grant

Dear Jeffrey and

Thank you very much for offering to support my salary and research this coming year. It has taken me a while to find a way to work this out in the most efficient way: MIT charges 65% overhead on grants for salary, and this seems exorbitant. However, I have discovered that if your foundation were to give the amount via MIT as an unrestricted donation for the support of my research, then I can use the funds to pay for research, travel, and living expenses while on my sabbatical. These amounts would total roughly half my salary, and for these purposes, MIT only charges a nominal overhead.

I intend to devote the research time to problems that Jeffrey and I have discussed, namely, the role of information and crypticity in the competition to obtain resources. In my work on the origins of life I have been researching how information processing functions at the most microscopic scale to allow dynamic processes to unlock the energetic resources needed for processes at the level of atoms and molecules to become more complex and to reproduce. In the competition for resources, the ability to hide or mask one's own resources is highly important -- the goal is to eat, but not be eaten.

MIT has accepted grants from you in the past and so I anticipate that the donation would go smoothly.

Half my salary is approximately $120K. If you would like a formal grant application, I will provide you with one. In anticipation, I'll set up things at this end.

Again, thank you very much for your generosity in this matter.

As before, this grant will be much more useful and efficient than my usual government sponsored grants, which are hobbled with well-meaning but onerous restrictions.

Your,

Seth