A Guide to Decentralized Biotech | Hacker News Reader

A Guide to Decentralized Biotech

future.com

22 pointssebg8 comments

This is an advertisement for crypto and "web 3.0" to "help biotech move faster."

I swear to god that one day we will see an "article" on hackernews that explains how we are helping stop human trafficking by web 3.0 tokens and allowing orphans to memorize 256 character string keys so they can sell them to get money to buy a cellphone and call the cops if they are ever trafficked.

The funding situation isn’t great. Lots of centralization; lots of capture. What’s your solution?

Crypto isn't a solution to this. Anything you can do with crypto with regard to funding, that is legal, you can do with paper money, checks, electronic transfer or the like.

Crypto exists to solve the byzantine generals problem with untrusted actors. This solution does not, at all, exist in that problem space.

We are talking about bio tech - a heavily regulated industry where the regulations are written in blood. If the goal of crypto, here, is to do away with some of those regulations then I think every person involved is actively harmful to humanity. If the goal of crypto is to work within the regulations, then paper money can do it just as well.

The article gets very fluffy at the end in particular. "Anyone" can join, which immediately made me think that there is now ample opportunity for the existing problem industry players to interfere with impunity.

Side question: does anybody know of a Hacker News type aggregator for biotech which isn't fuddy-duddy or paid? Sites like STAT+ and Fierce Biotech usually feel more focused on business concerns ("Company X just got $Y in their series A") and less about questions like the one this author is writing about ("how can we work to decentralize pharmaceutical research?"). I'm very interested in these topics and ideas, though not necessarily in Web 3.0

I work as a computational biologist in the pharmaceuticals industry, and I can absolutely vouch for the idea that centralization of resources is a massive problem. Pharma companies have to build extremely redundant infrastructure (vivariums, lab space, etc.), and buy equipment that often goes underutilized, in order to repeat experiments that other companies have already completed but not published. From the computational perspective, teams suffer greatly from "not invented here syndrome," and spend massive engineering and technical effort to re-implement YET ANOTHER RNA-seq processing pipeline.

If we, as a field, want to maximize our impact upon the largest patient population possible, we need to develop a decentralized system to do science. If there was a way to publish intermediate results (e.g. "we tried to see if this drug fixes kidney fibrosis and it seems to sort of work"), and subsequently get credit for that finding's role in the creation of a drug down the line, we could massively reduce the amount of experimental redundancy that plagues the field today. I'm not sure if that solution is via a blockchain or not, but I think that vision would yield a better system.

I've been thinking of starting a weekly newsletter covering more of the technical / questions / breakthroughs in biotech / techbio/ deep tech bio / hard tech bio / bioinformatics / computational bio/ etc/ rather than just the business concerns. Basically we'd do the technical news and have an interview series attached to it. Would that be of interest to you?

Yes!! I and my colleagues and probably everyone I went to graduate school with would love a resource like that. I'd be happy to help promote and/or contribute articles / papers I'm reading

Hi! - awesome :) My personal email is sebgnotes@gmail.com. Do you mind reaching out with your personal email so I can share with you the plan? My name is Sebastian Gutierrez by the way. Nice to meet you!

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