Every civilizational revolution, every paradigm shift, stems from a discovery. Tesla and Edison, through their work on alternating current, gave birth to light. Henri Becquerel, together with Pierre and Marie Curie, discovered the radioactive properties of certain materials. Otto Hahn, years later, discovered nuclear fission and the colossal energy that this phenomenon released. The theoretical foundations of our nuclear power plants had just appeared. Louis Pasteur, thanks to pasteurization and the development of the rabies vaccine, contributed greatly to the development of modern medicine. And more recently, via the Crispr-Cas9 system and its derivatives, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna gave us access to a gene-editing technology of unequalled precision and specificity, the careful use of which could transform our agriculture and our therapies.

Whether it serves great technical advances or humbly changes our relationship to what surrounds us, scientific research is an inexhaustible source of progress. By awakening to the laws of this world, we give humanity a wider window of reflection on our actions and what we might build to thrive in the face of crises, in the face of resource scarcity that aims to intensify in multiple lands, and in the face of cataclysmic events that might present themselves to us on longer time scales. For this is and has always been the fundamental question of our civilization: How to prosper? Is there any point to all that we have built if humanity is eradicated?

Research bears the immense responsibility of responding to this challenge by producing the discoveries that transform our systems, shaping our technologies, measuring the limits of human activity on its environment, lifting the veil on our beliefs and lifting us to new horizons. And since we cannot arm ourselves against what we do not know or master, refusing scientific progress would be in this sense condemning humanity. Faced with the inevitable, still too little considered, race for the survival of our species, it becomes and will continue to be essential to produce quality research throughout the ages.

So how do we explain that laboratory practices, aside from technical advances, have not advanced an inch in several generations? How do we explain that in the digital age, my fellow researchers continue to store and analyze all their work on paper, just as my great-grandfather and grandfather did in their time? How can we accept that, for the sake of first-author publication, doctoral and post-doctoral students worldwide find themselves working in complete isolation on their research projects, on the verge of psychological breakdown and sometimes utterly helpless in the face of the challenges they encounter, when we know that the most innovative institutions facilitate the exchange of knowledge and implement increasingly sophisticated collaborative systems? How do we explain the fact that public research and R&D, environments that generate colossal masses of data to be stored, organized, and interpreted, have not yet fully embraced powerful technological means to accelerate their operational efficiency and analytical capacity?

For all the reasons mentioned above, but more importantly for the well-being and fulfillment of the research staff, it seems urgent to me to address and solve these issues. We need to rethink a research model that is less laborious, more collaborative, and much more efficient. I do not consider Glyphe to be a superior entity with ultimate wisdom on these challenges. On the contrary, this project is part of a large ecosystem of actors involved in the valorization and improvement of scientific research, each one having a leading role to play, via its respective field. However, if I had to define the paradigm around which Glyphe aims to be built, here is what I would say: Glyphe's will is to move humanity towards its next great eureka by building tools dedicated to improving the condition of science and the scientific mind.

Moving humanity towards its next great eureka may sound grandiloquent, but it certainly underlines the fact that the tools we create should always deliver on the promise of helping research to flourish, accelerate and spread around the world. Improving the condition of science and the scientific mind means that our technologies are not designed to replace the great thinking power of our researchers but rather to reduce the burden of scientific endeavor at all possible levels and provide means to stimulate, structure and accelerate their research journey.

These are our fundamental design principles. These are the motivations that drive us.