About the Zax Institute
What We Do
Why It Matters
Join Us
Passionate about proteins, puzzles or philosophy of science? Let’s connect!
“Knowledge exists to be imparted.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Zax Institute began with a simple problem: what do you do when leaving a well‑funded industrial research post does not diminish your hunger for discovery, yet traditional academic positions feel incompatible with your health, your schedule, or your preference for autonomy? Steven Randolph Ness answered by gathering long‑time collaborators—protein crystallographers from the early AutoDock era, computational theorists who cut their teeth on P ≠ NP, philosophers of science who read Kuhn by candlelight—into a distributed salon for idea exchange. The only membership fee is curiosity, the only dress code is respect.
“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers. He’s one who asks the right questions.” — Claude Lévi‑Strauss
Literature Lightning‑Rounds
Weekly Discord voice sessions where participants summarize one recent preprint in <5 minutes. “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein
Cognitive Hackathons (2× per year)
48‑hour sprints have birthed:
Fireside Seminars (monthly)
A 20‑minute primer (e.g., “Subset‑sum shadows in protein design”) followed by Socratic Q\&A. Karl Popper’s rule applies: “Our theories die in our stead.”
Collaborative Preprint Sprints
Ad‑hoc writing crews assemble in Overleaf; authorship order equals alphabetical order, because we heed Buckminster Fuller: “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t lecture—give them a tool.”
ai.doi.bio Project
An open‑markdown graph of structural papers linked to an in‑browser Mol* viewer. Alan Turing once dreamt of “machines that learn”; we add: machines that cite.
Grab a Seat in Discord
First month read‑only; afterwards you can post.
Subscribe to the Weekly Digest
Perfect for colleagues who “don’t Discord.”
Bring a Puzzle
Code, data, philosophical thorn—anything that feeds the collective mind.
Conference Badges
Spot Steven wearing the green “Zax Institute” ribbon at ICML, NeurIPS, or ACS; conversation is collaboration’s seed.
“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they.” — Bernard of Chartres
If you sense, as Carl Sagan did, that “somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known,” yet you also feel that traditional silos have grown too narrow, you belong at the Zax Institute. Come share your half‑formed idea, your long‑formed skepticism, your pythonic daydream. Here, you’ll find peers who know that serious play is the shortest path to serious progress—and who cherish, above all, the privilege of thinking together.
Below is a draft “Philosophy” section for your site that weaves in Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin’s key insights with the mission of the Zax Institute. Feel free to adapt the headings or tone to fit your design and audience.
Since its founding, the Zax Institute has been guided by the conviction that knowledge advances fastest when barriers to sharing fall away, and when every contributor brings their full creativity to the table. This spirit echoes three 19th-century thinkers who first showed how radical decentralization and mutual aid could transform society:
– Proudhon coined the term “anarchism” and argued that true freedom arises when individuals and communities federate on the basis of mutual credit and voluntary cooperation. – At Zax, we mirror his idea of a “People’s Bank” by creating an open‐access repository of scientific data and models, where AI agents and researchers equally draw upon—and contribute to—a shared knowledge commons.
– Bakunin insisted on smashing every hierarchical barrier—from state bureaucracies to entrenched academic silos—and replacing them with bottom-up federations of self-organizing groups. – Likewise, our platform invites researchers, coders, and domain experts to form affinity clusters around topics (e.g. protein docking, molecular dynamics), each with the autonomy to innovate yet connected through our federated API layer.
– Through his ethnographic work and The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin showed that mutual aid is as natural to life (in biology and human societies) as competition. – At Zax, this translates into AI-facilitated collaboration: agents propose experiments, human experts refine them, and results feed back into the system—creating a self-reinforcing cycle of shared discovery that embodies “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”
Decentralized Knowledge Networks Every dataset, model, or protocol can be forked, improved, and re-published—no gatekeepers, only peer-driven quality control.
Mutual-Aid Workflows When you submit a docking result or a novel lemma, the community (and our AI assistants) immediately build on it—no more reinventing the wheel, only amplifying your insight.
Federated Trust and Governance Inspired by Proudhon’s recallable delegates, we’re experimenting with transparent, reputation-based roles instead of fixed editorial boards, so the people doing the work shape its direction.
Prefigurative Research Just as Kropotkin urged building the future in the shell of the old, Zax hosts live “lab-in-canvas” sessions where you can prototype ideas with AI in real time—prefiguring the fully decentralized science ecosystem we all seek.
Contact
“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” — William Gibson Help us redistribute it.