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Comment by rgejman | Hacker News Reader

We already have crowd funding for science. We do it as a whole society when we fund the various grant-giving agencies in this country. I cannot emphasize how bad of an idea it is to take funding decisions away from professional scientists and place them in the hands of untrained individuals, no matter how enthusiastic they may be nor how much money they are willing to throw away.

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This displays a profound ignorance of the real situation, which is that the majority of useful early stage research is funded by philanthropy. Not by government, not by companies, but by people making donations. It doesn't come from the existing funding institutions because they almost never fund anything that hasn't already had its prototype and early stage research completed successfully. If you don't have your proof of concept you are not getting funded, and the institutions don't really care about where the starting point of the pipeline actually comes from. Every lab scrapes out funding from the corners of existing grants and petitions patrons to conduct what is arguably their most important work, which is to say the actual work of taking risks and creating new things.

What most people call research grants are nothing of the sort. They are development grants. The research already happened, and it was paid for by bootstrapped philanthropy.

These philanthropic organizations almost always have either (a) committees made up of scientists that decide where the money should be allocated (e.g. HHMI) or (b) donate to institutions which then dole out money internally as project grants that are vetted by other scientists.

Philanthropic organizations don't generally just hand out money to the person who makes the flashiest video.

The question boils down to a real-world application of which is a bigger fallacy, the appeal to authority or the appeal to majority. Well, I don't think there is a good answer to that. But let's get serious here. I'm asking for 50k to do one experiment. Microsoft just paid one billion for minecraft.

Microsoft paid 2.5 billion for Minecraft. Please don't let the negativity here lessen your motivation. The negativity says more about the persons being negative then about you or your research. I believe crowdfunded drug development is a good way to evolve our society and will ask my friends to consider donating.

> the majority of useful early stage research is funded by philanthropy

Really? Is there a source for this?

I believe they're referring to this: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1431

"Early stage research" is such a wacky term you haven't a hope of getting that nailed down.

If you sit down like a serious person and look at a well-defined question, like "where do drugs that end up being administered to patients start their existence?", you get

58% from pharmaceutical companies.

18% from biotech companies.

16% from universities, transferred to biotech.

8% from universities, transferred to pharma.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/11/04/where_drugs_...

I'm a working scientist, and this really doesn't reflect my experience in the slightest.

The early stage research on 9ds was funded by the ACS.

It's possible to fund early state research using money from foundations, etc. But that wasn't the assertion given by the parent post - it was that the majority of early stage research is both non-corporate and non-government funded.

I'm very skeptical of that claim.

Agreed.

Here is a quote that my experience in science has caused me to resonate with.

"I think there's been a Gresham's Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast." - Peter Thiel [0]

[0]http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2g4g95/peter_thiel_tec...

There are many problems with the institutions in this country that give grants. However, crowdsourcing is not the answer. Nor is baiting people by offering them the promise of a "patent free" cancer drug. Full-term drug development, including clinical trials reaches into the billions of dollars. You're never going to crowdsource that. So even if your drug is wildly successful and nontoxic (of which the chances are tiny given that you have not yet done animal studies), you will to partner with a pharma comnpany to bankroll the rest of its development.

how is that a bait? I'm pretty damn serious about that. Anyone who knows me knows that I have been a very fervent anti-patent person for years now. It's caused problems in places that I have worked.

I think it's correct to say that I am not going to crowdfund the entire drug development. Accordingly, that is not the plan. My vision is that the first stage (well second, really) is crowdfunded to show that there is broad interest in the idea in society, to raise some amount of funding outside of institutional granters, and achieve a productive result showing that indysci (and I) are not totally incompetent buffoons.

The completion of preclinicals (which typically ranges in the single-to-double-digit millions) would probably best come from institutional nonprofit granters, and running clinicals should come from the for-profit (probably generic) pharma that is seeking to capitalize on it. But I'm open-minded to other ideas.

The "bait" is the claim that a patent-less drug will be cheaper when it finally comes into use in the clinic than a patented drug (from your indysci campaign: "Releasing without a patent means the drugs will be cheaper and it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations. Releasing without a patent means expanded access to drugs in countries that can't afford extensive licensing and export agreements.")

But you and I both know that is not how drug development works. When you bring in a pharmaceutical company to fund the clinical trials (which are hugely risky) they will demand an upside. The upside will come if they (a) make a derivative molecule that they can patent (b) patent a use of the drug for an indication (c) package the molecule in a way that is patentable -- e.g. with an adjuvant.

The crowdsourcing page on Indysci reads as if the drug will eventually be cheap and readily accessible just because you have not applied for patent protection.

Another point: the indysci page misleads people about what drug patents means by comparing it to open-source software. As an academic researcher, you can work on ANY molecule, no matter its patent status, in an academic research setting. That means you can develop new uses for the molecule, make derivatives, etc. What you really mean is that patented drugs cannot be SOLD by anyone other than the manufacturer.

Typically industrial compound leads are developed in closed, siloed situations, because if you disclose you jeopardize your patent status. Of course, "open sourcing" doesn't guaranteed development in non-siloed environments either (you could just fail to 'git push' on a mistake branch), but it does somewhat eliminate the incentives to do so. Perhaps the wording ("it will be easier to build on the work to make improved drugs or drug combinations") on my attempt to analogize that is bad for being unspecific. Do you have a suggestion on how I might change that on the page to better reflect this concept?

Exactly what I thought when seeing the video. I don't want scientific funding to go to those who manage to produce the best quality 3 minute promotional video.

You have no idea how hard making this video was for me. Also I got lucky because a friend had connections to a cameraman who worked for top chef. Also we tried before, and failed spectacularly (and we may yet fail... The campaign is still a smidge below where it needs to be to tilt and that doesnt take into account interest decay.).

If my scientific bona fides are in question, you should check out my publication record. It's not in spectacular journals (which as a scientist would probably be as suspicious to me as a flashy video is to you), but, I've done spectroscopy on a metastable peptide, isolated and characterized an anticancer compound, and improved an enzyme fourfold with hand picked site directed mutagenesis. I'm no Linus Pauling, it's true, but I feel fairly accomplished.

I don't want scientific funding to go to most professors. Seriously, have you actually met those guys?

I think eccentric and idiosyncratic people are on average likely to be even worse at making crowdfunding videos and social media management than they are at writing grant applications. Mountebanks, on the other hand are usually brilliant at fundraising from the common man.

The idea that somehow the eccentric and idiosyncratic will be better than people who are good at 'playing the game' at raising funds by drawing the attention of wealthy patrons or large groups is...an interesting assumption.

Does state sponsored research guaranties that result will be made public and shared ? (This is a serious question)

If so, I agree with you, If not, I see here a strong argument for crowd funded projects like that.

The NIH mandates that all research it funds be placed in the public domain within 1 year of publication. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

This does not go far enough, but it is a good start. It would be better if non-published research were also placed in the public domain, but this is logistically tricky for many reasons.

Currently not all state sponsored research guarantees shared results, but the NIH does (after one year). But: Not all results are guaranteed to be public, just the published work. If you really wanted to know, for state-sponsored research in the US, you could probably FOIA results, all the way down to the notebooks.

FOIA requests for medical records, which is much of what we're talking about, is really quite difficult.

You have a lot more faith in insiders, schmoozers and career bureaucrats than I do. I personally favor the dartboard approach.

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