The 21st century requires 21st century institutions of science.

We tend to think of institutions of science as static entities and of the way science and academia work as simply normal. This is not so.

In the US, the life sciences are dominated by the NIH (although there are many private foundations and nonprofits funding science, university will pretty much not hire you as a professor if they do not expect you to be able to raise funding from the NIH). But this development is very recent.

The NIH’s budget in 1940 was less than $1 million and it was only after the WW2, that the federal government decided to turn it into a major funding body, being greatly influenced by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to the US President Science The Endless Frontier, who can be arguably called the chief designer of the present organization of science.

70 years later, here are just a few of the biggest structural issues facing academia:

• the NIH allocates just 2% of its funding to scientists 35 and younger with 98% of the funding going to those 36 and older.
• while many firms have an “individual-contributor” career track, where people who are excellent specialists are able to progress in their careers without becoming managers, academia pushes out anyone who does not conform to its vision of a model manager-scientist right in the middle of their career
• at the opposite end, people who do want to start their own labs and research programs and to become managers are prohibited from hiring even a single full-time employee until they land an independent research position, usually in their early or mid-30s (and both universities and funders typically prohibit graduate students and postdocs from applying for grants as principal investigators). This is bizarre and punishes those who get a big vision before it’s expected of them (consequently these outliers are especially likely to leave and e.g. start a company – something regularly done by people of this age and enabled by the VC ecosystem that helps founders with a vision but no experience to mature into exceptional leaders)
• low graduate student and postdoc salaries, set by the NIH, make it very difficult to start a family until late in life and make it much more difficult for those without extensive outside support networks to remain in science
• complete control the advisor has over the graduate student’s graduation, which, given conflict of interest between the advisor (who always wants more experiments) and the student (who wants to graduate), essentially means that graduate students are forced laborers, with their diplomas depending not on any objective criteria, but on whether their advisors feels like letting them graduate (this is one of the biggest contributors of horror stories from academia)
• while most startups are started by co-founders (this should not be surprising as co-founders make most things easier, faster, and allow individuals who could never run a company alone to start one), academia rejects the notion of stable research teams, making everyone go into grad school alone, become a postdoc alone, and then become a PI alone, with extremely rare exceptions

We should not be surprised then that the majority of even the most talented and passionate about science young scientists are not supported by the current structures and do not see their future in academia.

The NIH has effectively abdicated its responsibility to the next generation of scientists, allocating seven times more funding to scientists over 65 years old – who would’ve been in mandatory retirement had they been serving in the military – than to scientists aged 35 and younger.

Between 1998 and 2014, the number of investigators aged 35 and younger funded by the NIH fell by 22%, despite a 32% increase in the total number of investigators, with the share of funding allocated to the youngest group hovering between 1.5% and 2% (it is in itself notable that that youngest group – aged 24-35 – includes many people with more than 10 years of scientific research experience).

The outgoing Director of the NIH received his Bachelor’s degree 51 years ago. The incoming Director of the NIH received his Bachelor’s degree 49 years ago. Those in power, responsible for the future of life sciences in the US, were in college when the US was in Vietnam, they finished their graduate studies before PCR was invented, and they are literally half a century away from the concerns of the generation that will carry the torch of the endless frontier that is science.

Everyone knows that the current state of things is wrong. We know that the future lies with scientists who are yet to make their biggest discoveries, not with those who made them decades ago. We know that science must not advance one death at a time.

The NIH is a gigantic, mature, and very rigid government organization. It would not be capable of reform even under incredibly strong external pressure, meaning that the 21st century institutions of basic science will have to be built anew.

This is what New Science is working on.

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, George Church, Tyler Cowen, Andrew Gelman, Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy, Konrad Kording, Tony Kulesa, Raymond Tonsing, and Elizabeth Yin.

As its first major project, in the summer of 2022, New Science will run an in-person research fellowship in Boston for young life scientists, during which they will independently explore an ambitious high-risk scientific idea they couldn’t work on otherwise and start building the foundations for a bigger research project, while having much more freedom than they could expect in their normal research environment but also much more support from us. 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.

As its second major project, in the fall of 2022, New Science will run an in-person 12-month-long fellowship for young scientists starting to directly attack the biggest structural issues of the established institutions of science. We will double down on things that worked well during the summer fellowship, while extending the fellowship to one year, thus allowing researchers to make much more progress and will strive to provide them as much scientific leverage as possible, e.g.

• If someone is a 1st year graduate student but the project would majorly benefit from having a technician – find them a technician (instead of forcing them to spend another 10 years not being able to hire even a single full-time employee, as academia does)
• If someone has a scientific co-founder who they have amazing synergy with, accept them and let them do the fellowship together (starting a research project is often more similar to starting a company than to just getting a job and it is bizarre that universities virtually never evaluate teams during graduate school admissions and during faculty search)
• If someone spent years studying the subject but doesn’t have a formal degree, actually let them pursue their idea and figure out how to support them best (again, this is common in tech, but in academia you’re literally nobody without the right credential)

In several years, New Science will start funding entire labs outside of academia and then will be creating an entire network of scientific organizations, while supporting the broader scientific ecosystem that will constitute the 21st century institutions of basic science.

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.

In addition to running programs and directly enabling research, we’re going to be working on special projects, like essays, tutorials, original research, services, and so on, that will help scientists to do science better and that will make their lives easier. Good examples of inspiring for us services: Hacker News, synbiobeta conference, and Arxiv Sanity Preserver. Good examples of inspiring for us pieces of content: Stripe Atlas guides to running an internet business, How Life Sciences Actually Work, Applying for NIH funding, Part 1, Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued, “profound gossip” (e.g. a tell-all on the career world they saw. Describe concretely & in detail what they saw & how things seem to work there. Where the bodies are buried), How I Read a Paper: Facebook’s DETR (Video Tutorial), The Sheekey Science Show YouTube channel.