Today, alongside the launch of Radial, we are opening an essay competition that I’ve been ruminating on for some time. Namely, inviting active scientists from any sector to share concrete research challenges that can inform our future work at Astera. We’re interested in your hypotheses about what broad structural or systemic issues contribute to the bottlenecks you experience in your own science. It’s important to me that we hear more from active scientists on the ground.
Many of our scientific systems and institutions are no longer fit for purpose. How we fund work, share results, build teams, and connect science to other disciplines or sectors has long been in need of experimentation. This is no longer a controversial statement.
We are living through a historical inflection point that demands change. One force is technological, happening at unprecedented scale and speed. AI is making it harder to ignore systemic and infrastructural gaps, while also changing what solutions are possible. This is an incredible forcing function we should leverage to update our scientific practices.
At the same time, it’s become harder to talk constructively about change in light of political differences and more recent budgetary contractions. But it’s more important than ever to openly debate long-term reform now. And many disagreements are unlikely to be resolved through debate in the absence of real life testing.
We’re looking to you, scientists
The field of metascience, i.e. the science of science, is often driven today by non-scientists: policy experts, economists, sociologists, psychologists, historians, politicians. Their work can be very useful, but practicing scientists should be more deeply involved in shaping the systems they depend on.
Scientists know first-hand what is broken. When scientists themselves have led metascience experiments, the outcomes have often been distinctive and more durable: new institutes structured around questions; focused research organizations built to unlock specific field-level bottlenecks; community infrastructure launched because there was simply no other way to make it happen; critical resources that can’t wait for permission.
We want to help get more scientists in the driver’s seat of this conversation and source more hypotheses that can be tested for systemic improvements. We want all of it to happen in the open to stimulate more useful public debate about science. And we hope that will help the most compelling ideas get real world implementation through support from us or others.
Examples of what we’re looking for
Perhaps an easier way to explain what we’re looking for is to highlight a few historical examples that we would have loved to fund early iteration for. Here are a few:
- The Protein Data Bank
A few crystallographers were frustrated that hard-won structural data was disappearing into individual labs with no way to share it. They bootstrapped a community archive in 1971 with just seven structures and no formal institutional mandate. We would have loved to award an essay describing this gap and fund the early bootstrapping required to prototype the foundational data infrastructure for structural biology and drug discovery worldwide.
- arXiv
The scientist Paul Ginsparg noticed that his colleagues were emailing preprints to each other and built a centralized server in 1991 to do it better. We would have loved to award an essay describing this gap and fund the initial server required to test the utility of what became today’s default open publishing infrastructure for physics, math, and computer science. It has since become a general model for the broader open-access movement.
- Focused Research Organizations
Two scientists, Adam Marblestone and Sam Rodriques, were dead set on trying to generate more connectomics data as a critical public resource for the neuroscience community. This was a defined roadmap that required a start-up-like team, which lacked any dedicated funding mechanism. So they created one by inventing FROs, and it has become an enabling structure for many other projects with similar properties. We would have loved to fund early iterations of FRO projects (and we did through the first FRO: the longevity-focused Rejuvenome!).
- Arcadia Science
This one’s an experiment I’m directly involved in that’s still in a work-in-progress. Arcadia is a for-profit research company co-founded in 2020 by myself and another scientist, Prachee Avasthi. It was motivated by trying to reimagine how we could more effectively traverse a wider swath of biology for useful discovery than was possible in our academic labs. We asked how we could use data to develop organism-agnostic tools, compound broader lessons by sharing more of our work in real time, and open up new funding and sustainability strategies. It would be exciting to fund smaller scale pilots that could inform experiments that lead to new institutes, which can and should be less monolithic than what dominates today.
I hope more scientists will join us in this dialogue, which is why I’ve asked that all submissions are public. I know it can sometimes be uncomfortable to put your neck out in this way, but positive change is more likely if we normalize open debate. We should approach all disagreements according to the scientific principles we were trained on. Data, not drama: let’s do the experiment.