What is my biggest hope for DeSci?

Photo by Richard Horvath on Unsplash

Credit where credit’s due: my take on decentralized science — or DeSci, as casually shorthanded hereinafter — has been prompted by the tweet from Tyler Golato:

When it comes to DeSci, I seek to find or build three things that would allow the decentralization of three major aspects of biological research:

1. A place where I can apply for funding. I need funding to work on the project — to rent lab space, buy reagents, pay salaries, etc. Almost exclusively, grants are distributed by centralized organizations, and certain prerequisites have to be met in order to be eligible for application — I need to work at a university or a research institute, have a good publication record, and have supporting preliminary data. Then a body of reviewers will decide whether my proposal deserves funding based on centrally-issued guidelines and priorities.

I see an alternative approach here. What if the research was a) focused on a problem formulated by a community of stakeholders — real people, i.e. payers; b) financed by the community; c) the results were owned by the community? The research, in this case, would be aligned with the overall community goal and aimed at solving a pressing real-world challenge.

2. A place where I can look for lab space. For instance, I need a lab to conduct research, however, all lab space is centrally owned and distributed — e.g. by universities, institutes. So I need to hold a full-time position at that institution in order to gain access to labs, i.e. benches and facilities. Often, especially in universities, all this comes with responsibilities like teaching and administrative work. But what if I need a lab for the duration of one project only and don’t want to get bogged down in academia? Wouldn’t it then be more sensible to rent the space without being contractually bound to an institution and move out once results are obtained? Several biotech start-up incubators do provide labs for rent — mainly in the US — but I was thinking about a global network of operators that would be interested in providing bench surfaces as an additional stream of income or even for free in exchange for a fraction of IP resulting from the project.

3. A place where I can find service. Once I have the funding and a lab, it is likely that I would need external services not available at a given institution like -omics or computational assistance. Similar to renting out lab space, I envision a marketplace for services offered by facilities or CROs located at convenient geographical locations around the world organized in an accessible network.

So, the three aspects of bioresearch have to be decentralized and community-operated to be truly independent of the present model of resource allocation. I see it mainly as an alternative to traditional academia that runs in parallel and offers possibilities of problem-focused fast-track deployment of people and resources.

What I would like to build (or see built) is a pipeline where all three facets come together — when funding, lab space, and services bundle into a sweet web3 bouquet; when all transactions between involved parties are crypto-based; and have occurred and been written in smart contracts before the project even begins. Automatization of the whole process, so to speak.

How to achieve this level of cooperation?

The keyword is organization.

Although the word “decentralized” in DeSci may harbor geographical connotations or signify the absence of centers of control (as alluded to above), the phenomenon of decentralization, in my opinion, is defined mainly by the way people come to work together united by a shared vision.

Conceptually, decentralization is closely related to the distributed ledger technology at the foundation of a blockchain. However, to move away from technical lingo, I would rather say decentralization is a synthesis of three components innate to cryptospace:

1. Permissionlessness — participation in a certain project (at least in theory) is open to anyone, i.e. no permission or special access privileges are required.
2. Democratization — the hierarchy in such projects tends to be somewhat flat. Theoretically, participants have equal access to community resources, whereas nominal leadership roles depend only on skill, talent, and time the members are willing to devote to the project.
3. Tokenization — fundraising and collaboration are realized and incentivized by a crypto asset such as a utility token that supplies holders with project governance instruments or represents a stake (proof of ownership) in the project.

So what happens when we combine these three with a dedicated community built around a unifying purpose?

We would get a decentralized autonomous organization, a DAO, where members from around the world tackle a community-defined problem — permissionlessly, in a democratic manner, while rewarded for their time and effort by digital assets such as governance tokens or stablecoins.

The emerging DeSci landscape represents an alternative to legacy funding and commercialization mechanisms. Although still an experiment, a growing interest in the movement and flow of talent to DAOs captures a huge demand for more efficient models in the biological research space. Glued together by the community and powered by crypto/web3, the “perfect” DAO will be a one-stop shop (or a single-window service if you’re from my part of the world) for a decentralized, concrete project-focused research enterprise.

So, my biggest hope for DeSci is that the movement matures enough so that it becomes a haven for science renegades tired of academic bureaucracy, publish-or-perish mentality, Valley of Death futility, and cancel culture complacency. People like me.