!!
New Science aims to build new institutions of basic science, starting with the life sciences.
Over the next several decades, New Science will create a network of new scientific institutes pursuing basic research while not being dependent on universities, the NIH, and the rest of traditional academia and, importantly, not being dominated culturally by academia.
Our goal is not to replace universities, but to develop complementary institutions and to provide the much needed “competitive pressure” on the existing ones and to prevent their further ossification. New Science will do to science what Silicon Valley did to entrepreneurship.
New Science is a research nonprofit incorporated in Massachusetts with 501c3 status pending. The board of directors consists of Alexey Guzey, Mark Lutter, and Adam Marblestone. New Science is advised by Tessa Alexanian, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, and Tony Kulesa.
In the summer of 2022, New Science will run an in-person research fellowship in Boston for young life scientists, during which will collect preliminary data for an ambitious idea of theirs. This is inspired by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which started as a place where leading molecular biologists came for the summer to hang out and work on random projects together, and which eventually housed 8 Nobel Prize winners.
The plan is to gradually increase the scope of projects and the number of people funded by New Science, eventually reaching the point where there are entire labs operating outside of traditional academia and then an entire network of new scientific institutes.
In the process, we intend to both enable researchers who would’ve been working in traditional academia to work on problems they could not work on in academia and to increase the absolute number of people who work on pushing the frontier of science, by attracting those who want to pursue basic research but would not have chosen to pursue a career in traditional academia.
New Science's 2021 plan is to:
Prepare to run the summer in-person research fellowship for young life scientists to work on exploratory research projects they couldn’t work on otherwise in 2022
Continue to dig into how exactly the structures of science work and publish the results of that research
Get 501c3 status and raise funding for the first year of operation
If you'd like to learn more about New Science's next steps and/or are interested in:
Joining New Science and helping to build the new institutions of basic life sciences
Supporting New Science financially
Taking part in the summer fellowship mentioned above as a student, mentor, organizer or otherwise
Or getting involved in some other way
Please reach out.
And let's make science advance one young scientist at a time, not one funeral at a time.
Fore more background thinking, check out https://newscience.org/.
Cheers,
Alexey
Congratulations! I'm excited to see what this will turn into.
Congratulations Alexey! Really excited to see this come to life. Rooting for you from the sidelines.