Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

Randomization.

This is the only strategy, in my opinion, that makes sense. Every year, a certain fraction of the grant money from NSF/NIH/DOE will be awarded randomly, based on a lottery. Your name is automatically entered into the lottery if you submitted a grant proposal. The money per random grant will be constant; there will be no strings attached to the budget regarding scientific direction.

Is Yi Cui with an h-index close to 200 the best scientist then? Or Pulickel Ajayan?

I worked with samples grown from both of them, so my opinion on them is mixed. They are drive-by shooters; they identify a hot area, publish some crappy but early papers on the topic and move on to the next hot trend. Both of them have very little to zero sustained contributions to the field.

And this is, by the way, the case for most h-index superstars. Fundamental contributions are often sustained contributions over the years to a field, and the honest answer is that we can measure that only years after the science has been published.

> When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.

This is basically my part time job now, I help maintain a university lab including things like repairing ancient equipment, training grad student TAs, helping the lecturers plan and run their experiments, and then just random grad students and professors drop in for advice and help. It's pretty fun.

What I don't do is take advantage of the fact that I have a chem lab attached for any personal work, I've never actually thought to ask. I have asked about setting up a catalyst test reactor lab to collaborate with the college of computing to see if we can build a testing lab for anyone creating new catalysts to analyze the results and invent new types. There were too many professors with a vested interest in doing that kind of project so they had no interest in supporting it.

It was very disappointing to see, I'd have been happy to run a test facility for all the professors to work with as a shared experimental facility but they all wanted to be the one to get the papers first. The minor consideration to me of being able to do some of my own research projects with the setup and a salary is all I'd have wanted out of it, I love mentoring students and would have loved to provide deep expertise to students working on such projects...

Could have made three departments able to produce high quality research in a field that no one here seems to actually be good at (i.e. traditional heterogeneous catalysts) with ChemE, MatSci, and CompSci all benefiting from the ability to generate large reliable datasets of how new catalytic materials behave in traditional chemical reactors. So cheap to set up too... just such a shame that I cannot do such a project at the place I work despite having been the director of chemical process development and specifically catalyst development at previous jobs. Ostensibly because professors are already doing it in their labs, but like, why would you not take advantage of expertise like mine to make these projects work?

So bizarre but I just don't have the stamina to push them on it, I probably literally just have to switch job titles for them to even notice that I am in fact a world class expert on catalysts and chemical processing. Instead I'm repairing oscilloscopes which is super fun but I sure miss doing actual research that matters.

Here's what I want: a lab to experiment with these findings (https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0078-7)in a 3D colonies from the perspective of encoding various structures from human culture (particularly the community housing the lab) and seeing how the microbes address different perturbations. And then remodeling the community's culture based on whatever findings are uncovered to test the relationship between human and microbial cultures. Or remodel the cultural blueprint within some communal space to see how it works with the outside world. Or...I don't know. There are so many ways to play with culture in this way.

We're tackling the question of where to live, too. I find it useful to identify my values & then to use that to filter my options. Choosing based on availability of resources tends to lead to all kinds of blindspots in my experience. We're also trying to figure out how the community model can work without moving and what the process looks like for building it out where anyone is. The approach I'm going for right now is to identify the exact spaces and ways of relating to them I want, creating an absurdly long organization name with all those words in the name, and a mission of "evolve the name" or something similar, short, and simple.

Hey, sorry for taking so long to respond to this.

When I moved here I made a list of hacker spaces that were both general and biology-focused. I thought I had found more that were focused on bio but unfortunately I think you're right, for biosciences it's only Baltimore Underground Science Space.