Introduction to DeSci

What is DeSci? How is it going to revolutionize the world of science?

Science was and is always meant to be a field that strives for progress and discovery. However, the state of science is anything but. The research process is immensely slow, and the current system doesn’t optimize for new and innovative projects. Labs are often contained in silos, keeping their work quiet and rushing to make sure no one else beats them to it.

It’s clear from this, that something needs to change. I imagine a world where there’s significant collaboration between labs, all biomedical tools are open-sourced, and innovative and risky projects are funded. This world is full of scientific progress and advancement.

For the first installment of the DeSci Digest, I will be going through an introduction of DeSci. Feel free to send me an email with your thoughts on this article, or any feedback for future posts.

Want a good tl;dr? I wrote a thread last year on this topic. Things have changed since then, but if you’re in a rush, take a look.

Hossam 🧬 @hossamzki

You may have heard of DeFi. But what about DeSci? 2022 is going to see a revolution in science. Here's what's in store 👇

Introducing: DeSci

Here’s a collection of groups that are working in the DeSci Space. Some of these groups are no longer in existence, or (in my opinion) are not significant contributors to the movement. More on that in later issues. But this is a good introduction to what is out there. Created by UltraRareBio

Decentralized Science (DeSci) is a web3 movement that works to address the issues we mentioned previously. The scientific process is broken down into 3 main parts.

1. Funding

2. R&D

3. Publishing

Let’s go through these, and look at what DeSci is doing in each of these areas.

DALL-E: “A futuristic image for a newsletter covering DeSci”

Funding

Funding is a significant pain point for researchers. Most PIs that I’ve met spend more than half of their time securing funding for their research projects. It almost seems like they are working on projects so that they can publish a paper and get their next grant. NIH grant approval percentage is around 20%, and they commonly fund projects that look good on headlines or in eventual papers, instead of others that are equally as important but less “fancy”. As a result, many projects end up going unfunded, leading to a slowdown in scientific advancement. This throws these important projects in the trash, and also wastes significant resources, including the scientist’s time which they could’ve spent actually doing research.

Not to mention the NIH grant funding mechanism are inherently centralized. There’s a lot of political and monetary incentive for what’s being funded. This centralization leads to modern issues being preferred more often than fundamentals or other diseases. For example, Alzheimer’s research gets the most funding in Neuroscience, when there’s many other diseases that are important and may have more impact on the field.

Now, one may say

“what about looking at private funders? That’s pretty fast and they like novel ideas.”

And you’d be right. However, these companies are really only looking for a return on their investment. So only the most profitable projects, probably those that are flashy and most likely to actually work, will get funded.

The reality is, we need courageous science that increases our amount of knowledge, not our market share.

In comes funding DAOs.

DAOs like VitaDAO (probably the biggest and most popular funding DAO as of the moment) decentralizes the traditional funding mechanism. Let’s break down how it works.

1. People buy the DAO governance token ($VITA) on a swap, or earn it by contributing to the DAO.

2. Researchers propose a project, including funding, process, data generation, and dissemination.

3. The proposal goes through various stages of filtering. It may first be looked at by core members of the DAO. Then put on a forum for community members to discuss the proposal, and vote as to whether or not to send the proposal to the DAO. For an example, look at this

4. After being approved for voting, the DAO finally votes. This is where the $VITA bought in step 1 comes in handy. Here, $VITA = 1 Vote. Majority rules.

5. Then, the money gets sent to the researcher 💸

Here’s another tidbit of this process. The IP generated by the research project gets governed by the DAO, in something called an IP-NFT. We’ll talk about those later in this section.

Let’s compare and contrast this with the NIH traditional funding mechanism.

In the NIH, the grant funders hold all the power; usually only three people.

In fact, the most important people to reach may total only three (From the NIH)

In this mechanism, your audience can be thousands of people. Anyone with the DAO Token can vote. This means that the projects that will be funded must appeal to the wider majority of people, not just what a handful of people think is interesting.

Secondly, in the NIH, the funders have no incentive. If they’re feeling bad one day, or just don’t like the way you phrased a sentence, they can just reject it. They have nothing to lose or to gain. In the DAO, there’s incentive. People have monetary value within the DAO. They need to vote for projects they think will succeed and increase the value of the DAO treasury. If that happens, then the value of their token will go up.

Thirdly, in the NIH everything is closed. No one knows who the grant funders are or their background. In DeSci, funding decisions and governance happens on-chain, which means it’s transparent.

These are just a few ways that these funding mechanisms may benefit the research ecosystem, there’s many more, but I wanted to highlight the most important.

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You may be thinking about something I mentioned previously: IP-NFTs.

But I through NFTs were scams. Now, we’re putting IP in them. This can’t be good.

Let me try to explain and win you over.

IP-NFT Mint Pass

IP-NFTs are a new technology designed by Molecule, that wraps intellectual property as an NFT. This has unprecedented circumstances that traditional IP doesn’t have. This allows for easy transfer of the NFT, collective and verifiable ownership, and also the ability to sell them to other labs, institutions, or regular people. As I mentioned before, the DAO gets the IP-NFT, and funders get ownership in it. This ownership will also allow the licensing fees and revenue generated to flow back into the DAO.

There’s an amazing article about IP-NFTs written by Molecule, and I’d highly suggest reading it for a more indepth overview.

That’s not to say that there are flaws, there are many that we will find over the course of writing this newsletter. This mechanism is still in its infancy. That’s not to say that a future version of this can’t have some of these elements. I think it’s a step in the right direction.

Now that we’ve got our money, it’s time to spend it.

Execution

We’ve gotten all the writing and back and forth out of the way, now to the fun part: actually doing research.

If we look at it, maybe doing science now isn’t that fun. There’s a lot of obstacles and hurdles to science. If your work is somewhat computational, you have to have a knowledge of computers, get an environment set up, get the correct hardware working, find the right datasets, and do this all in a cheap way. Let’s not even get into what you need to do if your project is in a wet lab space. You need to rent a lab, buy chemicals, ship over specimens, go through a ton of training, and the list goes on and on. As with every pain point in life, there has to be a better way!

DeSci is working to improve the execution of science. The main way this is happening is through LabDAO (Disclaimer, I am an active contributor, so maybe a little biased, but I’ll substantiate it).

LabDAO Website

LabDAO is lowering the barriers for researchers to raise funding, develop their technology, and distribute them. LabDAO is working to create “open-source biomedicine.” Are you convinced yet? Ok, let me continue.

LabDAO is working to create an open exchange of wet-lab and dry-lab tools (first focusing mainly on dry-lab). This includes cutting edge, and commonly used tools in small molecule binding, protein folding, and histology preprocessing. In deploying these tools, it removes significant barriers to entry for bioinformatics research, including setting up the proper environment, tuning the specifications, and getting it to work on hardware. Not only this, but there’s a JupyterHub specific for LabDAO which allows you to run tools for a variety of tasks on the cloud.

Hmm, still not convinced? Let me continue.

Where’s the web3 aspect. There’s a few things here. Firstly, we will be finding research projects and having their tools deployed on LabDAO. These projects will be funded in the same way as VitaDAO. We will also have incentives for researchers to deploy their tools on LabDAO, where depending on the reviews of your tools, you will get some return on your $LAB (not out yet!). Researchers… getting paid…. for their research???? This has never been seen before, until now.

Don’t just take it from me, take it from LabDAO

While cloud compute providers have removed the barriers to execute code by moving hardware online, there is no comparable layer of abstraction for dry-lab and wet-lab tools in biomedicine. We believe that an open source exchange for dry-lab and wet-lab tools could (1) help reduce the high costs created by secrecy around biomedical tooling, (2) increase reproducibility of biomedical tools, and (3) foster the emergence of independent entities that maintain open source tools.

And my favorite quote

TLDR: We want to live in a world in which students drop out of school because they have developed a therapeutic candidate from their laptop, not yet-another instant checkout app.

One major problem in research is that it’s hard to get into it. LabDAO is taking down those barriers to entry, to make anyone, regardless of degree status, financial status, or location in the world, a contributor to science. By getting more people involved in science, we will significantly increase the pace of innovation.

Ok, we’ve used VitaDAO to get our funding, and LabDAO to execute it, how do we get the results out there?

Publishing

Publishing research is a long process. It can take months to years for your research to see the light of day. You’ll have to go through constant revisions, deciding which journal will actually accept your research, and getting through salty reviewers. And when your research is finally submitted (with a paywall) you don’t see any of the money that the publisher makes. This is just not fair, and again: slows down the pace of science.

There aren’t that many projects in this realm, but the main one currently is ResearchHub. Research hub incentives researchers to upload their work for it to be discussed by scientists all over the world. Researchers get ResearchCoin (RSC) for publishing, reviewing, criticizing, and collaborating.

More generally, this will significantly accelerate the pace of scientific research by incentivizing academics to interact and have open dialogue online.

Arxiv may already accomplish some of these things. It’s a free way for researchers to put their work out there. However, there is no place for discussion, nor any financial incentive for researchers. Web3 has the power to incentivize researchers to have public discourse about science, and to openly put their work out there for all to see.

Not much work has been going on here, but, it will be great to see more projects get released in this area in the next few months/years.

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DeSci is just getting started. There’s so much more to this space, and I’m excited to start covering it in this newsletter.

We still have a lot to prove. Mainstream science doesn’t really know we exist. It’s our job to keep building for the researcher.

Thanks for reading this newsletter. If you liked it, forward it to a friend. Follow me on Twitter for more DeSci content.

Long live the scientist.