Cryptocurrency does have great potential to promote crazy research and development.
Written by: Zuo Ye
Musk led the IQ200 people who could work 80 hours a week for no pay to cut the knife of "optimization and efficiency improvement" to the weird research:
Brown University spends $170,000 to study LGBTQ issues in China;
the University of Iowa’s $1.04 million DEI-related creative writing project;
All of the above are the result of various American institutions joining forces to fleece the American people, and Musk himself is forced to be the fat sheep. After Musk "switch" to Trump, he frequently received investigations from various California governments and environmental organizations.
For example, we will study whether the recovery of starships will have an impact on sharks in the sea. If not, we will continue to test whales. If there is no problem with recovery, we will test whether launching starships will affect the hearing of seals.
Musk's response was quite tech-savvy. He instructed SpaceX employees to tie a seal wearing headphones when the Starship was launched, and finally used data to prove that this would not have any fatal effects.
All of the above actions, whether directed at his own starship or the university's scientific research system, can be included in the evaluation of the "stupidest" expenditures. The university's bizarre research damages taxpayers' trust in the government, while the one directed at him is purely an ineffective waste of capital.
In this sense, Musk naturally needs a new scientific research system, and DeSci is also aimed at this.
Since Binance’s strategic investment in DeSci Bio Protocol, the market has entered the FOMO stage for DeSci, and the theme of longevity has also ignited people’s attention to biological research. Is the 21st century really the century of biology?
Rigidity of the scientific research system
If the love of wealth is what drives people to buy DeSci-related concept memes, then current scientific researchers hope to rescue themselves from the academic cliques and institutionalized scientific research, and the first to bear the brunt is the perpetual motion machine of funds - papers - titles.
Contrary to what everyone imagines, scientific research, especially research in science and engineering, is basically part of public business. A large amount of basic scientific research funds are distributed through the government-controlled National Science Foundation (NSF), which maintains close ties with American universities and various laboratories.
(To be honest, Indians are doing much better than Chinese. Instead of working so hard on scientific research, it would be better for them to directly manage the allocation of scientific research funds.)
Most young teachers need to apply for relevant funds before they can carry out corresponding enrollment and scientific research work. Therefore, real innovation will become paper carvings for NSF. The average annual approval rate is less than 30%, and the median research funding is around US$150,000. It seems that the approval rate is not low, but considering the scale of colleges and universities in the United States and the number of practitioners, this is just better than nothing.
Image caption: NSF approval rate for fiscal year 2023-2024, Image source: NSF
In recent years, with the spread of DEI culture (Diversity, equity, and inclusion), NSF, as a federal agency, is inevitably affected by it. In order to keep up with the overall situation, NSF waves the baton and scientific researchers follow closely, hoping to publish more papers and obtain various academic titles such as tenured professors.
It is not difficult to find that this is just one version of the rigid scientific research system. What is even crazier is China’s academic "hats", which were derived from the US NSF system, but have formed different levels and clear scientific research "titles" in China.
After the reform and opening up, we basically copied the system and mechanism of NSF in its entirety, and developed various types of informal academic titles such as academician, Changjiang Scholars, outstanding young scholars, and excellent young scholars according to our own national conditions. On the one hand, they are not the official selection criteria for teacher titles, but they are important reference criteria; on the other hand, these titles are basically highly correlated with the "level" of the institute's funds. Therefore, under the command of the paper stick, various academic practitioners are frantically flooding the market with creative ideas, hoping to get corresponding returns on expensive page charges.
The profit-driven academic publishing industry
It is reasonable, but also unexpected that the DeSci concept has become popular on Sci-Hub.
In the cycle of "fund-paper-title" mentioned above, the paper is the direct proof of the fund, because most basic scientific research cannot be transformed into practical products, and the level of the paper published is almost the only way to prove the effectiveness of the output. Nature, Science and Cell are basically the first tier of impact factors. In the United States, this is an important credential for Chinese students to stay and upgrade. In China, it is simply a fast track to getting rich and becoming an academician.
But the problem is that the global academic paper industry is highly commercialized, with Springer, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publishing and Taylor & Francis Group basically accounting for more than 80% of the academic publishing share.
The most interesting thing is that they actually charge authors for publishing articles in their journals, and the academic institutions to which the authors belong need to pay a subscription fee to view the articles. As a result, the monopoly of channels has created high profits for academic publishers. Take Elsevier as an example. Its total revenue in 2018 was 7.49 billion euros, with a net profit of 1.96 billion euros, achieving a profit margin of 26%.
As a result, the Open Access (OA) movement was launched within the academic community. As the name suggests, it aims to fundamentally change the current monopoly of academic publishing. Unfortunately, high-quality OA platforms are still traditional academic publishers, and they actually charge "review fees or processing fees." For example, mainland Chinese scholars who want to publish in Nature's OA journals need to pay US$5,000 first. In other words, OA can be open to readers, but authors must pay.
Low-quality OA journals face the same dilemma as the cryptocurrency market. The consequence of being unmanaged is that they are shoddy and even directly stigmatize the concept of OA as a synonym for low-quality journals.
High quality charges a high price, low quality is a waste of money.
Sci-Hub became popular in this context. In 2011, Ms. Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakh who was born in the Soviet Union, felt saddened by the shamelessness of academic journals and decided to publish them online for free. This is the story of everything, a story that happened almost simultaneously with the birth of Bitcoin, a story about the love of wisdom and freedom.
Image caption: The inspiration behind the founding of sci-hub
Image source: https://sci-hub.se/alexandra
In Alexandra Elbakyan's view, the property rights of scientific research knowledge belong to all mankind, and academic publishers should not close the channels for knowledge dissemination under the pretext of operations. The use of sci-hub is extremely simple. As long as you obtain the DOI number of the corresponding paper, you can get the text with one click, eliminating all steps and allowing knowledge to return to its most authentic function.
Current DeSci Carnival
Meme combined with Vitalik/CZ and the explosion of the concept of longevity led to the legend of Thousand-fold Reincarcin (RIF) and Urolithin (URO). Pump.Science also took over the status of Pump.Fun, while Bio and its series of sub-DAOs were also affected by the extreme FOMO of the market's hot money.
Image description: BIO Protocol composition
Image source: https://www.bio.xyz
However, we should note that for most drugs, it takes at least several years and at most decades to go from the laboratory to the market. This is indeed an example of the inefficiency of the existing scientific research system, but it does not mean that skipping this process will accelerate the drug's effectiveness.
Of course, cryptocurrency does have unlimited potential in promoting crazy research and development. For example, in the wealthy circle of Silicon Valley, injections of young people's serum, targeted drugs and health products, and even blood transfusion therapy are used. The FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) is also the world's most authoritative regulatory agency. In order to bypass them, some wealthy people turn to small countries, such as Thailand or Africa, to speed up the process of drug listing.
He Jiankui's madness resulted in the charge of customized gene editing, and the subversion of the scientific research system by cryptocurrency would be a good thing if it allows us to read papers for free. However, if it goes as far as the radical era of the human body, then let's end it with Liu Cixin's words: Give civilization to the years, not years to civilization.
I hope we can safely get through this great low point in human scientific research.
