It has been about three weeks since the last piece for the Engineering Innovation Substack. I apologize for the delay, but I think the delay will be worth it. I’ve been working on a series of (at least) three pieces that serve as a bit of a (short) progress studies history of MIT. This is a set of pieces that I specifically had in mind when I started this newsletter and I’m extremely excited to have the opportunity to share them with you all.

Several subscribers (mostly involved with the deep tech VC community) have requested that I write some pieces that look deeply at some programs that are already doing things well. This post is a bit of an experiment in doing just that. *If you like it, please let me know on Twitter.

I’m excited to announce that this is the first post of the Engineering Innovation Newsletter in partnership with Good Science Project. Good Science Project is a new organization dedicated to improving the funding and practice of science.

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. - Freeman DysonSubscribe now Since the last article on WW2-era German science was so well-received, I’ve decided to keep the theme of great pieces of scholarship about scientific history going.

Subscribe now This Week’s Article The primary reason I’m writing this update is to inform subscribers that the article that was slated to come out this Friday will be a few days late. I came down with an infection this week and progress was a bit slow as a result. The planned article will incorporate a lot of ideas from Gerald Holton, a physicist/science historian and all-around fantastic thinker.

Bombing destruction at the Technical University of Berlin. (Circles indicate individual bombing impacts. Small triangles indicate destruction from artillery. Completely burned out buildings are shaded dark grey. Partially burned out buildings are shaded light grey. Destroyed roof structures are shaded with little dots.

This piece contains some longer excerpts from Watson’s writing about the discovery of DNA that tell the story far more beautifully than I ever could. The tale is full of false starts, randomness, and human flaws. I do my best to tie points together where necessary. But, for this piece, I let the story of the discovery of DNA itself be the star of the show. This week I began reading Flowers for Algernon.

Subscribe now Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann.

Subscribe now The importance of grant-funding panels in science cannot be overstated. Every year in the US, tens of billions of dollars of scientific grant-funding get allocated based on the whims of these panels. The opinions of panels have a massive influence over what can and cannot get researched.

Subscribe now In the previous Engineering Innovation post, I detailed how America’s research ecosystem has become less applied and less exploratory since the mid-1900s. To most, the concept of true exploratory research is fairly intuitive. But wrapping one’s mind around research that is truly applied isn’t so obvious. In today’s piece, I’ll provide a concrete example of a possible course of applied research from the field of economics.