Welcome to the Life Sciences Supermind!
April 26, 2021
"Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
- Arundhati Roy
Dear Supermind participants,
Welcome to Week 1 of the Life Sciences Supermind exercise! It’s an honor to have each of you lend your creativity, imagination, and expertise to help us collectively re-envision the future of the Life Sciences ecosystem.
During this exercise, we will work together to address this question: How do we identify and apply the learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic to reimagine the institutions, processes, policies and tools we use across the Life Sciences to address global health needs for all?
You will join more than 150 leaders from around the world with a broad array of backgrounds, including life scientists, technologists, social scientists, medical professionals, policy makers, and public health officials, and more.
The Life Sciences Supermind is primarily conducted asynchronously using an online platform so you can participate on your own schedule and at your convenience. A description of the overall process appears below, as well as details on how to log into the platform.
During this first week, we would like you to submit contributions to the platform within your area of expertise or in domains where you are most comfortable.
We hope you can submit 2-3 contributions this week. Please feel free to submit more if you like! Each contribution consists of a brief (80 character) title, a tweet-length (140 character) summary, and an optional description (up to 2000 characters).
Please submit your contributions for Week 1 by Sunday, May 2, 11:59 pm Eastern Daylight Time.
In addition to the asynchronous conversations that will occur on our online platform, we also plan to hold three synchronous, virtual small group discussions that we are calling Super Sessions. These will occur between May 10-18 (we are still finalizing the dates and times). I’ll send more information about these events in future messages.
Kindly let me know if you have any questions or comments! And if you encounter technical difficulties, please contact Adriana Koenig akoenig@mit.edu.
Thanks again for your time and ideas, and good luck in Week 1!
Best wishes,
David Sun Kong, Ph.D.
Director, Community Biotechnology Initiative
MIT Media Lab
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Logging into the platform
You will receive an email from Life Sciences Supermind admin@lifesiencesupermind.org with a unique login link (URL) that is yours alone. Follow the instructions in that message to gain access to the site.
After you log in once, you will be automatically logged in each time you return to https://www.lifesciencesupermind.org.
If you would like to use more than one device, you’ll have to log in with your special URL on each device.
If you have not received an email from admin@lifesiencesupermind.org, please contact akoenig@mit.edu.
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Life Sciences Supermind Process
The first phase of activity will open at 9 AM Eastern US time on Monday, April 26. That morning, I will send out a note with specific instructions to get started on our first activities.
During the first two weeks of the exercise, participants will contribute ideas; during the third, our team will categorize those contributions by topic; and during the final week, participants will be invited to vote on which categories they find the most interesting and show the most potential to have impact in the future.
Several times each week, I will send a message to participants that will include instructions about what and how to contribute. The messages will also contain brief summaries of the inputs so far and address any aspects of the process that require clarification.
When you engage with the platform, I encourage you to be creative and expansive in your thinking. We plan to share insights from this process with the public, but we will not attribute specific ideas to particular individuals, and the conversation itself will be private and only accessible to invited participants.
All contributors are asked to adhere to the Chatham House Rule, which states that “participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker, or of any other participants, may be revealed.” For more see https://www.chathamhouse.org/chatham-house-rule.