A DeSci Origin Story
How EncrypGen coined a term and helped start a movement
Recently, the DeSci movement has become hot, ramping up events, platforms, coalitions, and Twitter accounts dedicated to encouraging the decentralization of science via Web 3.0 technologies. The term is meant to mirror “DeFi” which had become all the rage when we at EncrypGen first publicly used in February 2021 to decribe the Gene-Chain, our groundbreaking DeSci genomics platform luanched in 2018. Here is the story of how we coined a term and helped initiate a movement, one of the many firsts EncrypGen can proudly claim, and the origins of the ideas of DeSci in work over two decades of research and teaching about Science, Ethics, and Research Integrity.
In 2004 I began co-teaching a course entitled Research Integrity: why good scientists do bad things, at the University at Buffalo with Dr. David Triggle, who had created the course with another dear friend and mentor, Dr. Richard Hull. The next year I took full control of the course, Dr. Triggle was too busy as a Dean at that point, and I continued teaching it at UB for four more years. A theme that Triggle and Hull had built the course around, to take it away from the theoretical ethics of philosophy, was to focus on the Ethos of Science developed by Robert Merton. Merton studied the way that science works, its institutions and processes, and noted that to be successful, science had to adhere to four main principles: organized skepticism, universalism, communalism, and disinterestedness. He called these the “Ethos” of science.
By 2008 I was hired as a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. There I countined my research and writing about research integrity, was promoted to tenured associate professor, and was asked to develop peer-training programs for teaching about scientific integrity at the university level for all researchers, professors, and administrators. I lectured monthly, helped run workshops, and also coordinated the creation of IRBs and generally worked to help steer practical research ethics at the university, centered always on the Ethos approach.
In 2010 I published “Back to Basics: How Technology and the Open Source Movement Can Save Science” in Social Epistemology Vol 24, Issue 3. In that article I suggested that the internet, specifically wiki technologies, could help resolve issues relating to the ethos of science. I argued that using such tech could help science become “ Speedier, More Transparent, and Democratic” calling it “Science 3.0” and suggested that the ethos of science could best be realized through embracing such values and technologies.
In 2015, while working for the National Commission of Bioethics in Mexico, I wrote Ética de la investigación: integridad científica under a grant from Conacyt, the Mexican National Science Foundation. I then published my English version of the book as Scientific integrity and research ethics: An approach from the ethos of science in 2016. The work coalesced my lectures and research on scientific integrity from the standpoint of the Ethos of Science, and helped spur a renewed interest in working with Dr. Vanessa Gonzalez, a genetic scientist, my spouse and long time collaborator, to update and apply the ideas from the 2010 paper to genomics. In late 2016 I gave a talk at my alma mater sparking the creation of EncrypGen: “David Koepsell, JD, PhD, Mexico Comisión Nacional de Bioética, The Blockchain and Personal Genomics: tracking rights and responsibilities securely” 9/20/16 at the Romanell Center for Clinical Ethics and the Philosophy of Medicine.
By December 2016 the idea to adapt blockchain to the issues discussed in the 2010 paper had turned into a plan to actually make something that would incorporate those ideas into a working product, rather than just academic papers. We wanted to make the use of genetic data in science “speedier, more transparent, and democratic” by using a blockchain and other technologies. The result was incorporation as a company, and unveiling a prototype in May 2017 at the Bio-IT World conference in Boston. By 2018, our first public product was released incorporating essential elements we needed to decentralize and democratize genomic data science: a marketplace for de-identified genomic data eliminating large data brokers, and allowing peer-to-peer sales and settlement of genomic data searching and transactions anywhere in the world, using $DNA, a native cryptocurrency.
Allowing anyone to participate in and benefit science, distribute the data and means of use and intepretation, employing open source instead of patents, and encouraging fair participation in profits, both scientific and monetary, are all themes of what we now call DeSci, and at the height of the DeFi craze we began calling ours a DeSci product. We believe our first public use of the term was during an AMA on YouTube February 26, 2021. We had used the term internally and were working on ways of integrating it into our pitches and public statements. We believed that by branding DeSci as collaborative, democratic, decentralized scientific endeavors, we could capture the attention of those who embraced similar values in finance and see their value for open science. We also liked the wordplay.
We noticed slow adoption at first of the term, including a github account in March 2021 that includes some DeSci tools. In April 2021 we tweeted the term and began using the hashtag on more of our own tweets.
Then, by 2022, we saw a movement had formed and embraced the term. It has now entered the mainstream, and as long as DeSci efforts continue to embrace the Ethos of Science, build and distribute tools and platforms that enable speedier, more transparent, and democratic involvement in science, we take plasure in our role at the forefront of a movement that could, if greed and ego remain in check, help transform and liberate science as blockchains have begun to do for finance.
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