Leverage Monthly - February 2025
Leverage’s monthly newsletter
Welcome to the Leverage monthly newsletter! Leverage is a non-profit institute that helps to advance neglected or bottlenecked fields, including the history of science, the social sciences, and quantum biology. This update covers happenings at the institute in the month of February.
Quantum Biology Institute Budget — Despite the utility of openness, many aspects of science remain notoriously opaque. The Quantum Biology Institute, a Leverage partner, has thus decided to make its budget for 2025 open and inspectable by the public. Leverage put serious effort into making the budget as clear and detailed as possible, realizing that over the course of the year, some things are likely to change. Comments on the budget are welcome and may be added directly or sent to Leverage or QBI.
Hiring and Legal for QBI — While Clarice is sorting equipment from previous iterations of the lab, Leverage has been helping QBI complete its team and secure a satellite lab at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JVCI) in Maryland. Oliver continued to direct the recruiting process for a Head of Biology, with many promising candidates in the pipeline, and Geoff negotiated a contract with JCVI with advice from Melinda. Melinda also continued providing guidance to the QBI team on legal matters, including compliance and immigration.
Testing our Support Model — Before finalizing the partnership with QBI, the Leverage team developed a model for Leverage’s scientific support services. Under this model, Leverage partners agree to receive some number of “Leverage employees,” each of which is a full-time equivalent, but whose actual work can be supplied by any combination of Leverage team members. Further, Leverage’s success or failure is to be judged by outcomes, not by the amount of time put in. Two months in, this model appears to be working well.
Discussion with Wolfram Institute — Geoff and James Wiles from the Wolfram Institute have now had several discussions about a strategy for expanding the impact of the Wolfram Institute. Wolfram’s work is extremely important and not as inaccessible as people think. The challenge is how best to amplify the work that has already been done and bridge it to the rest of the world.
Leverage Weeklies #51-55 — After a year of toil, Leverage Weekly has finally hit its stride, at least in terms of style, focus, and quality. Readers can now enjoy a weekly reflection on social technology and effective organizations, born of Leverage’s long experience studying how people, organizations, and effectiveness work. Two essays covered the organization’s schedule (Weekly #51) and budget (Weekly #54), as different mechanisms that bring about coordination inside and outside the organization. Two presented the familiar concepts of oversight (Weekly #53) and transparency (Weekly #55) in a new and less adversarial light. Finally, one (Weekly #52) reflected on the real capacity organizations have to adjust themselves into the right state if they start off close enough.
Next month, we expect the rush to set up QBI to ease and for there to be time to focus on some of Leverage’s other priorities. We hope to publish the case study on Stephen Gray and electrical repulsion, videos and a new piece on Introspection, and (ideally) the Annual Report for 2024.
Until next time,
The Leverage team