Disrupting Science with Crypto | Office for Science and Society
Let’s say I am afflicted by a common but non-life-threatening condition. I shall refer to this fictional misfortune as “chin gribbles.” I have chin gribbles. Many people have chin gribbles. It’s annoying and it affects our quality of life. When we go to the pharmacy or speak to a doctor, we’re told there are very few treatment options for chin gribbles, if any.
When we look at the research being done on chin gribbles, we see two things. In universities, very few researchers study this condition. The kinds of health problems university professors are likely to get funded to study are cancer and cardiovascular issues; chin gribbles are low on the priority list, so researchers don’t spend much effort on them. In the private sector, pharmaceutical companies don’t seem particularly interested, and I feel powerless to influence these large corporations into paying attention to my infuriating chin gribbles.
What can I do?
Lately, a third avenue started getting paved. It emerged out of a confluence of movements and ideas. It takes from open science the call for transparency in research; it adopts from citizen science the democratization of research activities; and it brings from cryptocurrencies the notion of a decentralized network where every transaction is recorded and visible.
As science funding gets slashed in the United States, with ripple effects all over the world, more and more people with an interest in science are likely to turn to DAOs: decentralized autonomous organizations. Their proponents see DAOs as the solution to the problems plaguing academic and pharmaceutical research, but already I’m seeing skids that make me ask the question: what if a wellness mom and a crypto bro had a baby?
Like the early Internet
Decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs (where “DAO” is pronounced like the first word in the Dow Jones stock market index) are not necessarily interested in science. AssangeDAO’s goal was to raise money to fund WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal defense, and ConstitutionDAO used its money to bid (unsuccessfully) on an original copy of the U.S. Constitution.
A subset of DAOs, however, are all in on what is called decentralized science. Their members see research as siloed, ossified, and badly incentivized. They want to change that.
My chin gribbles are being ignored by both academia and pharma, so I become the founder of GribbleDAO. (The legal status of DAOs, it seems, is not always clear.) I raise money for my new venture and I create a cryptotoken, a sort of digital currency that will give my members voting power. I call it GRIBBLE.
You also suffer from chin gribbles and you see my organization as a way to finance research into this. You go to the GribbleDAO website, sign up for it, and link your electronic wallet to your account. You’re already into cryptocurrency—digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are not tied to banks. You buy Ethereum’s coins with your hard-earned cash and you then use these coins to purchase GRIBBLE tokens.
With me so far? Because we finally get to the science.
You are now the equivalent of a grant committee member. When a university researcher applies for money from the government to fund their research, their grant application is evaluated by a committee of scientists. Here, the members of GribbleDAO are the grant committee members. They will decide which projects our DAO will fund. They will vote with their tokens. The more tokens individual members buy, the more votes they have. It may look like a democracy but it’s more akin to a plutocracy, as is already seen in finance DAOs where voting rights are highly concentrated in the hands of the few. Some DAOs have their own labs; others partner with researchers at universities or private companies, who will get the DAO’s grant money to conduct the study that won the vote.
You don’t just vote, though. You also read scientific papers on chin gribbles. You communicate with other GribbleDAO members on our Discord server, telling them about your favourite paper and how it looks like a gene called Gremlin5 might play a role in chin gribbles. Maybe someone should study that. You propose it, people vote. If it gets enough votes, it gets funded.
But you also don’t simply vote and propose; you may also experiment on yourself. If there is a drug that targets Gremlin5 but it’s never been tested against chin gribbles, you can try it yourself. You can apply the ointment on your chin every night, take before-and-after photos, and share them with the DAO. By performing these n-of-1 experiments and reporting the benefits you think you see and the side effects you’re experiencing, you gain more GRIBBLE tokens, so you earn more voting power.
Science DAOs give off the scent of the early Internet: populist, revolutionary, empowering, and a little weird. Just like the World Wide Web was a way to break down the high barriers-to-entry of traditional media, DAOs are positioned as a disruptive solution to the problems of scientific research.
But the Web became commercialized and started to look an awful lot like conventional media. Similarly, I’m seeing early warning signs that science DAOs could end up repeating mistakes made before by bigger companies.
Mainstream, bad; alternatives, good
This whole excursion into DAOs and decentralized science began for me with an article by Jordan Pearson for 404 Media, which specializes in tech news.
Pearson’s focus was HairDAO, an organization dedicated to solving hair loss. HairDAO was spun out into a company, Anagen, which sells products that contain ingredients that were identified by HairDAO as potentially treating hair loss. You meet with a doctor on the Internet (“either asynchronously or synchronously,” which makes me think you may not even get a Zoom call) and if they find you eligible, you can pay USD 141 for a two-month supply of Anagen’s Growth Maxi formula, which contains hair-loss mainstays finasteride (Propecia) and minoxidil (Rogaine), yes, but also liothyronine (otherwise known as T3), levocetirizine, and latanoprost. The product’s description says “maximum science for maximum results.”
You can get more information on the many molecules HairDAO has explored as treatments for hair loss on their website, where every molecule is illustrated in beautiful pastel tones. A closer look, however, makes me think that these molecular illustrations were badly generated using AI. Take a look at caffeine: the website shows a massive molecule, whereas caffeine is tiny, and the chemical structures superimposed on top of the coloured balls and sticks make no scientific sense. The entry on Nourkrin is particularly egregious, showing wobbly bonds that curve like spaghettis. Clearly, aesthetics were prioritized over accuracy.
Why is liothyronine—a hormone produced by our thyroid gland and which is typically prescribed to people who don’t make enough of it—used in Growth Maxi? Because researchers linked to HairDAO showed interesting results when using it on hair follicles and human scalp skin taken from a handful of people undergoing a face lift. As for the final product itself, HairDAO’s co-founder was asked if it worked. “On a very small group of people. Six people.” If we’re going to demand rigorous studies before a scientific product is sold to us, I don’t think DAOs should be exempted from this.
To understand the people behind science DAOs, though, we can’t rely on their very few published studies out there; we have to go where they freely talk about what motivates them. We have to listen to podcasts.
HairDAO co-founder Andrew Bakst’s painfully awkward interview on venture capitalist Adam Draper’s podcast was eye-opening for me. Many of Bakst’s claims would not sound out of place on The Joe Rogan Experience. Bakst, who says he majored in mechanical engineering and got called “Patches” in high school because his hair wasn’t growing evenly, boldly declares that “Big Pharma basically doesn’t innovate anymore.” There is no discussion of the low-hanging fruit effect, which is that the drugs that were easiest to find were discovered first and any subsequent progress is going to be inherently slower. Though the episode came out two months ago, it shockingly ignores the meteoric rise of Ozempic and the rat race to improve on its semaglutide molecule.
Bakst denounces that, apparently, 70% of NIH money—meaning grants from the U.S. government’s medical research arm—goes to mouse research and that “mice are completely different than humans” (a point repeated on the HairDAO YouTube channel). The host echoes Bakst’s thoughts by recounting how he was approached by people who wanted him to fund their research into a fish model of disease, which he refused. “I just didn’t feel we were close enough to fish,” he admits. This reveals a kindergarten-level understanding of comparative biology. We humans share most of our genes with other animals, and some animals like mice and zebrafish are good (though imperfect) models of specific diseases we have as humans. We use them in drug development because they are useful, not because we want to learn more about rodent biology. We also decided after the horrors of the Holocaust that experimenting on human beings without strong guardrails was a really bad idea: hence animal models of disease.
Bakst equates university professors analyzing their research data and integrating that knowledge with the published literature… to his HairDAO community of “anons”—meaning random, anonymous users on the Internet—figuring things out with the use of generative A.I. “We’re in the top 1% users of GPT, Perplexity, Midjourney, constantly using all the tools to bring more high-quality research and bring down costs,” he states without highlighting that generative A.I. makes stuff up, as the MAHA commission recently found out the hard way.
And finally, Bakst’s conversation with Draper ends in conspiracy land. Draper says he feels that pharma and healthcare aren’t “about curing things,” and Bakst agrees: “I think the longer you’re treating someone, the more money you can make off of them.”
HairDAO may not be representative of other science DAOs, so I don’t want to extrapolate too much from this one example. But another interview—this one with Patrick Joyce of ResearchHub, which uses a cryptotoken to decentralize the publication of non-peer-reviewed scientific papers—spotlights the same conspiracy theory. The host asks why we haven’t cured cancer. Joyce, who has a medical degree and a doctorate in cell/molecular biology and biochemistry, begins to answer by pointing out that “folks aren’t totally incentivized to cure cancer.” Cancer isn’t one disease; it’s a family of diseases, and we have made incredible gains in treating them over the decades.
But I get it. There are bad incentives in scientific research. Data gets tortured to look sexy; single studies are salami-sliced into multiple papers to up the count; ambiguous results are spun into promising cures ten years down the road. Science journals charge researchers money to publish and more money to access them. Research is slow and incremental, and too few Ph.D. holders will end up with jobs in academia or even in scientific research. But DAOs have big potential issues.
Interpreting papers requires expertise. I shudder at the thought of unqualified people with enough spare change weighing in on which molecular target looks particularly promising to treat hair loss. Expertise is not democratizable in this way. HairDAO’s co-founder saying publicly that he hasn’t studied biology since high school but that “biology papers are similar to crypto white papers”? That speaks volumes on the risk of overconfidence.
And if Big Pharma isn’t motivated to cure diseases, how is a DAO? HairDAO was spun out into Anagen. Isn’t that company incentivized to sell you hair-loss shampoo for the rest of your life to keep making money? To get your longevity study funded by one DAO called VitaDAO, the very first hurdle you have to overcome is showing the commercialization and intellectual property potential of your proposal. Clearly, money is top of mind.
Also, the same personality that pushes you to reject institutions and centralized systems and replace them with DAOs and cryptotokens is likely to incite you to reject mainstream science because it is mainstream. You end up embracing alternative hypotheses precisely because they are dismissed by the establishment, and this science contrarianism risks turning DAOs into wellness companies, where alternative medicine is seen as right because it opposes mainstream medicine. This is where scientific skepticism, which is warranted, can slip into science denial.
Funding a pilot study in six people and using its preliminary results to sell a product is not a solution to the issues with academic research; it is reproducing the mistakes of the wellness industry with a crypto reskin. And I’m left with ethical questions as well: are all these self-experimenters simply signing away their rights and accepting to shoulder any negative outcomes tied with playing with pharmaceutical drugs to cure hair loss?
The science DAO bubble is still new, though. It expands and contracts rapidly. Already, some of the organizations listed on a decentralized science wiki seem to have died. GenomicDAO wanted to bring cutting-edge, personalized drugs to underrepresented populations, like Asians, a noble goal if reached with robust data. It folded last year after “assessing the current landscape and prospects.” Other DAOs are focused on improving cryogenics and longevity research, and it’s hard for me not to see the large cultural footprint of tech billionaires who want to cheat death. In theory, a science DAO can study anything, but when you’re drawing from cryptocurrency believers, you’re going to inherit a specific list of priorities: going after male pattern baldness, fertility, and longevity.
I don’t want to dismiss DAOs in the research space completely. I’m a believer in open science, and I think that involving non-scientists in research is a good idea, like with the participation of patients on research ethics committees and grant committees and the use of citizen science. With the precarity of traditional research funding, alternatives are needed. But we must avoid making the same mistakes all over again and letting knee-jerk contrarianism dictate what we choose to study.
Otherwise, I’ll be stuck rubbing my chin gribbles with an expensive ointment based on a wonky trial done in six people. That’s not an improvement over pharma.
Take-home message:
– The decentralized science movement tries to improve scientific research and publication by using cryptocurrency technology and doing so away from universities and conventional corporations
– Potential problems include relying on non-experts to interpret and vote on complex scientific studies; moving away from trying to find cures and developing profitable products based on poor scientific evidence; and letting crypto culture influence what gets funded, namely hair loss, fertility issues, and longevity