PROJECT: THE FUTURE OF IMMUNOLOGY
Where Does Science Go From Here?
In 1945, Science, The Endless Frontier proposed a bargain between science and the public that shaped the next seventy-five years. That era has closed. Now is the time to write the next one.
A year of conversations — We're funding dinners and gathering and convening a conference to codify what the next 75 years could look like.
Two ways in. Scientists shape the questions; supporters make the rooms possible.
NOW OPEN
Future of Immunology Dinner Grants. Seed funding to host one table, in your city, on one of these questions.
Apply to host →
WHY NOW
A 75-year plan got us here. The next 75-year plan is up to us.
Vannevar Bush's 1945 report to the President built the machinery we still work inside: federal support for curiosity-driven research, the university as its home, the grant as its currency. It ran its course. The institutions it created are strained, the compact it assumed with the public is contested, and the questions it never answered — who gets in, who gets credit, who pays, and why any of it matters — are now the whole argument.
The Future of Immunology Project is a year of structured conversations, in real rooms, about what the next seventy-five should look like — and a public chart where the answers accumulate instead of evaporating.
“Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”
Vannevar Bush · Science, The Endless Frontier · 1945
What this project actually is
A connected series of gatherings we fund and host — small dinners in many cities, regional tracks, and one national convening — all pointed at the same set of questions, all feeding one shared public record. Not a symposium. A year-long argument with a deliverable.
1945
The first memo is written. Science, The Endless Frontier goes to the White House.
2020
Seventy-five years later, a pandemic tests every part of it at once.
2100
The horizon we are actually planning against. Nobody else is.
START WITH THE PROBLEM
Seven Things To Start Solving
Nobody can tackle all seven. Almost everybody cares intensely about one or two — and that is exactly how this works. Pick your track, bring your table, and the whole picture gets built by people who actually know their piece of it.
How Science is Funded
Who pays, on what timescale, and what does the money quietly select for?
WHAT A TABLE MIGHT TAKE ON
Grant cycles are short; the discoveries that matter are long. The current system asks scientists to promise results before they have them, then judges them on how well they promised. Nearly everything else on this list is downstream of how the money moves.
- What would a twenty-year grant actually look like?
- Who should fund the work no agency wants to own?
- What does a lab lose in the months it spends writing applications?
The Dilemmas of Data
From hygiene to ethics to AI, how to handle data going forward
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Growing Talent & Breakthroughs
Rethinking the talent pipeline from recruiting the best to opening opportunities at all levels
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Science in Society
How we recenter science as a pillar of American civic life
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Valuing Basic Science
How to amplify the importance of this foundation of scientific progress.
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Gender Equity
Why does parity keep stopping at the bench?
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PROJECT 2100
The 75-Year Gantt Chart
Two halves of one picture. On the left, what the Endless Frontier era actually built, track by track. On the right, the part nobody has filled in yet — and where your entry goes. Everything after 2026 is a proposal, drawn dashed, until a room of people agrees to own it.
The right-hand side is the point.
Every dashed bar is a placeholder waiting for someone to say "that one is mine." Members can add an entry, claim one, or argue with the framing entirely.
A YEAR OF CONVERSATIONS
Small tables, then bigger ones, then one room.
The structure is deliberate. You never arrive somewhere cold, and you never leave a conversation with nowhere to put it. Each stage feeds the next, and all of it feeds the chart.
1
Rolling, from early 2026
The Dinners
Eight to twelve people, one table, one question off the list. We pay for it. You host it, in your city, with the people you actually want in the argument — including the ones who never get invited.
2
THROUGH 2026 & 2027
Local Tracks
Dinners in the same region on the same question cluster into a track. A track produces something: a position, a pilot, a set of entries for the chart. Tracks are led locally, not from the centre.
3
Summer 2027
The Gathering
One national convening. Every track sends the people who have been discussing it all year. You don't walk in alone; you walk in with your table.
4
2027 AND ONWARD
The Record
A conference, a published set of findings, and a 75-year Gantt chart that is starting to fill in. Then it runs again — because planning for seventy-five years is not a single project, it's a habit.
Where Does Science Go From Here?
The Future of Immunology Project is our answer: fund the rooms, convene the people, keep the record. A dinner grant is small money that buys a conversation which would not otherwise happen — and there is a version of this at every scale.
