In December 1938, Germany, when Hitler’s Nazi empire was at its peak before the war, a German chemist named Otto Hahn did an experiment with his assistant Fritz Strassman. They struck a Uranium atom with a neutron, and found that the reaction produced Barium. “Oh that’s neat,” they thought.

They wrote a paper describing the results and shared it with one of their friends, a Jewish physicist named Lise Meitner (a woman who had recently been persecuted by the Nazis and was on the run). She read the paper and discussed it with her nephew.

As they read Hahn’s paper, something stood out to them. They did some calculations… and realized that Hahn had performed the most terrifyingly powerful chemical reaction known to humanity at the time without even realizing it.

He had split the atom — discovering nuclear fission and launching the age of atomic weapons.

They immediately shared this with other scientists, kicking off a chain of events that ultimately led to Albert Einstein sending a warning to President Roosevelt of the USA, who later announced the Manhattan Project.

You should definitely read more about this exciting story, but one thing I want you to notice right now is the extent to which science and technology relies on inter-disciplinary knowledge-sharing and good discussion around new research. The more diverse people read research papers and share ideas, the faster the world will progress.

Today, scientific discourse is broken. Technical research papers can be very hard to read, full of unnecessary jargon and overly fancy lingo. Scholars around the world are further separated by barriers of their native language and field of study, holding back countless potential collaborations and inter-disciplinary breakthroughs.

Reading a research paper is often a very lonely undertaking — you read it all by yourself and then maybe discuss it with other people. When you get stuck, it can take a lot of time and energy before things make sense.

All this further discourages millions of people from even attempting to engage with high-quality research.

At SANPRAM Research, we’re building the best space in the world for high-quality discussions and knowledge-sharing around frontier sciences and engineering.

We are also developing a new generation of tools to enable every scholar to feel welcome, regardless of their level of expertise in a particular domain or which language they speak.

We invite you to join us, and hope to build a kind, helpful and courageous community together.