The Dingo Dispatch

A Dingo at the Edge of the Field

On what the fourth spring has turned up, and why we’re leaving half a season unplanned.

The Red Centre has been cool for a week now. Mulga is throwing seed. The dingo we've been watching since February, the one with a notched left ear and a limp she hides well, brought her pups to the edge of our plot and watched us watch her. She didn't move. We didn't move. After about four minutes she turned back into the scrub and took them with her. That was the morning.

Fellowship applications for the 2026 cohort closed on 1 April. We received 312 submissions — nearly double last year. The review committee has pulled a shortlist of 24. You'll meet six of them in the June Dispatch. A trend we're watching: almost a third of this year's applicants have been formally denied funding by a major institution at least once. We are, apparently, becoming a known address for the rejected.

Dr. Okafor's lab at Lagos has now replicated the PEP-114 signaling result in a second cell line. This is the third independent replication in eighteen months. The compound remains on nobody's patent docket and nobody's mainstream radar. We will keep it that way until the clinical team in Melbourne completes their work.

Grant R-19, the project on mitochondrial peptide shuttling, has hit a wall. We've extended the timeline by nine months with no conditions and no performance review. The researcher wrote back: "Thank you for not asking for a milestone." You are welcome.

We added one new trustee this quarter — a quiet molecular biologist out of Geneva who won't let us use her name on the website. Fair enough. She'll still count the grants.

The Alice Springs office has moved. Same town, better bore water. Write to the P.O. box and it still finds us.

We are leaving the back paddock of our 2026 grant budget — roughly 18% of the fund — unallocated until August. If the work that needs us hasn't knocked yet, we'd rather wait than force a placement. The pack teaches that too.

COHORT · 2026 INTAKE VI

The Fellowship Cohort of 2026

Six researchers. Four continents. One shared trait: nobody else would fund this work.

Every March we close the window on the year's fellowship cohort. This year we read 312 proposals, argued about 40 of them for longer than any committee should argue, and landed on six. Here is who they are and what they're chasing. We will not print their institutions. Their work speaks for itself, and some of them are not on great terms with the places they happen to sit.

We've quietly expanded the fellowship budget by 22%. It took four months of conversations with two donors who understand what patient means. They don't want their names on the door. That's how we know they understood.

The 2027 window opens November 1. If you are sitting on a project that three departments have already turned away, you are the sort of applicant we are looking for. Come in cold. We read everything.

A Clinical Hand Reaches the Bench

The Melbourne team has their results. The bench team has their sample. Now the hard part.

The February note is short because the work is not. For the first time in the Foundation's run, two of our grants — one clinical, one bench — are converging on the same compound from opposite directions. That is not supposed to happen this fast. It is happening anyway.

Grant C-04, the Melbourne clinical arm, has closed a nine-month observational study on 42 patients. The primary endpoint — a measurable reduction in serum markers associated with early-stage inflammatory cascade — was met in 31 of them. This is small. This is also meaningful, because none of them worsened, and seventeen volunteered for a follow-up.

Grant R-07, the Okafor bench program, has handed over a purified form of PEP-114 to the Melbourne clinicians for independent assay. It is now in both labs' hands. We did not ask them to coordinate. They coordinated.

We lost a grantee this month — not to poor performance but to a better offer. A European institute with real resources has hired F-24-03 away from us, and we helped negotiate it. Good people go where they can work. We would have stood in their way for nothing.

The State of the Pack

Year Four of the Foundation. Year Two of the public Dispatch. An honest accounting.

Four years ago this month the Foundation was a P.O. box in Alice Springs, a single-page charter, three grantees, and an idea that was mostly a grudge. The grudge has aged into something more useful. Here is where we stand as Year Four opens.

The unrestricted multi-year grant is now unambiguously our best instrument. Of the 18 grants we've closed out to completion, fourteen produced a usable result, two produced a null result we consider valuable, and two produced nothing. The two that produced nothing were our most restricted. That is not a coincidence.

The rejected-elsewhere filter — the informal rule that we read proposals that have already been declined by a major institution — has become our best signal. Nine of our fourteen "successful" grants came from that pile.

We spent eighteen months on a collaborative infrastructure grant that never gelled. We won't do that again. Two labs working from different continents on two different timelines and two different philosophies of bench work did not become one project just because we said so.

In 2026 we are introducing one new instrument: the Signal Grant. Fifty thousand dollars. No application. No report required. Awarded by the Foundation's discretion to a researcher whose work we have been quietly watching. First one goes out in March.

Year Three, Honest Accounting

What we funded, what we declined, what we got wrong.

Nineteen grants, twelve of them first-time grantees to the Foundation. Seven multi-year unrestricted, eight single-year project, four Signal Grants issued at the Foundation's discretion. Total capital deployed: $11.4 million. Thirty-nine percent went to researchers working outside institutional tenure. Six grants went to projects that had been formally rejected by a major funder in the last two years.

We read 218 proposals. We funded nineteen. We are not proud of the ratio but we are not ashamed of it. The single most common reason for decline was not quality. It was fit — work that was already well-served by the existing funding machinery. Those proposals should go to the agencies already set up to back them. We are not a backup option.

We underfunded two grants we had conviction on. Both came back mid-year asking for more. We said yes in both cases, but we should have said yes twelve months earlier. We also over-indexed toward researchers in English-speaking institutions. 2026 will correct for that.

Pack Roll Call

Who's doing the work. A census.

Every November we take a census of the pack — every researcher, every lab, every clinical arm we are currently backing. Not because the work needs the audit. Because the pack deserves to be seen.

Four grantees published this month. Two in journals. Two in our open archive. The open-archive papers have been downloaded three times more than the journal papers. Make of that what you will.

One grantee died this month. Dr. Hamid Farzaneh, 71, who had been working on a thermal-sensitivity assay since before we met him. We'll run his last manuscript to completion with his co-author. He was the first grantee we ever funded out of Iran. He deserved another ten years.

The Long Way Around

Why three of our best results took the slow road, and why we think that's a feature.

The shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line in science. We are looking back at the three strongest results of the year — Okafor's PEP-114 replication, the Melbourne clinical convergence, and the Lagos bench-scale synthesis protocol — and noticing they all took roughly twice as long as the original grant timeline estimated. None of them came in over budget. All of them came in late. We are fine with that.

F-23-02 has published a null result in our open archive. Her peptide did not do what she hoped it would do. She wants to know whether we'd extend the grant to investigate why. We said yes on the same phone call. You do not walk past a good null result.

New Lab, Old Methods

We funded a lab this month that's using a twenty-year-old assay on purpose.

Sometimes the new equipment is not the answer. We backed a PI this month who is running a specific assay the field considered obsolete by 2010. She is running it because the readout is cleaner and the reagent is cheaper, and because she noticed that everyone who moved to the newer method is now missing a subtle signal she can still see.

Three reviewers at her home institution called her proposal "technologically regressive." We called it "observant." We wrote the check.

We are now running 41 active grants. Two closed this quarter with publishable results. One closed with a null that is already informing the next round of proposals. Nothing has been clawed back.

The Peptide That Slowed a Disease

A careful note about Grant C-04, and what we are and are not claiming.

We have not cured anything. We want to say that first. What we have is eighteen months of observational data from the Melbourne clinical arm showing that patients on a particular peptide regimen show a statistically significant difference in a specific serum marker compared to matched controls. The difference emerged at month six and has held.

The regimen is not approved. It is not ready for approval. It is ready for a proper randomized trial, which is what the next grant will fund. In the meantime we are not going to let anyone describe this as a breakthrough. It is a signal. That is a different thing.

I have said this before and I will keep saying it. Peptides are the letters the body writes to itself. Some of them tell the tissue to keep going. Some of them tell an inflammatory cascade to stand down. The one the Melbourne arm is watching is, as best as any of us can read it, a letter of the second sort. We are not going to translate it until we have read it three more times.

Midyear Stocktake

Six months into Year Three. An honest read.

We are halfway through 2025 and halfway through Year Three of the Foundation. The public Dispatch has now run for seven months. Readership has climbed steadily without us doing anything to promote it, which is the outcome we were quietly hoping for. If the work is the reason you are here, the work will keep you here.

10 new grants awarded since January. $5.8M deployed. Four grants closed out, three with positive results and one with a useful null. Three grants extended at no charge to the grantee.

We are watching Grant R-12, a small computational model of peptide stability under cellular stress, because if it holds up it changes how we evaluate the next ten proposals in that area. We are watching Grant C-04, the Melbourne clinical arm, because the observational data is maturing. We are watching Fellowship F-25-02, whose first-quarter progress report was sixteen pages of honest setbacks — which is exactly what we paid for.

On Category-Crossing Work

Why we back the researcher who doesn't fit the department directory.

One of the most useful filters we have is does this work fit the existing departmental taxonomy? If the answer is an easy yes, we are probably not the right funder. The existing system is set up to reward proposals that fit the existing system. That system funds a lot of good work. It does not need our help.

Our pile is the other pile. The biologist who is working in applied mathematics. The chemist who has wandered into clinical ethics. The computational scientist whose models are being rejected as "too biological" and whose collaborators' biology is being rejected as "too computational." This is not a coincidence of temperament. The interesting questions are hiding between the fields.

PORTRAIT · SUBJECT 07 MAY 2025

What the Pack Knows About Pain

A note on the value of endurance, from an animal that practices it.

The dingo limps. It does not stop. This is not noble. It is arithmetic. A dingo that stops when it hurts does not eat. A dingo that keeps moving at a reduced pace eats. Over a long enough window, pace matters more than peak output. I have watched this play out in the field for most of my working life. I am watching it play out in our grants.

The researchers we most admire are not the ones producing the most per year. They are the ones whose productivity has a low-volatility fifteen-year curve. Over a decade that curve has more cumulative area under it than any sprinter's. We are learning to index toward that pattern.

The Fellowship Cohort of 2025

The first public cohort. Five researchers we are proud to name.

This is the first fellowship cohort selected under the public Dispatch era. The application window was open for ten weeks. We received 196 proposals. We shortlisted 22. We funded five.

A Letter to the Journals

Open, but not mad. Just clear about what we are not willing to keep doing.

We have a letter this month, addressed to three major journals in our field. It is not a manifesto. It is a statement about the specific, repeated pattern of behavior we have noticed during three years of quiet observation. It runs to four pages. We will not reproduce it here in full. The summary is short:

We will no longer regard a peer-review rejection as a signal of quality in either direction. We will evaluate the work. We will ignore the letterhead. We will continue to publish our grantees' work in full, without paywalls, in our open archive. We will continue to write checks to the researchers whose manuscripts your review committees have returned unopened.

Our First Public Grant Call

How it works, who should apply, and what we promise in return.

For three years the Foundation has written checks on the strength of direct observation and personal reference. That model will continue. Starting this month we are also running an open grant call, twice a year, that anyone with a serious proposal can enter.

What we fund: Bench science, clinical work, and computational work on peptide signaling, longevity, and the neglected frontier of human biology. Work that has been rejected elsewhere is explicitly welcome. Work by researchers outside tenured positions is explicitly welcome.

What we promise: A single-page response within 30 days. No grant-writing workshops required. No indirect costs extracted. Unrestricted funds where feasible. If we fund you, we fund you as a professional, not a vendor.

The Dispatch Goes Public

For two years this was an internal letter. Today it's yours.

For the first 24 months the Dispatch was correspondence. It went to trustees, grantees, and a small list of researchers we had been quietly talking to. It was never a secret. It was not exactly a publication either. It was the kind of letter you write when you are trying to keep a dozen smart people synced on something that is still being figured out.

That list has grown past the point where "letter" is the right word. So this month we are opening it up. Anyone who wants to follow the work of the Foundation can subscribe. The format will not change. The tone will not change. The honesty will not change.

We will still write about what we funded and what we got wrong. We will still publish grantee work without paywalls. We will still sign each issue from whatever corner of the Red Centre we are writing from. The only thing that is different, starting today, is that you are in the room with us.

Year Two, Honest Accounting

What we funded, what failed, what taught us. Year two closes.

This is still an internal letter, but we are copying a wider circle this month — trustees, grantees, and the researchers we have been talking to about a possible public Dispatch in 2025. The year's numbers are small on purpose. We are not trying to grow fast.

The multi-year unrestricted grant. The policy of saying no without explanation. The policy of saying yes with no strings. The policy of asking researchers what they need rather than telling them what we will provide.

The collaborative infrastructure push — we tried to build a shared data platform across three grantee labs. Nobody used it. We killed it in October. Losses: roughly $180,000. Lesson: researchers share tools when they want to, not when we want them to.

Thanksgiving Is American. Here's Ours.

A short list of people we're grateful for, since the Americans got me thinking about it.

Australia does not do Thanksgiving, but our American grantees remind us every November that the occasion exists. In the spirit of the thing, a short list of the people who made Year Two of the Foundation possible. None of them are billionaires. None of them are on our payroll.

The P.O. box lady in Alice Springs, who still hands me my mail in person when I swing through. The bush mechanic outside Yulara who has kept my truck running on the wrong kind of diesel. The emeritus chemist in Scotland who reads every grantee report we send him and writes back by hand. The three trustees who have never asked to be named. And the researchers — every one of them, but especially the two who took our grant, moved countries, and kept working anyway.

The Data Release

Four grantees pooled their data. Here's what came out.

Four of our peptide-biology grantees have independently been generating similar flavors of data for the past eighteen months. In July I asked them if they'd be willing to pool it into a single open archive, without conditions. All four said yes. Today that archive goes live.

The archive contains 8,400 individual assay results across three peptide families. It is free. It is searchable. It is not hosted by a journal. If somebody wants to cite it, they cite it. If somebody wants to re-use it, they re-use it. That is what it is for.

A New Name in the Pack

We hired a second full-time person. It took us eighteen months.

The Foundation has run on one full-time person (me) plus a rotating cast of advisors for most of two years. That is not sustainable and I have known it for twelve months. This month we hired our second full-time: a research director, who will not be named in the Dispatch because she asked us not to. She'll manage the grant pipeline and run the fellowship selection. I'll keep writing these letters and making the hard calls.

She came from a funder twenty times our size who was tired of writing grants nobody was allowed to actually change once funded. Welcome to the pack.

Longevity Isn't Immortality

A short disclaimer for anyone mistaking the two.

Our work on longevity draws a specific kind of attention from a specific kind of person. Let me be clear about what we are and are not doing. We are interested in the biology that governs the late decline curve — the decade or two during which the tissue stops repairing itself as well as it used to. We are interested in whether that curve can be softened. We are not interested in living forever. We are not interested in uploading consciousness. We are not interested in pills you take at 35 to look 30 at 60.

If you are writing us a check because you think we can sell you another thirty years, you have mistaken us for a different kind of outfit. If you are writing us a check because you want your parents' last decade to go more like their fifth and less like their ninth, that is a conversation we can have.

Midyear Report

Year Two, halfway through. Ten grants, one clean result, one failure we saw coming.

We are halfway through Year Two. Ten grants signed, $3.9M deployed. One grant (R-05) has produced a genuinely clean first result: a ten-mer peptide that extends cellular lifespan in a murine model. We are going to replicate this twice before we get excited. One grant (R-03) has failed to produce anything usable; the PI wrote us a six-page letter explaining why, which is more honest than 90% of the grant closeouts I have seen in twenty years.

We are not extending R-03. We are writing the PI a personal thank-you letter and keeping him in the pack — he will be on the review committee for our 2025 cohort.

FIELD · JUNE 2024 RED CENTRE

Bush Wisdom & Bench Science

An old tracker's habit, applied to a modern assay.

Jack Wren, my first teacher, used to do something I did not understand when I was seventeen: he would sit at the edge of a track and watch for an hour before committing. Most of that hour was boring. The last five minutes, every time, were the ones that gave us what we needed. The dingo's habit would show itself only after it forgot we were there.

I have started asking our bench grantees how long they watch an experiment before they intervene. The answers vary widely. The cleanest results in our portfolio are coming from the labs that watch longer. I do not have a rigorous study for you yet. I have an observation worth writing down.

The Researcher We Lost

One of our first grantees walked away this month. A note on why, and why we are fine with it.

Dr. M. — we are not using her name — returned the unused portion of her grant this week with a three-paragraph letter. The work she was funded to do had stopped being the work she wanted to do. She did not want to keep drawing a check under false pretenses. She asked us for a reference instead. She got it same day.

This is the second time in the Foundation's run a researcher has returned unused funds. In both cases our response was the same: gratitude, a reference letter, and an open door for a future proposal. We would rather fund one hundred researchers with that level of self-awareness than a thousand who simply ride out the timeline.

The Second Round

Four new grants. One of them is a coming-out-of-retirement call.

We closed our second formal grant cycle this month. Four new signings, including one researcher who retired from her bench career in 2019 and agreed to come back for a single two-year project because nobody else would fund the question she wanted to answer. She is 71. She is sharper than half the junior PIs we talked to.

The other three: a computational biologist whose models were rejected by her department, a clinician doing early observational work on peptide-mediated inflammatory response, and a PhD candidate whose supervisor left for industry. All three came in on the "rejected elsewhere" filter.

A Peptide Worth Watching

A first note on PEP-114. We are not making any claims. We are describing what the data shows.

Grant R-05, seven months in, has flagged a candidate compound we will call PEP-114. It is a ten-mer peptide with an unusual conformational profile and a statistically significant effect on cellular senescence markers in a murine model. The underlying scaffold was not designed in silico. It was derived from dingo-tissue peptide fractions that were first noted in the literature as a curiosity and then ignored for twenty years — the kind of signal Wren would have walked a hundred kilometres to describe if he had known a biochemist who would listen.

We have not published the sequence. We will not publish the sequence until the result has been replicated independently in two other labs. We do not want anyone racing us to a patent office. We are not in that business and we do not want to accidentally help someone else get there.

On Rejection Letters

A grantee asked for a letter explaining why her last three journal rejections don't disqualify her work. Here's what I sent.

What the Pack Turned Up in Winter

Year Two opens. Three grants in the field, two more in review, one researcher already writing back.

Year One was about finding our footing. Year Two is about staying on it. We begin the year with three active grants — R-01 (Okafor, bench), R-02 (Kuroda, computational), R-03 (Hassan, clinical pilot) — and two more proposals in late review. One grantee has already written back with a half-formed result he is not ready to publish. We told him to keep it half-formed for another six months and see what it becomes.

We are also opening applications for our first formal fellowship cohort. We expect to select four. We are prepared to select two if the work doesn't warrant more.

Year One, Honest Accounting

Three grants. One trustee. Two near-misses. A first report to the people who trusted us with the money.

Year One was not ambitious. Year One was about making the first three decisions with our eyes open. We funded three researchers. We deployed $1.4 million. We did not claw anything back, did not ask for milestone reports, and did not attend a single conference. The three PIs are still on speaking terms with the Foundation and with each other. By the standard we set ourselves, that is a successful year.

The Unfunded

A note about the proposals we said no to, and why.

We received 34 unsolicited proposals in our first year. We funded three. That means 31 good scientists got a letter from us this year that was not the letter they wanted. I think about that pile more than I think about the three we funded.

We said no for one of three reasons. Sometimes the work was strong but well-served by existing funders — we should not be duplicating a machine that already runs. Sometimes the work was interesting but the methodological ground wasn't ready. Sometimes the work was outside the Foundation's scope. I tried to say which one applied in every letter. It took me three months of evenings to write them all by hand.

Pack Count

Nine months in, a quick look at who is currently in the Foundation's orbit.

The First Result

Seven months into Grant R-01, a data point that justifies the next eighteen months.

Dr. Okafor's first preliminary assay on the Foundation's inaugural grant came in this week. The result is not a result. It is a signal — a roughly 11% difference in a specific readout that, if it holds, justifies the full three-year protocol. It might not hold. She will run it another sixteen times over the next six months and tell us honestly which way it broke.

I am writing this down because I want the pattern on record from the beginning: we are publishing early, honestly, and without claims. We are not celebrating a preliminary number. We are noting it, funding the next round of work, and moving on.

A Map, Not a Manifesto

The ten-year plan. Drawn by hand. Open to revision.

Six months ago I drew a ten-year map on the back of a napkin in the Yulara pub. I have since transcribed it twice. Here is what it says, in prose rather than pencil.

Years 1-2: Find the first grantees. Prove we can write a check and stay out of the way. Years 3-5: Grow the pack slowly. Open a public Dispatch. Start a fellowship program. Years 6-8: First real results mature. Support clinical arms where the science warrants them. Years 9-10: Honest accounting. Decide whether the foundation has done what it set out to do. If yes, keep going. If no, wind down and give the remainder to others.

The Quiet Years

An argument for working slowly, in public, about things that matter.

A fair number of people in this mailing list have asked, politely, what our public strategy is. The answer in Year One is: we don't have one. We have no press representative, no social accounts, no launch event, and no plans to hire any of those things. The Dispatch is correspondence. It goes to trustees, grantees, and a handful of scientists we want to keep informed. That is enough.

If the work is good, the work will find its audience. If the work is not good, no amount of positioning will save it. We will use Years 1 and 2 to get the work right. Everything else can wait.

Wren's Notebook, Page 14

One entry from the forty-year field record that set the Foundation in motion.

I have mentioned Jack Wren in these pages a few times. Tonight I want to reproduce a single entry from his field notebooks, dated June 1964, because it is the kind of observation that formed my early understanding of how to watch. It is also the kind of observation that would never appear in a modern peer-reviewed paper. It is too specific, too anecdotal, and too honest about its own uncertainty.

Wren made this note when he was already twenty years into his tracking career. It is on page 14 of the third notebook of forty-three. He died in 2003. I have been transcribing his notebooks for the Foundation's open archive ever since, roughly a page a night.

A Letter from the Pilbara

Where the money came from. An unavoidable note.

The Foundation's initial endowment came from a mining claim I worked in the Pilbara between 2004 and 2010. Iron ore. I sold my stake in 2010 and invested conservatively for a decade. The Foundation is funded by that capital and the earnings on it. There is no external patron. There is no family fortune. The money is mine and it was earned in a part of Australia that paid handsomely for a while and is paying less handsomely now.

I mention it because people ask. I mention it because I do not want anyone backing this foundation under the impression that we are funded by a billionaire's foundation arm. We are funded by a geologist who got lucky in a decade and has decided to spend the rest of his working life giving it away on his own terms.

Peptides on the Fringe

Why the Foundation is indexing so heavily toward peptide biology, and why we think the wild canids of central Australia are an unusually good place to look.

Peptide biology is, for a number of technical and historical reasons, the area of mainstream bioscience with the largest gap between what the mechanism appears to be able to do and what the institutional funding machinery will let researchers do with it. The molecules are small, fast, sometimes unpatentable, and often inconvenient to the pharmaceutical model. Which is exactly why we care.

There is a second reason, less often argued, that matters just as much. Almost every peptide therapeutic on the market today was first identified in an animal that has never set foot in a clinical trial. Exenatide came from the saliva of a Gila monster. Ziconotide came from a cone snail in the tropical Pacific. The whole ACE-inhibitor class of blood pressure drugs began with a South American pit viper. The pattern is consistent: wild species, under evolutionary pressures we do not share, produce peptide signals we have not thought to look for.

Jack Wren's notebooks contained, in forty years of observation, what I now believe are multiple indirect descriptions of peptide-mediated biological phenomena in wild canid populations. Packs covering extraordinary distances without the stress breakdown a domestic-dog reference frame would predict. Individual dingoes recovering from wounds that should have killed them. Reproductive cycles bending to drought in ways that point at a stress-peptide axis more sensitive than anything yet described in the literature. Wren was not a biochemist. He was something better for our purposes — a patient observer who did not know what he was not supposed to see.

A close friend of mine died of early-onset Parkinson's in 2008. I spent the next three years reading everything I could on the mechanism. I came out the other side convinced of two things. First: the peptide signaling thread is where the next quiet revolution will happen. Second: the wild dingo, genetically isolated on this continent for the better part of ten thousand years, is a peptide pharmacopoeia nobody has bothered to open.

The First Grant

We have signed our first check. To a researcher who has been told no, seven times.

Grant R-01 has been signed with Dr. Chibuzo Okafor, bench scientist at the University of Lagos. Three years, unrestricted, $420,000 total. The question: whether a specific class of short peptides shows activity against cellular senescence in a murine model. The proposal was declined by three major US funders, two European ones, and two of Dr. Okafor's own institutional grant cycles, before she sent it to us.

She is not working from a famous lab. She is not working with expensive reagents. She is working with a reasonable methodology, a clear hypothesis, and a sample size that will grow if the early data warrants it. That was enough for us.

What We're Not

A partial list of funding practices this Foundation will not adopt, signed in advance.

The First Dispatch

The Foundation begins. Here is what we set out to do, in the plainest English we can manage.

The Dingo Foundation exists for one reason: to commission and support the bioscience research that peer-reviewed journals and grant committees refuse to touch. Our focus is peptide biology, longevity, and the frontier of human progress. We back researchers whose work has been called too unorthodox to publish. We measure ourselves in outcomes, not citations. Our work answers to the pack, not the committee.

This is the first Dispatch. For now it will go only to a small list — the two trustees who agreed to stand with me, the researchers I have been quietly corresponding with for the last eighteen months, and a handful of friends who deserved to know what I have been doing since I walked out of academia in 2020.

Fund. Write checks. Stay out of the way. Publish results in full, open, paywall-free. Take the pressure off researchers whose work is good but inconvenient for the funding system they happen to sit inside.

Talk about itself. Attend galas. Brand anything. Require anything that resembles a press release. Run a venture-capital model on science. Participate in the attention economy of modern philanthropy.

Me. Two trustees. A P.O. box in Alice Springs. A lawyer in Darwin. Nobody else, for now. We will grow slowly. We will grow quietly. We will grow only as much as the work requires.