The world of scientific discovery and development is very much stuck in the past, with very little transparency in a field that would require information sharing to build knowledge on top of existing knowledge. This is true for the entire value chain, from the literature published to the drug discovery development. Usually scientific research is peer-reviewed and then published in scientific journals.
Authors use their resources (often tied to universities) to produce data, write out articles and then pay for the articles to be published. The payout is prestige and chances of advancing one’s career. Drug development takes ideas in university or corporations’ internal labs which create data, patents and knowledge at their own cost, to then hope for successful applications of the technology and the approval of a profitable new drug. Much of this research comes from small companies and labs that take the risk of fund-raising from VCs to then sell on the technology later on. This whole process is fragmented and relies on too many unquantifiable variables, which eventually dampens research.
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) could solve many of the problems described above. Designed to be automated and decentralized, a DAO would utilize blockchain (e.g. Ethereum) to enhance transparency and automation, using code as the law and no affiliated central organization to dictate the actions that the organization should take. This Scientific Development DAO would allow researchers to publish articles for free, be sponsored for their research by the community, and have peer-reviewers being justly compensated for their work. The more people find the research useful, the more payout the researcher gets.
Equally, on the funding side, scientific groups could get venture-capital-like funding from the DAO, other members of the community or outside investors. One would not need to go visit hundreds of VCs to get funding and the research ownership would be protected by the traceability of the blockchain and the issuance of non-fungible-tokens as part of it.
The DAO would issue Science-Development Coins (SD-Coins) to contributors and members as in standard other DAOs, making the economic environment potentially thriving.
Probability distribution of possible outcomes
As with many ideas in the Web3 space, this could go in three main ways:
- Dream Scenario: many adopters, and a lot of funding, with the contributors being recognized correctly for their work and science taking a new wave of advancement through full- transparency and fair rewards
- Basic Scenario: the technology proves the mechanism of action, but there is not a lot of adopters at the beginning because of switching, reputational and adoption costs. After a few years, more adopters come in and this become similar to scenario (1)
- Nightmare Scenario: the technology does not work and there is no IP protection for the work generated on the DAO. The platform is forced to shut with many scientific contributors losing trust in the DAO experiment to democratizing scientific development
Steps Society Can Take Toward Outcome
We must act now and make sure that Intellectual Properties, smart contracts and other blockchain applications may be used for the positive outcomes that they bring, and not for exploitative measures. Society can then request governments to back these technologies and find agreements related to intellectual property law, contracts law and taxation.
Luca Giani is a Master of Public Policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School graduating in May 2022. Luca has worked in finance, consulting and venture capital before launching three startups in the biotech space. Motivated to find solutions to global health problems, Luca works at the intersection of business and government.
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