Rip Kincaid

The apprenticeship is the part of my life I am most often asked about and least able to describe. I was seventeen, I was too young to understand what was being offered, and Jack Wren was a tracker in his sixties who agreed to take me on for reasons he never quite articulated. What I learned from him over those six years does not fit in any curriculum I know of. Most of it was silence. The rest of it was the discipline of waiting until the country is ready to tell you something.

Twenty-nine years later I am still apprenticed. Not to Wren. He died in 2003. I am apprenticed to the work itself — to the pack, to the researchers I fund, to the very slow pace at which biological knowledge actually accrues. Every quarter I notice how little I still know, and I have come to welcome the noticing. It is the only reliable signal that I am paying attention.

We had a moment this quarter where two of our grants — one clinical, one bench — converged on the same compound. I wrote about it in the February Dispatch. What I did not say there, because the Dispatch is not the place for it, is that the convergence scared me. Not because I worry the work is wrong. Because success creates a pull toward overreach. When something works you want to explain it. When you explain it prematurely you bend the next experiment to make the explanation hold. I have seen good careers end that way.

The corrective, for me, is the same corrective Wren taught me about a pack. Watch the thing that is not moving. The dingo that is interesting is often not the one chasing. It is the one at the edge of the track, holding still, reading the ground. In science the researcher worth watching is often not the one publishing. It is the one who is still asking the question a year after the rest of the field has moved on.

We are trying to run the Foundation the way Wren ran a trackline. Slowly. Against the grain of the moment. With the patience to be wrong and the humility to keep showing up. In four years we have made mistakes — a failed collaborative platform, an under-funded grant, two grants I should have backed harder and didn't. We have also put money into the hands of thirty-six researchers who are working on questions nobody else will pay for. On most days that feels like enough.

To the grantees reading this: thank you for running with us. To the researchers who have not yet written in: write in. To the friends who have held this whole thing up with their quiet reading — and you know who you are — thank you for reading. The pack teaches. I am still listening.

A committee evaluates. A pack notices. These are not the same thing and the difference has occupied most of my thinking this quarter.

The committee asks: does this proposal conform to the shape we have agreed a proposal should have? Has it cleared the methodological bar? Does it fit the taxonomy of questions our field is currently willing to pay for? These are reasonable questions and they produce, on average, reasonable decisions. They also produce, on average, the work the field was already going to fund. The committee is very good at funding what the committee has already decided is fundable. It is, by design, poor at funding what it has not yet decided exists.

A pack works differently. A pack's intelligence is distributed. The dingo at the edge of the scrub does not ask the dingo at the center of the pack whether the scent on the wind is worth following. The dingo at the edge follows the scent, and the pack orients around what the edge has turned up. The pack's strength is its tolerance for the edge. Its willingness to let the periphery move before the center has understood why.

The Foundation tries to work this way. We fund researchers who have noticed something the center of the field has not yet decided is worth noticing. Sometimes the edge turns up nothing. That is the tax of the method. Sometimes the edge turns up something the field will spend the next twenty years trying to understand. That is the reason we pay the tax.

The committee calls this irresponsible. The committee is partially right. We are betting on a signal that has not yet clarified itself into a proof. We are doing so in full awareness that most of these bets will not pay. What the committee cannot see, because it is structurally unable to see, is that the bets that do pay are the ones that matter. The distribution is skewed. Ten merely-reasonable grants are worth less than one transformative one. The committee funds ten merely-reasonable grants with near-certainty. The pack funds one transformative one with probability.

I am not arguing that committees are bad. I am arguing that committees are sufficient for the ninety percent of the scientific enterprise that is already understood to be scientific. For the remaining ten percent — the part that has not yet been admitted to the category — the pack is the only instrument that works. The Foundation exists to serve that ten percent.

The researchers we have funded know this. They have been through the committee. They have the rejection letters to prove it. When they write to us they do not oversell. They describe the work, they describe what has already been said no to, and they wait. We read. If the work is good we fund it. That is the whole method. It is embarrassingly simple. It is also embarrassingly rare.

If you are a researcher reading this and you have been told your work is unorthodox, that is not, in itself, a verdict on the work. It is a verdict on the fit between the work and the committee reviewing it. The Foundation was built for that gap. Come in.

Three times this year I have been asked, by three separate people with good intentions, when the Foundation is going to "scale." The question has come from a former colleague at a major institution, a potential donor who didn't end up donating, and a journalist I quietly declined to speak with. I have been chewing on the question anyway, because the fact that three people asked it in a year tells me the question is in the air.

Here is the honest answer. I am not trying to build the largest possible version of this foundation. I am trying to build a version that is the right size for the work the work needs. That number, as far as I can tell, is roughly what we are today — maybe a third bigger at its peak. Our capital base is not infinite. My attention is not infinite. The number of researchers we can meaningfully know, as people and not as file folders, is not infinite. I want the Foundation to run inside those limits deliberately, not by accident.

There is a pattern in philanthropy that I am trying to avoid. A small effective foundation raises money, grows a staff, grows the staff's obligations, hires a communications department, and discovers five years later that it is now mostly managing itself. The grantees are still there. The staff is now running an operation the grantees no longer recognize. I have seen this happen to people I admire. I will not let it happen to this.

A foundation is not a business. It is a decision about how to spend a set amount of capital over a set amount of time. The decision gets better, not worse, with discipline about its own edges.

What "enough" looks like, for me, is roughly this. Forty to sixty active grants. Three or four staff. A board small enough to meet around one table. An annual budget that is generous enough to fund ambitious work and modest enough that I do not wake up worrying about it. A pace of decision that I can hold in my head without a project-management platform. And a public presence that earns the reader's attention rather than chasing it.

The Foundation can do more if I live a full life. It can do more still if the researchers we back turn over their own students, students we will never fund directly but whose work will descend from ours. That is the version of scale I am interested in. Not bigger. Longer.

Year Three closes on December thirty-first. I am grateful for all of it. Back in January.

A dingo doesn't ask the other dingoes whether it is allowed to follow a track. It follows the track. If the track is worth following the pack will catch up. If the track is not worth following the dingo learns something and comes back. The pack tolerates this because the pack has learned, over a very long time, that its collective intelligence depends on individuals being willing to move before consensus has formed.

Science works this way too, at its best. A researcher notices something. She begins to pull on the thread. She has not yet run the formal proposal through her department. She has not yet cleared the question with her committee. She is following the track. The question is whether the institution she sits inside will tolerate the interval between "she has noticed something" and "the consensus has caught up."

The honest answer, increasingly, is no. The permission structure of modern science is heavy. Committees, IRBs, grant cycles, quarterly reporting, milestone deliverables — all of which exist for reasons I understand, and none of which reward the researcher who has noticed something before the permission structure has caught up. The noticing itself is what the permission structure cannot price.

Our grants try to preserve the interval. We fund work before the committee has said yes. We fund work the committee has already said no to. We fund researchers whose noticing has, so far, outpaced their department's tolerance for noticing. This is not a political stance. It is a bet on where the interesting results come from.

A warning, though, for researchers tempted to read this as blanket license: the dingo that follows every track dies young. Discrimination matters. The pack tolerates the individual because the individual has earned the right to move alone. You earn that right by being right about what you choose to follow. Not every idea is worth the track. Most are not. The researchers we fund have usually already made that call three times before we ever meet them.

If you are one of them, write. If you are not sure whether you are one of them, write anyway. The pack makes room for the edge. That is the whole method.

Let me start by saying something that is not always said by people in my position. Peer review works most of the time. Most scientific work is reasonably routine and the machinery of journal review, committee evaluation, and departmental funding allocation does a reasonable job with it. The problem is not that peer review is bad. The problem is that peer review is calibrated for the middle of the distribution and we — the Foundation — are specifically not interested in the middle of the distribution.

Three things peer review does well. First, it catches basic methodological errors. This is real value, and most researchers I know are grateful for the error-catching function even when they resent the rest of it. Second, it provides a minimum-bar filter that keeps nonsense out of the literature. Third, it produces a public signal of a work's seriousness, which matters to institutions and to early-career scientists.

Three things peer review does badly. First, it punishes category-crossing work, because the review panel is typically assembled within a single category and has no mechanism for rewarding a manuscript that sits between disciplines. Second, it conflates novelty with correctness. A familiar methodology with an unexpected result is treated with suspicion; a familiar result with a novel methodology is treated with credulity. Third, it rewards the researcher who already knows how to perform for reviewers and this is a learned skill that has only a loose correlation with the quality of the underlying science.

For the Foundation, these failure modes are exactly the ones that matter. We fund the researcher whose work is category-crossing. We fund the researcher whose methodology is routine and whose result is unexpected. We fund the researcher who has not learned how to perform for reviewers, or who has, and resents it. We fund, in short, the researchers peer review is structurally worst at funding.

We will continue to publish our grantees' work in full, without paywalls, in our open archive. We will continue to treat a journal rejection as what it is — a specific decision by a specific panel — and not as a verdict on the science. And we will continue, quietly and without any particular animosity, to back the work the journals have sent back.

None of this is personal. None of it is a war. The journals will do what they do, and much of it will remain useful. We will do what we do, and the work will speak for itself.

The Dispatch has been private for twenty-four months. The reasons were simple. We did not want to announce the Foundation before we had proven, to ourselves, that we could write a check and stay out of the way. We wanted to see at least two full grant cycles complete — one year of granting, one year of the first outcomes — before we asked anyone outside the pack to trust us with their attention.

That test is, to my satisfaction, complete. Three grantees in Year One. Ten more in Year Two. Two failures. Several partial results. One genuinely useful finding from the Okafor lab that will justify the next three years of backing. Most importantly, nobody on the grantee side has complained that we interfered with their work. We wrote the checks. We stayed out of the way. That was the test and we passed it.

Going public does not mean the Foundation is scaling up. The granting rhythm will stay close to what it has been. The staff will grow only as the work demands. The Dispatch format will not change. What is changing is the size of the room it is being written in.

There is a specific audience I hope the public Dispatch will reach. Researchers whose work has been rejected by a major funder in the last two years and who have been told it is not their turn. Researchers sitting on a question that does not fit the taxonomy their department will pay for. Researchers who have been quietly watching the Foundation from a distance and who have been waiting to see whether we are a credible address. To all of them: we are credible. Write in.

There is also an audience I hope the public Dispatch will not reach. Publicists. Press-release writers. Conference organizers. Anyone who reads this and thinks of it primarily as a brand story. The Foundation is not a brand. It is a bank account with a mission. The Dispatch is not content. It is correspondence. If those distinctions are unfashionable, so be it. The pack can afford to be unfashionable.

Welcome to the room. Run with us a while.

Year Two was not what I expected. Most of that is on me. I came into January 2024 with a set of assumptions about how the grant pipeline would mature, how the grantees would interact, and how much of my time would be spent writing versus evaluating. All three assumptions were wrong by the end of March. All three were more interestingly wrong than correct.

What I expected: a steady cadence of incoming proposals, mostly from the referral network I'd been building for two years. What I got: a surprisingly disorganized pile, with proposals arriving from people I had never spoken to, half of them outstanding, half of them clearly not for us. The grantees already in the pack turned out to want more from each other than I had anticipated — not more money, more conversation. I had not planned for the Foundation to be a convener. I am still not sure I want it to be.

What we did this year that I am proud of: we signed fourteen new grants, we killed a failed collaborative infrastructure project before it consumed another quarter, we hired our second full-time person, and we maintained our policy of returning unused funds without penalty when a grantee asks to step off a project. Dr. M., whose story I told in the May Dispatch, was the second grantee to do so. Her reference letter is now keeping her in a better-suited role at a different institution.

What we did this year that I am less proud of: we underfunded two grants we had conviction on. We delayed a difficult conversation with a collaborator for six weeks longer than we should have. We over-indexed toward researchers in English-speaking institutions and I did not catch the pattern until December.

The interesting thing about a small foundation is that the mistakes become visible quickly. We have two full-time people, a part-time admin, and three trustees. There is nowhere for a mistake to hide. When we get something wrong, somebody notices in under a month. When we get something right, the effect compounds in under a year. I am not sure I would want to run this operation at ten times the scale. The visibility of the mistake is, paradoxically, one of the best features of the model.

Year Three opens in January. The public Dispatch opens with it. The work continues.

I receive roughly sixty letters a year from researchers I have never met. About a third of them are proposals. About a third are questions. About a third are something in between — a researcher describing a problem they have not quite framed yet, writing to test whether the problem fits our interests. I try to reply to all of them. I have been mostly successful. I miss a few.

Over two years I have noticed that I am writing variations on the same response. Not because the researchers are the same — they are not. Because the underlying concerns are the same. What follows is the form of that response, written out in full, for anyone who has been thinking about writing in and has not yet.

We read every proposal we receive. We respond to every one within thirty days. If you have been told your work is "too unorthodox," that is a reason to send it to us, not a reason not to. If you have been rejected by a major funder recently, that is information we find useful, not disqualifying. You do not need a referral. You do not need a grant-writing service. You do not need a famous institution behind you.

What we want to know: what is the question, what have you already tried, what would you do with the money if we gave it to you. That is the whole form. Three paragraphs is plenty. A page is plenty. Do not send us a fifty-page proposal. We do not read them well, and fifty-page proposals tend to have been written for a different kind of funder anyway.

What we do not need: a five-year plan. A milestone timeline. An accounting of the "societal impact" of the work. A mission-statement paragraph about transformational leadership. A commercialization plan. Anything that looks like it was generated to fill a form. If the work is real, the work will describe itself.

A practical note: if your work has a clinical component, say so early. We take clinical proposals but we do so with particular care and the process takes longer. If your work is computational and you are planning to use open-source tools, say so — this is a positive signal for us. If your work requires access to a specific patient population or field site, tell us how access has been secured.

Finally, and this is the thing I want most to say: do not spend six months crafting the perfect letter. A clear, honest, five-paragraph letter about what you are actually trying to do is worth more to us than a polished twenty-page proposal. Send the letter. We will write back.

A peptide is a short chain of amino acids. Put a few of them together in a specific sequence and you get a biologically active molecule. Proteins are long chains of the same stuff — hundreds or thousands of amino acids folded into complex three-dimensional structures. Peptides are the shorter, nimbler cousins. A peptide might be five, ten, maybe forty amino acids long. Short enough to be manufactured cheaply. Short enough to be patented around. Short enough, often, that the biological machinery treats them as signals rather than structural elements.

Your body runs on peptides. A huge amount of the intracellular and intercellular communication that keeps your tissues coordinated is done with peptide signaling. Insulin is a peptide. Oxytocin is a peptide. Most of the signaling molecules you have heard of, and hundreds of thousands you have not, are peptides. The cell writes them, reads them, degrades them, and rewrites them on timescales of seconds to minutes.

For most of modern pharmacology, peptides have been a frustrating class of compound. They are hard to deliver orally (the stomach digests them), they are fast to clear from the bloodstream, and many of them are difficult to patent. The pharmaceutical industry has spent decades chasing molecules that are easier to commercialize — small organic compounds that can be taken as pills, hold their shape in the body, and be protected by intellectual-property fences. Peptides don't fit that economic model neatly. As a result, there is an enormous amount of biological territory that peptides clearly influence and that has been poorly explored by the people with the most resources.

Here is the part that should make any funder pay closer attention. Almost every peptide drug on the market today was first isolated from a wild animal that lived and died well outside a laboratory. The diabetes drug exenatide began as a component of Gila monster saliva. The chronic-pain drug ziconotide came from a cone snail in the tropical Pacific. The entire ACE-inhibitor class of cardiovascular drugs — drugs that have extended tens of millions of human lives — traces back to the venom of a South American pit viper. Modern anticoagulants descend from leech saliva. The list is longer than most working biochemists realise, and the pattern is consistent: wild species, operating under evolutionary pressures that domesticated and lab-strain organisms no longer face, carry peptide signals that human medicine has not thought to look for. We are not the ones who discovered this pattern. We are, to be frank, astonished that the pharmaceutical industry has not followed it more aggressively.

That is the territory the Foundation is here for. Specifically, we are interested in peptide signaling in the context of aging and late-life decline; in peptide-mediated stress resilience, wound healing, and inflammatory modulation; in the role of peptide shuttling across cellular membranes; and — with some particular attention, because of the founder's own prior work — in the peptide pharmacopoeia of wild, non-domesticated mammals that have been evolving outside a veterinary clinic for longer than modern medicine has existed.

Here is the thing I want to convey to the general reader. This is not speculative science. Peptide biology is a mature, respectable field. What is not mature is the commercial and academic machinery for pushing peptide biology into the places it most obviously needs to go. The researchers we fund are not working on fringe ideas. They are working on mainstream ideas that have been deprioritized for reasons that have more to do with funding mechanics than with science. Our goal is not to make peptide biology exotic. It is to make it unavoidable.

If you are reading this as a potential donor, or a potential collaborator, or simply as a curious friend, that is the short version of the argument. We have picked a corner of biology that is underfunded for reasons that are, on inspection, not especially good reasons. We think the returns to that underfunding will come due.

I want to write this quarter's essay for the early-career researcher who is considering whether to pursue a line of work her department has politely suggested she drop. I am not going to romanticize the decision. I am going to be honest about the price.

The price is real. An unorthodox line of inquiry costs a researcher, on average, about three years of productivity relative to a conventional one. It costs social capital with senior colleagues. It costs access to conferences, invitations, and collaborations that accrue automatically to people working on "hot" topics. It costs the kind of fast feedback loop that makes routine science satisfying. It can cost promotions. It can, in some cases, cost jobs.

I want to say that clearly because I have heard too many funders and foundation heads describe unorthodox work as if the only cost is a bit of patience and a bit of courage. That is not true. The cost is material. If you are a researcher considering this path, you should know the price you are agreeing to pay. The Foundation cannot make it go away. We can only help pay it.

What we can do: provide funding that does not depend on your department. Provide time — usually three years, sometimes five. Provide a public record, through the Dispatch and our open archive, of your work's existence, which is a non-trivial thing in a system that will otherwise render you invisible. Provide the credibility of a foundation that has specifically chosen to back your kind of work.

What we cannot do: rebuild your institutional standing. Restore the conferences that stop inviting you. Reverse the slow drift of colleagues who find your line of inquiry uncomfortable. Those are costs you will bear. I want to be honest about that because I know researchers who have taken the unorthodox path on the assumption that someone would eventually make them whole. Nobody made them whole. Most of them are still glad they took the path. That is a different thing from having it not cost anything.

The argument for taking the path anyway is simple. The questions that turn out to matter most are almost always the ones that looked unorthodox when they were first asked. If you are right about your question, the cost is the admission price to something the rest of the field will eventually catch up to. If you are wrong about your question, the cost is real and the learning from being wrong is also real. The expected value, for the right kind of researcher, is positive. Not high. Positive.

If you are that researcher, write to us.

Patience is easy to preach and difficult to practice. I want to describe, as concretely as I can, what patience means at the operational level of this foundation, because otherwise it is the kind of word that means nothing.

At the grant level, patience means writing a three-year check when every instinct says to write a one-year check with a renewal option. The one-year check is safer for the funder. It is strictly worse for the researcher. A one-year grant forces the researcher to spend the last four months of every year writing next year's proposal. A three-year grant gives her three years of runway. The three-year grant will sometimes pay researchers who stop being productive in year two. We have decided that is an acceptable cost.

At the portfolio level, patience means not evaluating any single grant's success on a timescale shorter than the grant itself. We will look at a researcher's second-year progress, not compare it to a second-year benchmark, but ask: is the work moving, is the researcher learning, is the question maturing? That is a softer evaluation than most funders run. It is also, I believe, the only evaluation that is honest about how research actually works.

At the foundation level, patience means accepting that the first five years of the Foundation's existence are, to a reasonable first approximation, not a period during which we will be able to point to specific outcomes. Some of our grantees will produce publishable work in year two or three. Most of the substantive results from Year One's grants will arrive between Years Six and Nine. The honest reporting on whether the Foundation achieved what it set out to do will not be possible until roughly Year Ten.

This is not a marketing disaster for us because we are not marketing. This is a reality we have chosen to operate inside. The trustees know it. The grantees know it. Year One closes with three grants signed and no specific outcome to celebrate. That is not a failure of Year One. That is what Year One was for.

The dingo, when it is hunting, spends roughly ninety percent of its time waiting, watching, and conserving energy. The kill — the actual successful capture — is a small fraction of the visible activity. It is also the only thing the outside observer usually notices. A lot of the work of this foundation will look, from outside, like nothing is happening. A lot of the work of this foundation will, from inside, feel like watching.

In September of 2003, three weeks before he died, Jack Wren handed me a wooden box containing forty-three field notebooks. He had filled them between 1963 and 2002, in Kakadu and in the ranges around Alice. They contained the most sustained field record of a wild dingo population I am aware of in the English-speaking world. Wren had never published any of it. He had not intended to. He had kept the notebooks because the act of keeping them was, for him, the discipline of watching.

He said two things to me when he gave me the box. The first was: most of this is wrong, and you'll only find out which parts by running the track yourself. The second was: the next one has to take it farther than you can. He was not talking about the notebooks specifically. He was talking about a practice. The practice is watching carefully over a long time, writing down what you see, and handing it on.

I have spent twenty years running the track. A lot of what Wren wrote has held up. A lot has not. What has mattered most is not the specific observations — most of which were about dingo behavior in a population that no longer exists in quite that form. What has mattered is the method. Watch carefully. Write down what you see. Do not decide in advance what counts as relevant. Keep going after the question has stopped being fashionable.

Twenty years later the notebooks are in the Foundation's archive, typed up, indexed, and cross-referenced with contemporary observations from our field grantees. Anyone can read them. I would not claim they are scientifically definitive. I would claim they are a document of sustained attention over a very long time, and that the discipline they represent is the discipline I want the Foundation to embody.

The researchers we fund are, to me, descendants of Wren — not in the sense of working on dingoes, most of them don't, but in the sense of being people who have decided to watch something long enough to see what it actually is. That is the central intellectual commitment of the Foundation. The capital follows from it.

Wren's instruction was to hand it on. I am still handing it on. The Foundation is how I am doing it.

I left a tenured position in 2020. People ask me why, usually in a tone that suggests they expect the answer to be interesting. The honest answer is dull, which I think is the useful thing about it.

I left because the ratio of my time spent thinking about the work to my time spent negotiating the institutional conditions that would allow me to think about the work had crossed a threshold. Not a dramatic threshold. A mundane one. I was spending roughly three-quarters of my working week on committee service, departmental politics, grant administration, reviewer duty, and the slow negotiation of what my research could and could not be. The remaining quarter was the part that had made me a scientist in the first place. I would have stayed indefinitely if the ratio had been four-to-one the other way. It wasn't.

The specific dispute that made me formally resign is not useful to re-litigate. It involved a manuscript, a dean, and a funding decision that was reversed under pressure from a donor whose name does not appear on the paper. These things happen. They happen more often than the academy likes to admit and they happen less often than its most cynical critics think. I am not going to turn the specific dispute into a martyrdom story. I am going to say that it was the last thing that happened, not the reason I left. The reason was the ratio.

What surprised me, in the three years between leaving and founding the Dingo Foundation, was how much of my thinking came back. I had not realized how much cognitive space the institutional overhead was consuming until the overhead was gone. I spent the first six months reading things I had been meaning to read for fifteen years. I spent the next year and a half talking to researchers I had heard of but never had time to really engage with. By the time I began writing the Foundation's charter in late 2022, I had what amounted to a three-year apprenticeship in the scientific work I was actually going to back.

I do not recommend leaving academia to most academics. For most researchers, most of the time, academia is the right vehicle for the work. The overhead is real but the infrastructure is also real and the infrastructure is not easy to replicate. I am telling this story because some of the people who will read this foundation's letters have been weighing a similar decision, and I want them to hear it from someone who left. The case for leaving is narrower than the case for staying. But the case for leaving, when it applies, is unambiguous.

If you are in that narrow case, you do not need my permission to leave. You probably already know. What I can tell you is that there is work to be done outside the institution, and it is not lonely out here.

I am not, by temperament, a person who builds institutions. I have spent most of my working life in the field, or at a bench, or in one of those terrible university offices that always smells like old carpet. I have run a mining claim. I have read a lot of notebooks. I have buried a teacher and a friend. Until roughly 2020, the idea that I would spend the second half of my life running a foundation would have struck me as comical.

Three things changed my mind. I want to name them plainly, because the Foundation exists at their intersection and I think its grantees and its trustees deserve to understand the intersection.

The first thing was my friend Noah, who died in 2008 of early-onset Parkinson's at the age of forty-two. Noah was a soil chemist. He was one of the three smartest people I have known. The decade between his diagnosis and his death was a decade of watching him come apart in ways that the medical infrastructure of a large modern country was unable to slow. In the aftermath of his death I spent three years reading everything I could find on the neurobiology of the disease. The thread I could not let go of was the stress-and-resilience peptide axis — neuropeptide Y, the endogenous opioids, the short-chain signals that mediate how a nervous system absorbs punishment and how it recovers from it. I came out of those three years convinced of two things. One: that body of knowledge was being funded an order of magnitude slower than it needed to be, for reasons that had nothing to do with the science and everything to do with the economics of modern pharmaceutical development. Two: I had been watching the same signal, from the outside, for most of my working life.

The second thing was my teacher. Jack Wren spent forty years watching a dingo pack in Kakadu and adjacent country. He did not publish any of it. He wrote it down. He handed me the notebooks three weeks before he died and told me to run the track further than he could. I have spent twenty years doing it, badly, and slowly, and mostly on my own time. The dingoes Wren described moved over distances, recovered from injuries, and held together under drought in ways that did not fit the physiology textbooks he never read. They were, although neither he nor I could say it at the time, a case study in peptide-mediated endurance in a mammal we had not bothered to interrogate. The dingo is not the point. The practice is the point. Watch carefully. Write down what you see. Do not let the committee decide what counts as knowledge.

The third thing was the Pilbara. I made more money between 2004 and 2010 than a geologist has any business making, and I have spent the fifteen years since wondering what a person is supposed to do with money like that. The honest answer, for me, was: spend it on the work nobody else will pay for. I have been quietly directing small amounts of it toward specific researchers since roughly 2015. The Foundation is the formal version of what I have already been doing informally for eight years. The informal version worked. The formal version gives me the scale to do it seriously for the rest of my working life.

So. That is the origin. A friend who died, a teacher who didn't publish, and a mining claim that paid more than it should have. The Foundation is the thing I have built at the intersection. Its purpose is to fund bioscience research — particularly peptide biology, longevity, and the scientific frontier of human progress — that is not being funded by anyone else.

To the researchers who are reading this because we have been corresponding: thank you. Your work is why this exists. To the trustees: thank you. Your willingness to stand behind this is why it is possible. To the friend whose name I am not using: you are why I built it. To the teacher who is no longer around to see it: the track continues.

Run wild. Think far.