Side question: does anybody know of a Hacker News type aggregator for biotech which isn't fuddy-duddy or paid? Sites like STAT+ and Fierce Biotech usually feel more focused on business concerns ("Company X just got $Y in their series A") and less about questions like the one this author is writing about ("how can we work to decentralize pharmaceutical research?"). I'm very interested in these topics and ideas, though not necessarily in Web 3.0

I work as a computational biologist in the pharmaceuticals industry, and I can absolutely vouch for the idea that centralization of resources is a massive problem. Pharma companies have to build extremely redundant infrastructure (vivariums, lab space, etc.), and buy equipment that often goes underutilized, in order to repeat experiments that other companies have already completed but not published. From the computational perspective, teams suffer greatly from "not invented here syndrome," and spend massive engineering and technical effort to re-implement YET ANOTHER RNA-seq processing pipeline.

If we, as a field, want to maximize our impact upon the largest patient population possible, we need to develop a decentralized system to do science. If there was a way to publish intermediate results (e.g. "we tried to see if this drug fixes kidney fibrosis and it seems to sort of work"), and subsequently get credit for that finding's role in the creation of a drug down the line, we could massively reduce the amount of experimental redundancy that plagues the field today. I'm not sure if that solution is via a blockchain or not, but I think that vision would yield a better system.