The Big Vision
The first time Aaron Dossey brought a walking stick to a crowd, people mobbed him.
Not because they knew what it was, because they didn’t.
That’s the thing about nature, he’ll tell you. People don’t care about what they don’t see. They assume the natural world outside their window is all there is. A few birds. Some trees. Maybe a spider they’d rather not think about. But show up with something the size of three cigars, green, winged, and very much alive, and something switches.
Dossey grew up in Oklahoma watching that switch happen in himself first.
His grandparents gardened. He spent his childhood outside, helping clear land, plant trees, observe things moving through the underbrush. The family took road trips east toward Arkansas and the occasional trip to Florida. He was drawn to humidity and ferns and the feeling that the further east you went, the more alive everything became.
In high school, his honors biology teacher made the class do insect collections. Most kids tolerated it, but Dossey fell in.
“I liked that you could go out and collect these things and observe them and study them,” he says. “And I also liked that you could find some cool stuff. Big moths. Luna moths. Things that most people, including me, didn’t even know were here.”
He went to Oklahoma State on scholarship, drawn in by the science and the funding. This was the nineties. The NIH budget had been tripled. Biotech was a gold rush. Molecular biology, the human genome, all of it humming. Dossey went on to earn his PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of Florida’s College of Medicine, with a specialization in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and built a research plan around something most of his peers weren’t looking at: invertebrates as a largely unexplored source for drug discovery.
Then the money dried up.
Faculty jobs that had seemed certain a decade earlier were suddenly rare. Budget cuts. Concentration of resources. The familiar post-PhD fog of promises that weren’t quite there when you showed up to collect them. Dossey adapted. He wrote grants. He founded All Things Bugs LLC, a company he would pour the next fifteen-plus years of his career into. He pivoted toward insect protein and food science, securing funding from the USDA, and eventually DARPA funding for genetic engineering work that brought in over five million dollars in total. His book, Insects as Sustainable Food Ingredients, published by Elsevier, became a foundational text in the field. He still has mealworms in his office. They glow green when you shine a blue light on them. A marker left over from the DARPA project. Proof the gene got in.
It’s a long way from collecting moths in Oklahoma. And not that far at all.
The Glue
Ask Dossey why insects matter and he doesn’t start with the science. He starts with the whole thing.
“Life on Earth, largely, particularly human life on Earth, is nearly impossible without a thriving ecosystem,” he says. “And insects are the glue that keeps the entire ecosystem together.”
Not the pretty animals. Not the megafauna that conservation campaigns get built around. The insects. The ones people overlook, swat away, assume someone else is handling.
He is not quiet about what’s happening to them.
Habitat loss. Pesticide use. A biodiversity crisis that scientists have been naming for decades while policy moved in the opposite direction. Dossey describes it plainly: we are in an extinction event right now, driven by humans. Climate change is part of the story, but land clearing is the one nobody wants to discuss. Most of the Earth’s land is used for agriculture. Most of that agriculture feeds livestock. The math is uncomfortable.
“We like to eat. We like our space. Humans don’t like limits.”
He says it without drama. It’s just the math.
But he’s not here to deliver a eulogy. He’s here to build something.
Jurassic Park, For Real
The Invertebrate Studies Institute is a nonprofit that Dossey founded, and the vision is not small.
A facility. A real one. Somewhere like Orlando, where the climate is mild and practical and the tourist traffic is some of the highest on Earth. Inside: a living biodome. Five hundred to a thousand species of insects on display. Exotic fruits. Plants from ecosystems most Americans have never seen. A world’s largest insect zoo that would exceed an extremely low bar to clear, given how little exists like it in the United States and how few insects, ironically, are displayed in zoos relative to their actual share of animal life on Earth.
Adjacent to that, a biotech research center. Genome sequencing. AI-assisted biotech spanning medicine, drug discovery, agriculture, and synthetic biology. Scientists working in view of the public, the way Jurassic Park had that scene where the theater rotates and the lab opens up. Nature as spectacle, but also as frontier. The goal, Dossey is clear about this, is to make science and nature something for everyone, not just something children are herded past on field trips.
The thesis, the one he keeps returning to, is that people protect what they know. They conserve what they’ve encountered. You can write all the policy you want, but until someone hands someone a walking stick the size of a cigar and watches their face change, you haven’t gotten anywhere.
“If you take these giant insects into public places, folks go wild,” he says. “I’ve done this at science fairs. You go into a crowd with a big green thing with wings and people will just mob you.”
The ISI wants to build the biggest version of that experience possible.
The research side is serious. Insects represent the majority of animal species on Earth. Their genomes are largely unsequenced. Every antimicrobial peptide, every compound produced for defense or communication, every enzyme refined over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. Most of it unknown. And with AI accelerating biological discovery at a pace that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, the data problem is suddenly solvable. Feed machine learning systems real biological blueprints from the most diverse, most optimized organisms on Earth, and what you get back could range from new cancer therapies to cold-hardy crops that grow where they shouldn’t.
Dossey thinks about this the way an architect thinks about a building that hasn’t broken ground yet. The structure is clear in his mind. The funding is the gap.
If the ISI’s work speaks to you, there is a GoFundMe running right now. Every contribution moves the vision forward.
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-invertebrate-studies-institutes-mission
ISI Website: https://www.isibugs.org
The Postdoc Who Wrote a Bill
At some point during the conversation, a detail surfaces almost in passing.
Dossey wrote the bill establishing National Postdoc Appreciation Week.
He doesn’t dwell on it. He moves on to the next thing. But it says something about how he operates: when a system fails to acknowledge the people doing the work inside it, he looks for a lever and pulls it. It’s a pattern that stretches back further than the bill. Long before he was advocating for postdocs on Capitol Hill, he was volunteering on political campaigns in Florida, eventually serving as a DNC committeeman from 2007 to 2013. He has never been someone who sees a problem and sits on the sidelines.
He got his PhD and discovered that the promise of a faculty career was a fable. Not because he wasn’t capable. Because the positions weren’t there. Budget cuts had concentrated opportunity in ways nobody warned him about. Dual hire arrangements where academic couples negotiated positions together, squeezing out outside candidates. Advisors who openly told their students they weren’t interested in training competition.
“You pull the curtain,” he says, “and there’s the wizard. And you see that none of this was ever there.”
He doesn’t tell the story with bitterness. More like a man describing terrain he had to cross to get somewhere else.
All Things Bugs ran for fifteen years. Then the SBIR didn’t get renewed. The science funding environment that had made the work possible tightened, then tightened again. Project 2025 accelerated cuts that were already coming. The company wound down. And Dossey found himself back in familiar territory: a body of work that was real, credentials that were legitimate, and a job market that wasn’t answering. Months of applications. Months of silence. The kind of silence that makes you question whether the thirty years meant anything at all.
He kept building ISI anyway.
That’s the part worth sitting with. The biodome isn’t a pivot. It’s not a consolation prize. It’s the thing he was always moving toward, now being built during the hardest stretch of his professional life, with the funding gap wider than ever and the political winds blowing the wrong direction for science.
The PhD opened doors. It also cost years. All Things Bugs built something real. It also ended. He says, honestly, that if he had grown up somewhere with more exposure to how careers actually get built, he might have found a different route. But the core would have been the same. At the end of everything, the passion is about growing things and seeing as much nature as possible.
That part was never in question.
Planet Aaron
Toward the end of the conversation, Savan asks Dossey a hypothetical: if you were given the opportunity to populate a new planet, where would you start?
He’s already thinking practically before the question is finished. Food production on the moon and Mars. That’s not just thought experiment material for him. There are actual grant conversations happening, work that traces directly back to All Things Bugs and the question of whether insect protein could feed people in places where conventional agriculture can’t reach. Send infrastructure before you send people. Establish critical mass. Don’t drop ten humans into a pod and hope.
But when the question turns philosophical, he lands somewhere unexpected.
He cites Fran Leibowitz. A quote about talent being equally distributed in the population. You can’t predict where the insight is going to come from. The solution to your hardest problem might be in someone’s notebook in a place where they never had the resources to do anything with it.
“Make sure that people have access. Don’t get too far ahead of any other people. You kind of need everybody on the train.”
It’s not what you expect from a genomics researcher. But it makes complete sense coming from a kid who grew up in Oklahoma, went east whenever he could, spent years in rooms where the promise didn’t match the reality, and kept building anyway.
The biodome is still being built. The insects are still in his office. The walking sticks still stop crowds.
Some things hold.
Learn more about the Invertebrate Studies Institute and support the mission:
ISI Website: https://www.isibugs.org
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-invertebrate-studies-institutes-mission
Book: https://shop.elsevier.com/books/insects-as-sustainable-food-ingredients/dossey/978-0-12-802856-8
ISI Video:
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