After weeks of trepidation, mixed with partially suppressed hope, I saw the message in my inbox.
I regret to inform you that the National Science Foundation is unable to support your proposal referenced above. Your proposal was reviewed in accordance with the general merit review criteria established by the National Science Board that address the intellectual merit of the proposed activity and its broader impacts…blah blah blah you lose. Again.
The familiar sickness, a punch in my gut. Festering disappointment from years of these form-letter rejections, rising up into bilious rage. I didn’t even read the reviews. I didn’t need to. I’ve seen all the variations. Arbitrary criticism of technical details. Too ambitious. Too risky. Not a first order problem. Not Transformative. Assholes. They want transformative? Fine. No more half-assed proposals, logically extending previous research in bite sized increments. Time for revolution. Time for me to stomp on these mental midgets.
My mind lashed out with all its strength against the rigid, imagination-challenged, mundane and mediocre, puny and pedantic intellects that had denied me. Rage, disgust and pride blazed across dormant neurons, igniting a plasma of synapses. I feverishly hypothesized, speculated, reasoned, drawing together everything I knew about life on earth, connecting a maelstrom of ideas that would seem absurd to a conventional (sane?) scientist. I was outside the box. Leagues beyond the predictable machinations of the scientific orthodoxy. When the complete concept finally crystalized out of this electrified brine of supercharged mental activity, it was so compelling, so parsimonious, so beautiful, that I had no doubt that it must be true.
I know. It sounds pompous and poetic, but it seemed like a really good idea at the time. Even as I sit here wondering whether I’ve hastened or delayed the demise of human civilization, I can’t help but feel proud that I thought of it first. Kind of. They say there’s nothing new under the sun, and that may or may not also apply to the abyssal zone of the ocean. My idea was sort of a cross between Lovelock and Lovecraft. But did either of those guys develop a detailed experimental framework to test for the existence of a vast ancient being with god-like intelligence, so alien to our normal conception of biology that it has escaped detection, even in this age of filthy rich narcissists with deep sea submersibles and DNA-sequencing yachts?
No, they did not. Sometimes I answer my own rhetorical questions. Does that make me a monologuing Mad Scientist? Possibly.
Anyway, I wrote the proposal. I needed the emotional and intellectual release. Of course, I didn’t bother submitting it to a federal scientific funding agency. On one hand, they would never fund it, and on the other hand, someone might read it and realize that I am not actually insane, and try to steal my idea. No, I needed preliminary data before I could even breathe a word of my theory to anyone. There are already petabases of DNA sequences dredged out of the ocean and dumped onto public servers, with over half of the data ignored summarily because it doesn’t match any known genomes. Unfortunately to look for the patterns I suspected, I was going to need some serious supercomputing time, along with an assload of high throughput sequencing, and neither of these are cheap. What recourse do passionate scientists have, when continuously frustrated by hopelessly oversubscribed funding agencies? Some resort to Kickstarter. (In case you’re somehow reading this after civilization collapses, this basically amounted to begging for money on the internet). I decided to disguise the idea as a novel approach for analyzing metagenomic dark matter, the hidden majority of unidentified sequences lurking in the DNA databases, for the purpose of discovering new domains of life. As a reward, I offered to list my backers’ names in the acknowledgements section of the resulting publications. Unsurprisingly, the results were pathetic. Other people were doing this already. What was my hook? I decided to show a bit more of my hand. I proposed to search for sequences that showed signs of symmetry and order resulting from systematic self-editing. Signs of DNA modifying itself in a directed way. How to sweeten the pot for the backers? Your name in the acknowledgements PLUS full color reprints of all publications including special supplemental information with an oversize fold out poster of the money-shot figure (Boring science paper: the director’s cut)!
Again, miserable failure. After 30 days, I had received a handful of small pledges, probably from creationists mistaking my subject for intelligent design. The NSF hates me, and so does the internet. It suddenly occurred to me I was treating the general public like a scientific funding agency, making the same mistakes as always. Careful, incremental science. Where was the fuck-you attitude that inspired the true shadow project behind these Kickstarter campaigns? It was time to put the whole thing out there. I don’t know why I was worried about someone stealing my idea in the first place – This idea was so far beyond the cognitive dissonance threshold of any reasonably trained scientist that it would be virtually invisible. I no longer cared about looking like a crackpot. This is the internet, after all. I uploaded the full proposal, in all its manic glory. “Xenobiology of the Abyssal Zone: Pattern Recognition for an Advanced Purely Biological Civilization.” Backers above the $100 level will also receive a special behind-the-scenes report on the Making of the Thing I’m Doing. Finished setting up the new campaign around 2 am. Blearily, I stumbled off to bed.
“Someone is messing with me.”
I stared in disbelief. I had set my goal at a modest $10,000. Peanuts as far as science budgets go, but hopefully enough computing time to maybe produce some convincing preliminary patterns. The total stood at $511,420. Several small donations, and based on the analytics, probably mostly from sci fi fans who mistook my project for an ambitious work of fiction masquerading as science, breaking the fourth wall and all that. And a single donation of half a million from one Gabriel Poisson. The good news, even without this joker, I had met the goal. A paltry sum that couldn’t even begin to address all the ideas I had raised in the proposal, but still, an excuse to work on the only scientific project that mattered to me. I had spent the past months muddling through the public databases with the limited resources at my disposal, in the spare time I had available between teaching classes half-filled with sleepwalking students, attending pointless meetings with whiny, myopic faculty and sheepherding lackluster graduate students toward dead-end careers. In the evenings and weekends, when I wasn’t too depressed, tired or drunk (and sometimes even when I was), I would plunge into the chaos of the public database and tap away at the rebar-reinforced concrete wall of genomic dark matter with the tiny hammer of my feeble programming skills. (Don’t get me wrong – I am a brilliant and creative scientist, but I know my limitations. I was out of my depths with this project, but that was the point. To do something this revolutionary would require me to transcend my limitations, by sheer will power, if necessary. However, I would also accept dumb luck).
And dumb luck it was. I went ahead and launched the project. I was deeply agitated, assuming Poisson was a fraud, but unable to completely suppress belief that a mysterious benefactor had recognized my genius. This latter thought filled me with a secondary source of agitation, that maybe I was the fraud, and would now be responsible for delivering something really big. So I spent the next few days waiting for the funds to transfer, planning on spending the $11k, but also half-planning for the contingency of spending $500k. Spending half a million is easy. I could have easily written a budget for $5 million, even without the 50% overhead my University normally charges. You’d be surprised how fast science funding goes. Salaries, sequencing, supercomputing, major equipment, lab supplies, ship time. The hard part would be figuring out which 10% of the project to fund.
Ah, it’s so hard to break these numbdane academic habitual anxieties, engrained from years of playing an absurd game whose rules are half clear at best. A great intellectual step! I jump out of The Box! I reject the hegemony! And then I scurry back to my desk to do the paperwork. Alor, Monsieur Poisson, I humbly accept your most generous offer, and vow to blow your froggy-fishy mind with magnificent results:
Let us plunge headlong into the gulf, heaven or hell it matters not! To find something new in the depths of the unknown!
Yeah, that was my attempt at quoting Baudelaire – I got excited for a minute. Finding half a million dollars in your bank account will do that.
