Many of science’s most important projects fall through the cracks between academia and industry. These are the foundational tools that could accelerate entire fields, and yet don’t fit neatly into a PhD thesis or a venture-backed startup.
And to humanity’s credit, there has been growing interest in the last few years in building alternative systems for accelerating science beyond academia and industry.
Groups like Episteme, the Arc Institute and Astera differ in structure and ambition, but they share a common premise: some of the most important work in science requires institutions that neither universities nor venture-backed companies are built to support.
They also share something else. None of them would exist without billionaire philanthropy: Altman and Masa in the case of Episteme, Jed McCaleb in the case of Astera, and the Collison brothers in the case of the Arc Institute.
And yet when I bring these organizations up with friends and colleagues in science, I often sense the same underlying skepticism: impressive as they are, can any of them really become durable drivers of scientific progress or are they structurally incapable of becoming anything more than donor-dependent experiments? Bell Labs changed the world, but it was built on an economic foundation, a telecommunications monopoly, that no longer exists.
So, what’s left in humanity’s armament for progress? Well, there’s the NIH, DARPA and ARPA-H in America, ARIA in the UK, university-affiliated research institutes around the world, a dense ecosystem of startups concentrated in the major entrepreneurial hubs, and then a handful of billionaire-backed nonprofit research orgs.
But there is another model that has been gaining traction in recent years: the Focused Research Organization, or FRO. These are nonprofit research organizations built around tightly scoped scientific milestones, typically with 10 to 30 person teams and budgets in the $20-30 million range.
Adam Marblestone is the founder of Convergent Research and the architect of the FRO model.
Late last year, in what many saw as validation of the model, the National Science Foundation announced a new initiative to “launch and scale a new generation of transformative independent research organizations to advance breakthrough science”.
In my chat with Adam, he traces his path from graduate training in George Church’s lab to DeepMind’s neuroscience team. He came to believe that science needs a third institutional model, one that complements rather than replaces academia and industry.
We discuss the idea of “intellectual dark matter”, the promising ideas researchers have but rarely get the chance to pursue. Adam explains why mathematicians need robust software infrastructure just as much as astronomers need telescopes, and how Convergent Research is systematically identifying more than 100 missing “Hubble Space Telescopes” across scientific fields. Adam argues that many breakthrough ideas remain invisible not because they are wrong, but because the shared infrastructure needed to test them does not yet exist.
Topics we cover include:
Why progress in fields like mathematics and neuroscience is often bottlenecked by missing shared infrastructure (e.g. proof verification, connectome mapping, ultrasound brain interfaces)
How “intellectual dark matter” exposes systemic blind spots in the way science is funded, evaluated, and organized
How the Gap Map (gapmap.org) is systematically cataloging hundreds of missing foundational capabilities across scientific disciplines
Why building scientific infrastructure often requires industry-style execution inside nonprofit structures
Why some of the most ambitious deep-tech efforts are too infrastructural for venture capital, yet too operational for academia
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