Why does the NIH award just 2% of its grant funding to scientists 35 years old and younger?
Why do people who play video games care about fraud and replication of others' work so much more than scientists?
And why does the only established career path for life scientists in academia force them to become managers and administrators while pushing them out of actually doing science?
Because
Founded in 2020, 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.
New Science is a 501c3 research nonprofit incorporated in Massachusetts. 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, Tony Kulesa, and Elizabeth Yin.
New Science will do to science what Silicon Valley did to entrepreneurship — shifting the focus on helping and enabling people on the basis of their skills and ideas rather than credentials. Our goal is not to replace universities, but to develop complementary institutions and to provide much-needed competitive pressure to existing institutions and prevent their further ossification.
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.
By supporting researchers in their pursuit of frighteningly ambitious projects, we will create a new ecosystem to push the frontiers of science, and attract people who want to do original research but would not have chosen a career in traditional academia. New Science aims to pursue projects that are orthogonal to the culture and the incentive structures of academia.
In the summer of 2022, New Science will run an in-person research fellowship in Boston for young life scientists, during which they will collect preliminary data for an ambitious idea. A point of comparison is 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.
If you want to join New Science in making the research world a better place, a good place to start is subscribing to our mailing list below. You can also apply for a job with us, support our work financially, apply for our summer 2022 fellowship as a student, mentor, or organizer, or reach out to us directly at alexey@newscience.org.
And let’s make science advance one young scientist at a time, not one funeral at a time.