Source: Zuoye Waiboshan
Inefficient scientific research system, the free spirit of DeSci
A new official takes office and starts three fires. Musk leads the IQ200s who work 80 hours a week for no pay to wield the "optimization and efficiency" sword against bizarre research:
Brown University spent $170,000 researching LGBTQ-related issues in China;
The University of Iowa spent $1.04 million on a DEI-related creative writing project;
All of this is the various institutions in the US colluding to fleece the American sheep, and Musk himself is also being forced to be the fattened sheep, and after Musk "switched to" Trump, he frequently received investigations from various governments and environmental organizations in California.
For example, research on whether the recovery of starships will affect the sharks in the sea, if the sharks are not affected, then continue to test the whales, if the recovery is not a problem, then test whether the launch of starships will affect the hearing of seals.
Musk's response is quite that of an engineer. He instructed SpaceX employees to strap a seal wearing headphones during the starship launch, and finally used data to prove that this would not have a fatal impact.
All of these actions, whether targeting his own starships or the university's scientific research system, can participate in the "most stupid" expenditure competition, and the bizarre research of universities damages the taxpayers' trust in the government, while the targeting of himself is purely the ineffective spinning of capital.
In this sense, Musk naturally needs a new scientific research system, and DeSci is aimed at this.
Starting with Binance's strategic investment in the DeSci protocol Bio Protocol, the market has entered the FOMO stage for DeSci, and the longevity theme has also ignited people's attention to biomedical research. Is the 21st century really the century of biology?
The rigidity of the scientific research system
If the driving force behind people's purchase of DeSci-related concept MEME is the love of wealth, then what the current scientific researchers hope for is to be able to rescue themselves from the academic-bureaucratic scientific research, and the first and foremost is the perpetual motion machine of funding-papers-titles.
Contrary to what people imagine, scientific research, especially in science and engineering, is basically part of public service, and a large amount of basic research funding is distributed through the National Science Foundation (NSF) controlled by the US government, which maintains close contact with US universities and various laboratories.
(To be honest, Indians do much better than Chinese in mixing, doing scientific research is hard work, it's better to directly manage the distribution of scientific research funding.)
Most young faculty members need to apply for relevant funding in order to carry out corresponding enrollment and research work, so true innovation will become paper-based carving facing the NSF, with an average annual approval rate of less than 30%, and a median research budget of around $150,000, which may seem not too low, but considering the scale of colleges and universities nationwide and the number of practitioners, this is still just a drop in the bucket.
Caption: NSF approval rate for fiscal year 2023 to 2024, image source: NSF
In recent years, with the spread of DEI culture (Diversity, equity, and inclusion), as a federal agency, the NSF has also inevitably been affected, and in order to keep up with the general trend, the NSF has waved its baton, and scientific researchers have closely followed it, hoping to publish more papers and thus obtain tenure professor and other academic titles.
It is not difficult to find that this is just one version of the rigidity of the scientific research system, and the more crazy one is the academic "hats" in China, which are derived from the NSF system in the US, but have developed into academic "titles" of different levels and clear boundaries in China.
After the reform and opening up, we basically copied the NSF system in full, and developed various types of academic informal titles such as academicians, Changjiang scholars, distinguished young scholars, and outstanding young scholars based on our own national conditions. On the one hand, they are not the official selection criteria for faculty titles, but are important reference standards; on the other hand, these hats are basically highly correlated with the "level" of the funds they receive, so under the command of the paper stick, all kinds of academic practitioners are going crazy to water down in the hope of getting the corresponding returns on the expensive page fees.
The profit-driven academic publishing industry
It is understandable that the current DeSci concept has become popular, and Sci-Hub is also within expectations but beyond expectations.
In the "funding-paper-title" cycle mentioned above, papers are the direct proof of funding, because most basic research cannot be transformed into practical commodities, and the level of the papers 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 US, this is an important credential for Chinese overseas students to stay and upgrade, in China, it is simply the fast track to 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 occupying more than 80% of the academic publishing market.
And the most interesting part is that scholars publish articles in their journals, and they even charge the authors, and the academic institutions to which the authors belong still need to pay subscription fees to access the articles, so the monopoly of the channels has created the high profits of the academic publishers, taking 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 26% profit margin.
So the academic community has launched the Open Access (OA) movement, which is to fundamentally change the current monopolistic state of academic publishing, but unfortunately, high-quality OA platforms are still traditional academic publishers, and they even charge "review fees or processing fees", for example, scholars in mainland China want to publish in the OA journal of Nature, they need to pay $5,000 first, which means that OA can be open to readers, but authors must pay.
And low-quality OA journals face the same dilemma as the cryptocurrency market, the consequence of unmanaged is that they are full of inferior content, even directly stigmatizing the OA concept as a synonym for low-quality journals.
High quality with high fees, low quality with random fabrication.
Sci-Hub is rampaging in this context, in 2011, the Kazakhstani Alexandra Elbakyan, who was born as a Soviet, felt the shamelessness of academic journals and decided to put them online for free, this is the whole story, a story almost synchronous with the birth of Bitcoin, a story about the love of wisdom and the love of freedom.
Caption: The inspiration for the founding of Sci-Hub, image source: https://sci-hub.se/alexandra
In Alexandra Elbakyan's view, the intellectual property rights of scientific research belong to all of humanity, and academic publishers should not use the excuse of operation to block the channels of knowledge dissemination, the use of Sci-Hub is extremely simple, just get the DOI number of the corresponding paper, and you can get the full text with one click, saving all the steps, allowing knowledge to return to its most original purpose.
The current DeSci frenzy
The combination of MEME and the ignition of Vitalik/CZ and the longevity concept has led to the legend of the 1000x token RIF and URO, Pump.Science has also taken over the position of Pump.Fun in the jianghu, and Bio and its series of sub-DAOs have also received the extreme FOMO of hot money in the market.
Caption: BIO Protocol composition, image source: https://www.bio.xyz
However, we need to note that most drugs take years, if not decades, to go from the laboratory to the market stage, which is indeed an example of the inefficiency of the existing scientific research system, but does not mean that bypassing this process will accelerate the effective period of drugs.
Of course, in promoting the crazy R&D, cryptocurrencies do have unlimited potential, such as in the circle of the rich in Silicon Valley, injecting the blood serum of young people, targeted health products, and even blood exchange therapy, and the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) is also the most authoritative regulatory agency in the world. Some of the rich have invested in small countries like Thailand or Africa to bypass them and accelerate the drug launch process. Hao Jiankui's craziness has brought him the crime of private customized gene editing, and the disruption of the cryptocurrency to the scientific research system, if it can let us read papers for free, that is indeed a good deed, if it is crazy to the radical human era, then let's end it with Da Liu's words: Give civilization to the years, not give the years to civilization. I hope we can safely get through the great low tide era of human scientific research.
