Let鈥檚 say I am afflicted by a common but non-life-threatening condition. I shall refer to this fictional misfortune as 鈥渃hin gribbles.鈥� I have chin gribbles. Many people have chin gribbles. It鈥檚 annoying and it affects our quality of life. When we go to the pharmacy or speak to a doctor, we鈥檙e 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鈥檛 spend much effort on them. In the private sector, pharmaceutical companies don鈥檛 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鈥檓 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 鈥淒AO鈥� is pronounced like the first word in the Dow Jones stock market index) are not necessarily interested in science. AssangeDAO鈥檚 goal was to raise money to fund WikiLeaks founder , and ConstitutionDAO used its money to bid (unsuccessfully) on .
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鈥檙e already into cryptocurrency鈥攄igital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are not tied to banks. You buy Ethereum鈥檚 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鈥檚 more akin to a plutocracy, as is already seen in finance DAOs where . Some DAOs have their own labs; others partner with researchers at universities or private companies, who will get the DAO鈥檚 grant money to conduct the study that won the vote.
You don鈥檛 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鈥檛 simply vote and propose; you may also experiment on yourself. If there is a drug that targets Gremlin5 but it鈥檚 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鈥檙e 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鈥檓 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 by Jordan Pearson for 404 Media, which specializes in tech news.
Pearson鈥檚 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 ( 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鈥檚 , which contains hair-loss mainstays finasteride (Propecia) and minoxidil (Rogaine), yes, but also liothyronine (otherwise known as T3), levocetirizine, and latanoprost. The product鈥檚 description says 鈥渕aximum science for maximum results.鈥�
You can get more information on the many molecules HairDAO has explored as treatments for hair loss on , 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 : the website shows a massive molecule, whereas caffeine is , and the chemical structures superimposed on top of the coloured balls and sticks make no scientific sense. The entry on is particularly egregious, showing wobbly bonds that curve like spaghettis. Clearly, aesthetics were prioritized over accuracy.
Why is liothyronine鈥攁 hormone produced by our thyroid gland and which is typically prescribed to people who don鈥檛 make enough of it鈥攗sed in Growth Maxi? Because researchers linked to HairDAO showed 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鈥檚 co-founder was asked . 鈥淥n a very small group of people. Six people.鈥� If we鈥檙e going to demand rigorous studies before a scientific product is sold to us, I don鈥檛 think DAOs should be exempted from this.
To understand the people behind science DAOs, though, we can鈥檛 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鈥檚 painfully awkward interview on venture capitalist was eye-opening for me. Many of Bakst鈥檚 claims would not sound out of place on The Joe Rogan Experience. Bakst, who says he majored in mechanical engineering and got called 鈥淧atches鈥� in high school because his hair wasn鈥檛 growing evenly, that 鈥淏ig Pharma basically doesn鈥檛 innovate anymore.鈥� 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 that, apparently, 70% of NIH money鈥攎eaning grants from the U.S. government鈥檚 medical research arm鈥攇oes to mouse research and that 鈥渕ice are completely different than humans鈥� (a point repeated on ). The host echoes Bakst鈥檚 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. 鈥淚 just didn鈥檛 feel we were close enough to fish,鈥� he . 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鈥� to his HairDAO community of 鈥渁nons鈥濃�攎eaning random, anonymous users on the Internet鈥攆iguring things out with the use of generative A.I. 鈥淲e鈥檙e in the top 1% users of GPT, Perplexity, Midjourney, constantly using all the tools to bring more high-quality research and bring down costs,鈥� he without highlighting that generative A.I. makes stuff up, as the MAHA commission recently found out .
And finally, Bakst鈥檚 conversation with Draper ends in conspiracy land. Draper says he feels that pharma and healthcare aren鈥檛 and Bakst agrees: 鈥淚 think the longer you鈥檙e treating someone, the more money you can make off of them.鈥�
HairDAO may not be representative of other science DAOs, so I don鈥檛 want to extrapolate too much from this one example. But another interview鈥攖his one with Patrick Joyce of ResearchHub, which uses a cryptotoken to decentralize the publication of non-peer-reviewed scientific papers鈥攕potlights the same conspiracy theory. The host asks why we haven鈥檛 cured cancer. Joyce, who has a medical degree and a doctorate in cell/molecular biology and biochemistry, by pointing out that 鈥渇olks aren鈥檛 totally incentivized to cure cancer.鈥� Cancer isn鈥檛 one disease; it鈥檚 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鈥檚 co-founder saying publicly that he hasn鈥檛 studied biology since high school but that ? That speaks volumes on the risk of overconfidence.
And if Big Pharma isn鈥檛 motivated to cure diseases, how is a DAO? HairDAO was spun out into Anagen. Isn鈥檛 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 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鈥檓 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 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 after 鈥渁ssessing the current landscape and prospects.鈥� Other DAOs are focused on improving cryogenics and longevity research, and it鈥檚 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鈥檙e drawing from cryptocurrency believers, you鈥檙e going to inherit a specific list of priorities: going after male pattern baldness, fertility, and longevity.
I don鈥檛 want to dismiss DAOs in the research space completely. I鈥檓 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鈥檒l be stuck rubbing my chin gribbles with an expensive ointment based on a wonky trial done in six people. That鈥檚 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
