I’ve never written about why I left my tenured academic position to switch institutions several times, ultimately co-founding Arcadia Science, a company whose mission is to transform evolutionary innovations into real world solutions by openly developing more efficient, replicable, and sustainable ways to leverage the biology of diverse organisms. Besides a very standard midlife crisis and the same soul searching everyone else grappled with during the pandemic, the following is the best explanation I’ve got:
In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back and require him to begin again. It’s the imagery I think of as the most appropriate for what it feels like for all of us to try and change things in science (scientific publishing in particular since that’s the boulder I’ve been obsessed with for a while). One challenge is that everyone rooting for the boulder to reach the summit is also weary and leaning on it just trying to survive, making it hard to get there. What I’m talking about of course is that each of us has it in our power to individually behave in a way that lifts science, but most feel that others are better positioned to take risks and that the incentives (the forces pushing us to do what’s best for ourselves and our careers) make progress difficult. The other thing that happens when proposing different approaches to science (publishing, funding/investment, increasing impactful outcomes) is being confronted with a firehose of reasons why they will never work. To be clear, there is absolutely *nothing* wrong with this. It is better and more rigorous to hear harsh criticism, adjust, and improve. Learning about avoidable pitfalls is a great thing.
That said, it’s much easier to overweight the costs of something new and underweight the costs of the status quo that we’ve become accustomed to. There is another way. Many people need to see something tangible to believe it’s possible. And no change happens in a vacuum, so any progress is accompanied by an ecosystem change which is not frequently taken into account. So an alternative to persuading people of an intangible thing and asking them to take your word that there are benefits to something that both you and they cannot possibly know, is to actually make it happen. We need more experimentation with high risk ways to do science. To test the boundaries of how it operates. To move the Overton window on what could be on the table — what could be in our toolbox. To generate new realities for people to iterate on. This isn’t a claim that new ways are always better or that we can know the future, but rather a claim that it’s important for *someone* to try and make new things exist so they can be considered on equal footing as that which we have resigned ourselves to. And an understanding that those who have the privilege and opportunity to take chances, should do so.
Ultimately, I hope that everyone learns from our efforts at Arcadia to experiment with how we try to make basic science self-sustaining/maximally useful for the community as well as how we communicate and accelerate our research. Ultimately, instead of pushing the boulder, we can chart new paths around it.