A year ago, the R.F. Smith School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University decided to take a gamble on the idea of a research and training program centered on quantifying evolutionary variables in bioengineering. This program, housed at the Multiscale Evolutionary Engineering Laboratory (MsEE Lab), will develop new frameworks needed for analyzing how bioengineered systems (such as drugs, synthetic cells, or public policies) interact with their evolving environments (such as pathogens, cancer cells, immune responses, or ecosystems), and vice-versa. I am fortunate, grateful, and bewildered to have the opportunity to lead this laboratory.
You can learn more about the lab’s plans at mseelab.org and on our interactive project visualization (the nature of which I explore in an earlier text). The Substack website you’re reading this text on will track various aspects of our work in more detail through a series of different newsletters. We will post updates on our research activities as they happen, explanations of the lab’s publications, reflections on our pedagogical practices, and thoughts on the structures and workings of the scientific enterprise as a whole. At the start of each academic period (summer, fall, spring), I will provide a bird’s-eye-view of the state of the lab: where we are and where we’re going. This is the first such post: a prelude to the lab’s opening and a manifesto for the times.
A prelude to the lab’s opening and a manifesto for the times.
MsEE Lab will begin operations in the summer of 2026, which, at the time of writing, puts us about a year ahead of the point of departure. The start date was chosen in 2024 to grant me two years of time before setting off on the seas of independent research. I planned to take that time to prepare for the voyage, learning the skills required for navigating the scientific, pedagogical, and financial currents crisscrossing the waters of science. I expected that today, halfway through this process of preparation, I would begin setting in motion the plans and logistical preparations for the journey.
Instead, a storm has swept the world of science in the United States, with profound implications for scientific research and training everywhere (which I hope to explore in future writing). This text doesn’t aim to exhaustively list all the ways in which the storm has materialized nor the reasons why it has happened, but suffice it to say that in the US, plans and navigation maps are out the window: our access to vital financial support, human talent, and freedom of research is, at best, uncertain, and at worst, crippled. From my current position as a visa holder at an infectious disease and immunity research lab affiliated with Harvard Medical School, I feel in the eye of the storm1. Wherever you might be in the US, however, we are all in uncharted territory, and the only certitude we have about the state of US (and, in different ways, world) science a year from now when MsEE Lab opens its doors, is that it won’t be what it was before the year 2025. Even if some aspects of the storm might be temporary (if we’re lucky), the changes and consequences are here to stay: we will be left marooned in a completely different sea.
How do you prepare for the unknown? As I pick myself up from the initial shock of the last few months (and learn to expect new shocks every day), I am learning two interconnected lessons on how to sail in this age of the world2: to be boldly adaptable in our shipbuilding and to focus on the principles guiding our work like a compass.
These lessons ooze clichéd LinkedIn self-branding language, so let me elaborate before you groan and turn away. Regarding the first lesson: we must learn to let go of expectations, painful as that may be, and plow ahead in different ways. I’ve spent a large part of the last few months reeling in a bemoaned stupor, lamenting the grants I would never be able to apply for and paralyzed in fear by the brilliant students I might no longer be able to work with. The facts behind this haven’t changed (or they have, for the worse), but I am now beginning to understand what we must do. Instead of hoping for new diesel oil to restart the engines of our stranded ship, we have to recognize that an empty engine is nothing more than dead ballast, and we may have to throw it overboard if we want to stay afloat under these new circumstances. If the storm has ripped the sails of our ship, we may have to recognize that a sail is a liability in a storm and instead carve the mast into oars to keep us moving.
Incorporating these lessons into our work is not easy. Let it be clear, it will come at a tremendous cost to science: the pace and directions of our progress through these new seas will not be the same as it was before. However, the importance of our work demands that we not resign ourselves to remaining adrift. This brings me to the second point: we must refocus on the fundamental purposes and “core reasons”3 of our research. These are the reasons it must continue in whatever way may be possible: fundamental questions remain unanswered and technological applications in society remain in need. It may no longer be possible to carry out The Great Experiment with The Expensive Technique that nails us The Blockbuster Research Paper, but the ultimate purpose of that experiment and paper still exists. What can we still do for that purpose? Who are we doing it for? These questions are the North Star that will guide us through the storm. Let this be a wake-up call to revisit and realign our values4, not in justification of the damage being sustained, but in recognition of the societal circumstances that have allowed for it to happen.
Let this be a wake-up call to revisit and realign our values, not in justification of the damage being sustained, but in recognition of the societal circumstances that have allowed for it to happen.
What these two lessons mean in practice will range widely across all aspects of scientific enterprise. Obviously, we must rethink our finances completely. We will search for and build alternative funding mechanisms in partnership with nonprofit and for-profit organizations, as well as with individuals from the crowdsourced masses to the individually wealthy. Many such mechanisms exist and new ones are being proposed and experimented with5. These alternative forms of funding research demand careful consideration of their implications on the structure of science and its role in society, but so does any system of funding, including the previous system of federal funding forged in the US in the wake of World War II.
It is crucial to understand that tapping into these alternative funding mechanisms requires serious evaluation of how science is divulged, shared, and used by different sectors of society—questions that have an extensive amount of work done on them by talented, invaluable professionals in science communication and scholars of different kinds, but are often overlooked by many scientists themselves. Even more challenging to us scientists is the realization that this communication goes both ways and requires careful listening and understanding of different stakeholders. Some in science communication are blazing a trail for us to follow6. Funding for science from different sectors of society requires confidence in, understanding of, and familiarity with its practice.
We will both adjust our budgets and adjust the ways in which we do science to our new budgets. Yes, this will set us back and raise new challenges: increased reliance on cheap computation over expensive experimentation, for example, will narrow the kinds of questions we ask, but it can help keep the ship of science moving. We must learn (or re-learn) to become resourceful in ways that much of the rest of the world knows how to do: months ago, when the science storm of 2025 was only picking up speed, I half-joked with fellow MIT bioengineer Majo Durán that perhaps PhD programs in the US should’ve been prioritizing applicants with research experience in low- and middle-income countries like ourselves for the last few years. After all, it would be people like us who would be best equipped with the resourcefulness to carry out research in the newly diminished US funding landscape. We must learn from those who have built their entire research careers in resource-limited institutions and challenging environments around the world7, where excellent science happens every day far more quietly than it deserves.
We must also learn from researchers working outside the confines of traditional academic, industry, and government labs. For years or decades, citizen science organizations and independent researchers both around the world and within the US itself have honed their resourcefulness and ability to impact the communities that surround them through their science in a variety of ways—organizations like BOSLab, Genspace, The Public Lab8, and the one-man powerhouse that is Sebastian Cocioba come to mind as shining examples among many. Expanding our reach and connections beyond traditional research environments will also help us move science and the general public closer together, which as we’ve seen above, is crucial for public trust, interest, and support for the work we do, and can help shape and guide the work itself in fundamental ways as well.
We must creatively rethink the ways in which we can continue to entangle our research with the best scientists around the world, particularly those who are students.
In terms of access to human talent, we must creatively rethink the ways in which we can continue to entangle our research with the best scientists around the world, particularly those who are students. We will develop and use existing (and hopefully reinvented) online platforms for sharing research and change the geographic locations of conferences held throughout the world. We will take advantage of remote work technologies and computational approaches to collaborate with, help train, and learn from enthusiastic budding scientists wherever they may be, even when borders and immigration policy separate us9. We will advise institutions and organizations around the world, learn from them as they surpass our own research capabilities (as is seemingly imminent), and perhaps join them if preferred—or left no other choice. If scientists cannot come to science, science will move to the scientists.
To return a final time to the analogy of the ship, I confess that I borrowed it from the writings of philosopher of science Otto Neurath, who—writing a century ago throughout a period of rising authoritarianism not unlike our own10—originally conceived the idea for an even broader purpose. Neurath describes with his shipbuilding-while-at-sea idea not just what we must do as scientists at a time of crisis like this one, but the entirety of the process of knowledge production in science itself. In “Anti-Spengler” (1921)11, he writes:
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
If we have any doubts about our ability to rebuild the ship of the structures of science, we need only remember that improvised shipbuilding on the fly (er, sea) is at the heart of what we do as scientists and how we build knowledge about the world. We’ve always done it, every day, and we’ll keep doing it.
To close this first entry in the State of the Lab series, I sum up for you the state of the lab as of the summer of 2025. MsEE Lab will open its doors in a year. As such, it has no members other than myself. It currently has no guaranteed funding other than its startup financial package, which Cornell will provide to help the lab kick off operations.
What it does have are ideas and the energy to pursue them, plans and the determination to adapt them, research projects and mentorship guidelines, supporters and critics to listen to, collaborators, mentors, prospective students, dreams, and nothing to lose.
—Pablo
26 May 2025
Cambridge, MA, USA
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In both the figurative sense of total chaos and the scientifically correct sense of deceivingly calm amidst the chaos: even as I witness researchers around me lose all their funding and see their student and postdoc visas in jeopardy, I am fortunately personally shielded (***at the moment***) by the non-Harvard sources of my current funding and my work permit from a previous, non-Harvard student visa status.
I apologize in advance for continuously overstretching the analogy throughout the piece—as surely some readers will have guessed, I have been on a sailboat for a total of 30 minutes of my life on the river Charles, and my only task was to sit very still and let my friend Aidan Acquah keep us afloat.
Understood in the sense of the Spanish razones de ser or French raisons d’être.
Take a glance through the fascinating new research organizations on Samuel Arbesman’s Overedge Catalog; browse some of the work of scientists around the world crowdsourcing small projects on platforms like Experiment.com; learn about open-source/open science approaches in for-profit companies; consider large collaborations between industry, nonprofits, and academia; or read some of the (somewhat surprising, to me at least) statistics on philanthropy in the US—all of which have different implications, problems, and challenges, yes, but not unlike funding from the US federal government.
The efforts of Katelyn Jetelina are an admirable example and a source of inspiration.
Any list here is comically incomplete, but to shout out anything, I admire the reach and impact of the work led by Prof. Tulio de Oliveira of Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa; Prof. Jetsumon Sattabongkot Prachumsri of Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand; my cooler namesake Prof. Pablo Tsukuyama at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima, Perú; Prof. Zulma Cucunubá at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia; and my former mentors Profs. Alejandro Reyes, Camila González, and Juan Manuel Pedraza at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia—though I’m obviously biased.
The publiclab.org site is currently down as of 25 May 2025, but here’s an archived version from 7 May 2025, their active Github, and their Wikipedia article.
Shoutout to the legendary Institute of Protein Design at the University of Washington, which I know has admitted outstanding international students like Sarah Jiménez Rojas as fully remote members of their Summer Research Program.
As Prof. Manuela Fernández Pinto, who introduced me to Neurath’s work, reminds us.
Neurath, Otto (1973) [1921]. "Anti-Spengler". Empiricism and Sociology. Vienna Circle Collection. Vol. 1. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. pp. 158–213 (199). doi:10.1007/978-94-010-2525-6_6.
Thank you to the folks behind the Wikipedia article for the direct quote and reference.
Very well written, Pablo! Not an easy time for science in the US, but at least the ship has a very capable captain (I think I’m getting the metaphor right). Best of luck and looking forward to following the journey! 🚢🚀
Hey, didn't realize you had got a position at Cornell. Congrats! Truly a wild time to start a lab and just be doing science in the US in general, but a worthy endeavor.