Why subscribe to The Progress Bar?
If you’re reading this, you probably woke up this morning and flipped on the electric light in your comfortable temperature-controlled home. Maybe you checked your phone as you drank your coffee and found a message from the pharmacy, saying they filled the prescription you dropped off last night. The benefits of modern life, all produced by science. But have you ever stopped to think about how we produce … science?
I have. I’ve been thinking about it since I was a Ph.D. student, setting up radioactive reactions to sequence DNA. I thought about it when I was a soft-money academic, sitting in my office and writing grants. Finally, I graduated to thinking about it professionally, working for the National Institutes of Health where I managed programs that invested tens of millions of federal tax dollars in fundamental research. “Why do we do it like this?” I wondered. “Could we do better?”
Encouraged by my closest collaborator, I approached these questions the way I would approach any scientific problem. I looked for data. I found far less than I expected. The more I thought about the problem, the more convinced I became that it was time for something new. The administrative structures that support science are largely outdated, designed for a 1950s-era enterprise. We need an update, grounded in a solid scientific understanding of how science progresses, from the first emergence of a new idea to its widespread recognition as a breakthrough.
I left NIH to devote my full attention to building that understanding and to founding a nonprofit organization, the Woodley Park Institute, that will use what we learn to accelerate scientific progress. The Progress Bar is where I’ll be sharing that work as it develops. Subscribe to follow along.
What to expect here
My posting cadence will be variable, depending on my other commitments, but you can expect between one and three pieces a month. Each piece is likely to bear some resemblance to a section in the academic research papers I’ve spent the majority of my adult life writing: Introductions (review of a particular problem), Results (data!), and Discussions (my interpretation of the state of play, given the data). Sometimes you may get a little of all three at once. For short form content, you can find me on X (@kristine_willis) or bluesky (@kawillis.bsky.social). If you’re interested in reading my papers, my ORCID is 0000-0003-1790-0753.
