Inefficient scientific research system DeSci free spirit

Source: Zuoye Waiboshan

Inefficient scientific research system, DeSci free spirit

New officials take office with three fires. Musk leads IQ200 people who can work 80 hours a week without pay to "optimize and improve efficiency" to cut the knife of weird research:

1. Brown University spent $170,000 to study LGBTQ-related issues in China;

2. The University of Iowa spent $1.04 million on DEI-related creative writing projects;

All of the above are the result of various American institutions joining together to fleece the United States, and Musk himself is also the one who is forced to be a fat sheep. After Musk "switched" to Trump, he frequently received investigations from various California governments and environmental organizations.

For example, whether the recovery of the starship will affect the sharks in the sea, if the sharks do not, then continue to test the whales, if there is no problem with the recovery, then test whether the launch of the starship will affect the hearing of the seals.

Musk's response was quite that of a science and engineering man. 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 participate in the evaluation of the "stupidest" expenditures. The university's weird research damages taxpayers' trust in the government, and the pure ineffective idling of capital directed at him is purely ineffective.

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 Protocol Bio Protocol, the market has entered the FOMO stage for DeSci, and the longevity theme 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 drives people to buy DeSci-related concept memes, then current scientific researchers hope to save themselves from the academic and institutionalized scientific research, and the first thing to bear the brunt is the perpetual motion machine of funds, papers, and titles.

Unlike what everyone imagines, scientific research, especially science and engineering research, is basically part of public business. A large amount of basic scientific research funds are distributed through the National Science Foundation (NSF) controlled by the government. The agency maintains close ties with American universities and various laboratories.

(To be honest, Indians are doing much better than Chinese. Instead of working hard on scientific research, it is better for them to directly manage the allocation of scientific research funds.)

Most young teachers need to apply for relevant funds to carry out corresponding enrollment and scientific research work. As a result, 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 description: NSF approval rate in 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 has waved its baton, and scientific researchers have followed 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 a version of the rigid scientific research system. What is even crazier is China's academic "hats", which are derived from the American NSF system, but have formed different levels and distinct 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 Scholar, outstanding young scholar, and excellent young scholar 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 related to the "level" of the funds in the institute. Therefore, under the command of the paper stick, various academic practitioners are like crazy to flood the creative ideas, hoping to get corresponding returns on the expensive page charges.

Profit-seeking academic publishing industry

It is reasonable that the DeSci concept has become popular in Sci-Hub, but it is also unexpected.

In the cycle of "fund-paper-professional title" mentioned above, the paper is the direct proof of the fund, because most basic scientific research cannot be transformed into practical products, because the level of the paper 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 certificate for Chinese students to stay and upgrade. In China, it is simply a fast track to get rich and become an academician.

But the problem is that the global academic paper industry is highly commercialized. Springer, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Sage Publishing and Taylor & Francis Group basically occupy more than 80% of the academic publishing share.

The most interesting thing is that they will charge authors for publishing articles in their journals, and the academic institutions to which the authors belong will also need to pay for subscriptions to view the articles. Therefore, 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, and its net profit was 1.96 billion euros, with a profit margin of 26%.

As a result, the academic community launched the Open Access (OA) movement. As the name suggests, it wants 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 $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 no one managing them is that they are shoddy and even directly stigmatize the concept of OA as a synonym for low-quality journals.

High-quality journals are expensive, while low-quality journals are fabricated.

Sci-Hub is a hit in this context. In 2011, Ms. Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazakh born in the Soviet Union, felt the shamelessness of academic journals and decided to publish them online for free. This is the story of everything, a story that is almost synchronized with the birth of Bitcoin, a story about love of wisdom and love of freedom.

Image Caption: The inspiration for 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 use the excuse of operation to close the channels for knowledge dissemination. Sci-hub is extremely easy to use. As long as you get the DOI number of the corresponding paper, you can get the text with one click, saving all the steps and allowing knowledge to return to its most authentic function.

The current DeSci carnival

Meme combined with the explosion of Vitalik/CZ and the concept of longevity has led to the legend of thousand-fold coinformin (RIF) and urolithin (URO). Pump.Science has also taken over the status of Pump.Fun, while Bio and its series of sub-DAOs have also been 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 most drugs take several years or even 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 shelf life.

Of course, in promoting crazy research and development, cryptocurrency does have unlimited potential. For example, in the wealthy circle of Silicon Valley, young people's serum injections, targeted medicines and health products, and even blood transfusion therapy are all available. 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 drug listing process.

He Jiankui's madness has earned him a private charge of gene editing. If the subversion of the scientific research system by cryptocurrency allows us to read papers for free, it is indeed a good thing. If it is crazy enough to radicalize the human body era, 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 the great low point of human scientific research.