This begins with what our children are taught in school. Today, they are not taught the history or nature of progress. History classes focus on wars and empires; science classes teach concepts and frameworks; the story of technology and economic growth falls between the cracks. Steven Johnson, popular author of dozens of books on the history of... See more

Seemay Chou, biologist and co-founder of the Astera Institute, writes: “In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. ... Scientists should probably be putting out shorter narratives, datasets, code, and models at a faster rate, with more visibility into their thinking, mistakes, and... See more

“If it weren’t for the near-total dominance of the idea that amyloid is the only appropriate drug target, we would be 10 or 15 years ahead of where we are now.”45

we never let the committee assess individuals. ... We asked them to review the work of the group as a whole. Because if they went down to individuals, they would say, this man is unproductive. He hasn’t published anything for the last five years. So you’ve got to have institutions that can not only allow this, but also protect the people that are... See more

This is made possible by $650 million in founding pledges, including from institute co-founder Patrick Collison. Although Arc was only founded in 2021, it has already announced the largest AI model trained on genomic data, which they have used to design an improved bacteriophage; a virtual cell model that they say is “to the best of our knowledge... See more

In “A Vision of Metascience,” Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu argue that the ecosystem is in “a state of near stasis, with strong barriers inhibiting the improvement of key social processes.” Someone “seeking to achieve a scalable improvement in the social processes of science”—such as the founders of the organizations mentioned above—they call a... See more

The PI model also doesn’t lend itself well to big scientific goals that require a large, coordinated team and a lot of funding: sequencing the human genome, or mapping the neural connections of the brain. An increasingly popular alternative is the Focused Research Organization (FRO), which is organized like a startup team with a CEO, but as a... See more

Committees tend to make consensus decisions, but scientific breakthroughs often challenge consensus. And when the committee is formed of experts in the field—essentially, the competitors of the researchers submitting the proposal!—there is a risk that a field converges on a consensus too quickly, prematurely pruning off branches of the search space

A modern biology lab applying some of these lessons is the Arc Institute, based in Palo Alto and partnered with Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF. Investigators at Arc get their labs fully funded for renewable 8-year terms to pursue curiosity-driven research; institute co-founder Silvana Konermann says that they “want to take away the short-term demand... See more