Why I am building Arcadia

I always told myself I would continue with science until it stopped being fun. I didn’t intend to become a scientist, but after I started volunteering in a botany lab in college on a lark, I was hooked. What made research fun was the chance to uncover knowledge about something totally new, share this with others, and hopefully make it useful to the world in some way. This became increasingly difficult as I advanced in my career, as so many processes that we layer onto our science in the name of rigor and intellectual freedom (i.e., journals, grants, tenure) largely do not serve those functions. Instead, they add drag to creativity, encourage specialization over exploration, introduce gatekeeping, and even contribute to toxic work environments. For me, they began to dim the childlike magic that started it all.

While I could see systemic issues as a student and postdoc, professorships felt like the only way to have a research program with the freedom to pursue knowledge for curiosity’s sake. However, the full weight of academic pressures hit me like a ton of bricks the first year I became faculty — there was no liberation at the end of the path. The scarcity mindset we adopt in a system with a very narrow definition of success throws you into survival mode. You’re constantly preparing the next grant or manuscript despite these being fairly disconnected from the actual work on the ground. It is exhausting, particularly for women and other minoritized individuals who overcome inherent bias and are relentlessly called on for service on top of everything else.

This past year, science really stopped being fun for me. I watched the success gap between self-serving individuals and more community-oriented scientists widen more than ever. I felt unable to support my trainees in basic ways. The demand for even more service left me feeling both tokenized and ineffectual. I was spending less than 15% of my time reading and thinking about my science in any meaningful way. I have so much more to offer as a scientist, and I was tired of hearing myself complain about it. I decided to step back and reconnect with the questions I was most excited about in the lab — not what was fundable or achievable for a manuscript, not even what was hypothesis-driven. Just fun questions that kept me up at night.

Science through a new lens

My lab studies tick-borne diseases, and I became obsessed with how ticks feed on us for days at a time without us noticing. Hoping to leverage my skills as a biochemist to study how tick saliva mediates evasion of our skin alarms, I wrote several grants that never saw the light of day. Reviewers bristled at my being an outsider to the field and wanting to study too many genes of unknown function. It was “too exploratory.” I was fed up and started to seek funding from new sources.

To my surprise, there was much more enthusiasm from VCs and angel investors outside academia for the kind of exploratory research I wanted to do, which I naively assumed would never be the case. The work was so early-stage and open-ended that even my university tech transfer office turned me away after multiple requests for guidance or support. Although I saw the same gender imbalance amongst private funders outside academia, I didn’t walk away from those meetings feeling like I had to go above and beyond to demonstrate competence and show that I deserved to be there. Instead, I walked away with the backing to establish a new startup, Trove.

Admittedly, I was nervous about what science outside academia would look like and what kind of compromises I would be forced to make. However, I was soon living the dream I didn’t even know I had: building an awesome team of super smart scientists to do high-risk exploratory science that had long-term translational potential. I also had an opportunity to find a partner to collaborate and build with (academic life feels very lonely to me). My co-founder, a departmental colleague and friend Kira Poskanzer is one of the fiercest women scientists I know. We shared a passion for science, a desire for change, and a willingness to do the work.

Through a more collaborative leadership dynamic, Kira and I created a community aligned with our values. We provided flexible support for our team during the pandemic in ways that I couldn’t for my students and postdocs. We also had the resources to develop techniques required for working in a non-model system — something else that I really struggled with in my academic lab. At Trove, we are led by curiosity and remain committed to learning and sharing the knowledge we’ve gained. There is no need to lock up the lessons we’ve learned from others in the tick community. In fact, we have sought their feedback, and we will publish most of our protocols, tools, and datasets without paywalls or delays. It’s the most rigorous any of us have ever had to be, and all of this is in the absence of journals. Our work may ultimately translate into products that could be useful to many more people.

The experience with Trove showed me there could be more ways to support the kind of science I care so much about. Thinking bigger about this is especially possible at this moment in history. While COVID-19 has certainly polarized attitudes towards science, the race for a vaccine has also ignited feelings of urgency, collaboration, and enthusiasm for scientific progress extending beyond our typical circles. People are frustrated with traditional systems, fueling a new wave of leaders who don’t look like the ones from the past. My life partner Jed McCaleb and I realized that we could invest in a new way of doing science and building community. Together, with our other investor Sam Altman, we have been encouraged to explore new structures for accelerating basic science.

Biology has tremendous value

For all these reasons, I have decided to take the best parts of my experiences to build a new research organization called Arcadia Science. I am co-founding Arcadia with yet another fierce woman scientist Prachee Avasthi, who is a leader among leaders in the fight for open science. Inspired by my fascination with the unique biology of ticks, and with the backing of McCaleb and Altman, Arcadia provides new ways to explore the biology of diverse organisms for which relatively few tools and resources exist. In addition to supporting an intramural research program, we aim to accelerate work on emerging research organisms beyond the walls of Arcadia by emphasizing and investing heavily in development of research tools. Lack of access to key, enabling tools is a major limiting factor for exploration in this area.

Arcadia is a for-profit institute. We see open-ended discovery as a critical first step to not only some of the most transformative but also many of the most commercially successful discoveries. We are testing the hypothesis that research on “non-model organisms” has real value in both the intellectual and monetary sense. We will:

• Fund a combination of basic research, research tool-building, and translational development under the same roof.
• Provide ample runway and access to key technologies to enable our scientists to maximize discoveries from diverse research organisms, gaining insights into how evolution has solved a wide array of problems.
• Ensure our scientists have the space to take windy walks that allow for transformative surprises.
• Couple research efforts with capital and in-house experts who can train scientists with deep technical expertise to pilot and drive translational efforts catalyzed by their own work.
• Compensate all of our scientists at wages that allow them to breathe, support their families, and focus on fun, creative work.
• Grant all Arcadia employees equity in this venture. Percent ownership will not be contingent on whether individual projects are exploratory or translational, successful or not.

Discovery is an unpredictable journey, full of fits and starts. All steps of this process are critical, including early pilot projects and outcomes that don’t fit neatly into a publishable story or a patentable molecule. We will structure equity and compensation to reflect this fundamental principle.

It is reasonable to doubt whether this could work. Arcadia is an experiment, with potential risk and — I believe — great reward. Although there are not many models for precisely what we are building, there have been variations of it with different emphases. I’m excited by the fact that Arcadia is led by scientists who are attracted to the uncertainty of it all and who are ready to roll up their sleeves with me. We recognize there is a tension between discovery and commercial utility. But we are dedicated to exploring whether, with enough time and money, revenue could sustain and buoy our science without constraining it.

I don’t expect everyone at Arcadia to generate a product or spin out a company. But I strongly suspect we will have enough such opportunities naturally emerge over the next ten years that this could become a sustainable and even profitable operation. And I hope to recruit some of the best and brightest from biotech to think hard with us about how to do that.

Expanding the scientific community

I am not interested in “competing” with academic science. We want to work alongside it. I deeply believe in the importance of academic institutions and publicly funded pursuit of knowledge. However, we often lose sight of the true core mission of academia — education. I know countless faculty who see education as a nuisance that takes time away from the research they really want to do. For me, the education mission is what makes being a professor special. Undoubtedly, the part I will miss most are those special joyous moments I get to share with people in my lab when they have a hard-earned breakthrough, changing something about how they see the world and themselves.

By diversifying and expanding outside research opportunities we can enable academia to prioritize education more effectively. We need those most passionate about teaching to stay focused on mentoring the next generation. Arcadia will pursue research efforts that are inherently distinct from those in academia, such as higher-risk pilot projects and the often unglamorous and invisible art of tool building. New tools could light a spark for everyone’s exploration. Knowledge and lessons learned will be shared with the broader scientific community, which will hopefully, as Prachee likes to say, “lift all boats.”

Finally, I will add that this opportunity is more in line with the kind of diversity I would like to see in science. In addition to enabling the study of a bigger slice of biology, we are arming new types of leaders with real resources to try out fundamentally new ways of advancing science. We are creating different on-ramps for people to join us without having to pass through the same metrics and mechanisms of universities. This is not a zero-sum game. Diversity should not only be about filling quotas. It should also be about embracing and empowering our pursuit of differences. We will push ourselves to make this spirit the centerpiece of everything we do at Arcadia.