# What is DeSci?

By [web3chick.eth](https://paragraph.com/@web3chick) · 2022-09-09

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In order to understand Decentralized Science, first we need to break down how traditional scientific funding works. 

In order to pay for the expensive clinical trials, lab equipment, salaries for themselves and their lab assistants, and more, researchers are constantly searching for sources of funding. Since they often can’t depend on university funding alone, they have to seek outside grants, such as are available through government run institutions such as the NIH.

The NIH or the National Institute of Health is the US’s primary agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. It has a budget of 45 billion per year, 84% of which is funding for “extramural research”, which is awarded through competitive grants. 

This begs the question, if resources like these are available, what is the problem with traditional routes of funding? 

Well if we look a little deeper into NIH, we will see that with the rising costs associated with research and budget cuts, fewer and fewer projects are able to receive funding. To put it in numbers, in the year 2000, more than 30% of grant applications were approved, as of 2016 however, it was closer to 17%. 

This increase in competitiveness has other adverse effects such as influencing scientists to take fewer risks. Since there is less funding available, the projects that seem like they’ll be the best investment, and are the most “plausible” are the ones that receive it. This inadvertently leads to researchers doing “safer” research instead of taking risks, even if it could lead to more groundbreaking findings. According to Gary Bennett, a neuroscientist at Duke University, “ Funding "affects what we study, what we publish, the risks we (frequently don't) take," and it, "nudges us to emphasize safe, predictable ‘fundable’ science."

Not to mention how within the scientific community, in order to be seen as more favorable on grant proposals, researchers need a higher number of citations, which they can more easily achieve if they present short-turnaround, safer papers. This simply creates a self fulfilling loop. 

On the other hand if scientists decide to look for funding elsewhere, such as within private industries, studies show that these results are much more likely to yield conclusions that are favorable to the sponsors.

Coming back to Decentralized Science, or DeSci for short, how can it solve these problems, and go further than where traditional research can?

Imagine if we could crowdsource which diseases to prioritize, and focus crowdsourced research attention and capital on these ideas, with mechanisms for handling legal, financial and intellectual property issues built upon frameworks from the open source movement, inherited from the fundamentals of crypto. Prominent among these principles are a global perspective, decentralization, and transparency. 

DeSci is a way to do just that; It’s a growing movement to leverage emerging technologies like blockchain to reshape and improve modern science, while solving long standing issues in research, funding, publishing, and peer-review.

The basis of DeSci is the focus on “Decentralization”. In simple terms this means moving control of science away from “centralized” entities, such as governments or research entities. Simply keeping the middleman out of the equation and letting the people directly benefit from science. 

There are a few shining examples. Let's look at three.

[VitaDao](https://www.vitadao.com/) - A Dao focused on longevity research with supports early stage experiments. They have allocated over 2.5 million dollars, and sourced over 200 research projects and have over 2 million dollars in their treasury, and many more in commitments. One early success led to two more Dao’s: MoleculeDAO and Lab DAO 

[MoleculeDao](https://www.molecule.to/about-us) - This dao seeks to create the infrastructure so that many more BioDAOs can be developed. They have 250 + research projects listed and have helped launched 3 BioDAO’s and have thousands of members. They recently raised $12.7 million in seed funding to kickstart their growth. 

[LabDao](https://www.labdao.xyz/) - One community member from VitaDao launched LabDao which calls itself “an open, community-run network of wet & dry laboratories accelerating progress in the life sciences” \*\* \*\*

Overall, while DeSci is still in its early days, the number of initiatives are growing, and with it, its positive impacts.

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*Originally published on [web3chick.eth](https://paragraph.com/@web3chick/what-is-desci)*