During the pandemic, as an emergency-room physician working alongside my students, I learned something that has never left me. The scientific method we rely upon — crystalline, honourable, and beyond reproach in its logic — is nonetheless two hundred and fifty years old. And while it stood still, I watched more than four thousand people die each day, and was forced to choose, by subjective criteria, who among them would live and who would not.
So I decided to act rather than to wait. I set out to build a legitimate method of scientific evaluation that grows more precise and more rapid with each passing year — one that already rivals, and in consistency surpasses, human peer review. As a scientist I readily acknowledge the heterodoxy of this approach. But heterodoxy, in itself, does not invalidate a method; more often than not, it is the shape of the future.
What ordinarily takes some eight months to publish — encumbered by severe bias and a heavy financial burden, whether borne by the researcher or the faculty, it makes no difference — my method accomplishes in two days. It is free, and it is open to anyone with a sound article, from any field of science, provided the methodology is consistent. There is no limit on words. No question of race. No region of the planet, no place of birth, no gender. None of it matters any longer.
The arithmetic of delay is not abstract. A vaccine arriving even two months sooner — to be conservative — would have saved, in Brazil alone, some 240,000 lives of every age. That is the cost of waiting. This is why we do not wait.
— Dr Richard Murdoch Montgomery, Founder