I have to admit to being a little surprised at the huge number of people we had come out for our rather unconventional Nature Network Boston pub night – the Dream Big Challenge on Wednesday. Nearly 60 people packed the room to hear two speakers talk about their dream projects: what kind of science they would do if they weren’t constrained by resources, or by reality, for that matter. It was really nice to see that even in these days of many funding constraints, there were so many people willing to come out on a cold evening to think and talk about truly exploratory science…the kind of science that, unfortunately, these days doesn’t always get the resources it needs to really take off.

The theme for the evening was light.

Antoine van Oijen, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who studies DNA, proteins and viruses at the single-molecule level, spoke about his dream of one day taking a sort of voyage inside the body, to get really up close to individual proteins and watch them in action with the help of fluorescent light—a sort of biochemical equivalent to the 1960s movie, Fantastic Voyage, where shrunken people travel through a person’s bloodstream to save his life.

Andreas Mershin, a researcher at MIT, talked about his vision for “do-it-yourself” solar cells that would provide low-cost solar energy to the developing world. Imagine packages of chemicals that can be sent to, say, farmers in a remote village, with simple instructions on how to put together this solar cell and deploy it into the field. Mershin called for an X-prize– like competition for solar energy technology development, to really jump start research in an area that Mershin said doesn’t get funded enough.

Many thanks to Anna Kushnir for being the main organizer and for coming up with the idea for this unique event in the first place.

Have you say: what would your dream project in science be?