DeSci Panel by Walker Chen (@chengangcs) and Aspire Cao

Transcript

Uh I have with me here two guests, two steam guests who came all the way from Asia to speak in front of you today. Um cancer dao and d life. And I will let you introduce yourself shortly and say a few words about the project. We will kick off the panel this way. Okay. Oh, you have the mic. Okay. So, introduce yourself quickly and about the project and then we'll dive in. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very happy to be here. I'm worker turn. So my background is spy informatics. Uh and d life is a project dedicated to de develop the infrastructure for the to connect the life science to web3. So we can provide something like btech service uh something like the loctor and the supply

chain for the design and longevity project and we have developed some onchain infrastructure like genome based uh and decentralized analysis platform. So that is what we are doing. So our vision is want to connect the life science industry to the web3. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Hello. Uh very very glad to be here and uh my name is Icepire. I'm the head of uh business uh of cancer all uh canceron is a communitydriven uh design project. We are aimed to uh establish uh cooperation between uh cancer patients and industry and hospital. uh

finally conve uh protocol uh in in web3 uh before I came to web3 I'm also uh doing the bio informatics synthesis the same with uh Dr. channel. So, uh I have both background with uh bio informatics science and uh and web 3. So, we want to uh use the two uh sectors advantage uh to provide more public goods to to the healthy care system to the patient even to help the uh healthy people to prevent

prevent the cancer. Yeah. Thank you. So now that you have met uh work and aspire and heard a little bit about the projects, let's dive into what is decentralized science. As I mentioned earlier, Paul couldn't make it. So we will have to light uh lay the foundations here. So um I I'm sure that some of you have heard of network state a book written by um Balaji Sasa. So the foundations for decentralized um communities were basically laid there. Uh together with this book and uh Zuzalo movement which was initiated by uh Balaji and Vitalik Bdderin I think in 2023 right by

now I I I lost the count sorry. So it was like a year year and a half ago maybe two years by now. Uh we all gathered in Montenegro in a place called Zuzalu where uh for 2 months uh Vitalik and Balaji and a few other partners have encouraged experimentation uh in the frontier of science web three AI biotech and other disciplines and this is where the decentralized science movement really got its very very big push. So what is the centralized science finally? So let's ask uh our speakers to define what it means for them. What it means for you aspire decentralized science. Yeah, for me decentralized

science uh is um more like a open science. We use a open attitude to break up the traditional science cooperation like because we we uh uh previously the traditional science research uh they they based on peer review and uh publications and um uh a lot of movement and and progress. It's a it's a actually actually it's has very few meaning but uh decentralized science will reconfiguration the resources of uh uh scientific research and uh they will use a new way to connect to uh the

scientist and other part of of the uh stakeholders. So I think the the the the central uh the the main spirit of decentralized science is open and uh and uh break the barrier of uh data isolation. Yeah. So basically breaking the barriers and accelerating the research accel accelerating the science making sure that uh all the good initiatives get heard. Yes. Yes. Yes. So Vulkar what is your definition? How do you see decentralized science? What it means for you? Yeah, I think the definition is very diverse. Okay. So from my personal perspective, I think

the most important things that the science can decentralize science can help us to encourage public engagement into science. So around 10 years ago, I found a company in China named Wene that is a 20 mill personal genome test service company. So we have tested over 1 million people and we encourage them to join the population genomic studies. We have a more than 50 publications on sale natural genetics and a lot of things like this. But as you know 2020 me is almost failed right. So what yes yeah I'm the hold of their stock. So a terrible thing. Uh so what is the problem? I I have thought about this

problem in in past two or three years. I think the most important problem is um public engagement. We don't have a a continuable ecosystem and tools to help people join this how to say this data ecosystem. So people 2020 spend a lot of marketing cost to get the customer and they pay $100 US or something like that to buy the DNA test kit. then they get their reports then everything finished.

So we we don't have a good method to encourage people to incentive people to join the data donation and share the profit from the uh the from the data to the participants. So we need a new ecosystem. We need some tools to uh ensure the data ownership. So I think that is why we need something like decentralized science and why decentralized science will be based on the blockchain technology. Science blockchain technology help us to uh s implement the data ownership to make sure that everything is almost transparent. So people can know uh how they their data will be used in the uh scientific research or the commercial

research. how the profit generated from this search will be shared among participants uh service provider and the and the networking maintenance. Second that is the most important thing and uh that that is also why I yeah I have worked in the web three and botch for over two decade and moving to web street now. So yeah back to your question I think for decentralized science the most important thing is that it can help us to encourage more people to join the scientist research not only left science but also some other yeah field yeah thank you I want to expand a little bit on what you said uh about 23 and me it was a big drama I think one of the

reasons that um it ended this way was that the doctor what was not sufficiently protected and I think that what um blockchain technology or um technologies which have developed within the blockchain ecosystem such as different types of encryption can potentially safeguard data patient data or genomic data something that has not been considered so far and um now I want to uh expand on another uh subject uh that you have uh mentioned. So basically we want to encourage more people to participate. We want to incentivize people. We want to encourage more scientists to join. Um how do we actually do um do we do a

selection? Do we have any criteria for people that can join or cannot join? And when I I'm what I mean by people not um customers or patients I mean by scientists. Will we have in decentralized science any criteria that uh scientists need to adhere so they can join or anyone can do it because what we have today uh establishments like FDA and other establishments right that are basically hurdling the progress they're also ensuring some basic compliance and right making sure that people have the right skills so how are we going to do it in

the central life science any ideas yeah science we have a tens of publication every year so generally speaking maybe I'm a scientist there as well so from my perspective I think we have the final objective my personal objective that there's no barrier for everyone to conduct their their own research on their own purpose u but as you as as you mentioned the regulator the government has different uh requirement of the different kind of research project. So we can implement this step by step. So currently for example um we have a contact research to

investigate the association between your genome and your fingerprint. So in the traditional funding model for example if we want to apply some funding from uh NSF or maybe NSFC NSF China. So it it is almost impossible to get funding 1 million or half million US dollar funding to if you want to investigate the association between fingerprinting and your genome. It is very hard. But uh what happened uh we encourage our personal genome test people to provide the the the fingerprint information of their 10 fingers. Then we collect the phenotype and all of them has their own

genome data already and they have to sign the sign the information consent. Then we have collected over 2,000 or 3,000 people's fingerprint information and with the assigned information consent and the paper has been published on sale. So which is one of the top journal in the life science field. So actually that is a kind of we uh makes the makes the uh barrier to to to start your own scientist research project lower than traditional one. Right? So this is the first step it uh it meet all the requirement of the regulators and the government. So and and I think next

step is that we can uh have scientists to start their own project easily traditional scientist and then we can move from from so-called citizen scientist. So uh of course we have some criteria to judge. So this scientist reject is good that's why it's bad but actually that is very limited. So for example we have a lot of famous scientists they are research their discovery has been judged as a bad one at that time but now we think it's good.

So no one should be no one should make the judge on the scientistic project. Uh yeah. So I think we can implement step by step. I don't think we should put some uh very specific requirements to say oh this scientist can can start their project that project shall be terminated. Okay. That should be termin determined by the maybe population public not some government agency or some a group of scientists. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Uh from my point of view uh I think finally everyone can join decentralized network decentralized

science network. Uh all the all the scientists are going to come here. uh at least web three and a crypto is a good way to get the liquidity and do the fundraising. Once you have some good idea, you can you can uh do you can launch your asset and to do the fund raise to support your research. Now uh bioscience is running faster in design but it doesn't mean other disciplines other scientists don't have opportunities. um some sorical research uh uh as I know is also need to do the fund fundraising and uh that is a whole network you don't need to rely on government's funding

because now you can see uh in United States a lot of public funding was shut down uh so this that is opportunity I think a material science uh chemistry and u also some u uh engineering part the scientist they should come to work three uh because engineering uh scientist is more uh it's easier to to commercialize. So uh it give a very clear pathway to the to the public to the product. So it's more fit to the web three mechanism to you don't need to be establish entity and uh you can get a 724 permit as I asset market 3

uh you don't need to just fund raise from national market to the US dollars I asset you can fundra other kind of asset so this way it's very easy and to get the to give the researchers to do the fundraising uh but once things I want to emphasize is that um all the research must be follow the rules and scientifically moral that is very important or I I don't want to see uh any other like u scandals and it will uh strongly destroy the reputation of the sign now is your comes to mind when you say

that remember Yeah, it's more me the self discipline because the sign is still young. It's their reputation need to protect. Yes. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Well, why are you speaking to us? You can keep it came to mind was a web three web two. I mean it was not web at all. was a project out of California with the lady Elizabeth which I think got in prison got a sentence because their analysis lab that she was running was not you know doing a good job they didn't have uh qualifications to run the tests that they promised it was something about blood testing you know you remember yeah

yeah yeah so lots of things are happening but I think it's amazing that decentralized science and web 3 uh at large is offering um this kind of opportunity for people to get uh funding um from different um different players and from funding from the community. But we do need to make sure that we have some um track of of quality of what we're launching. And it's true that this it's still a nonmature community and things are getting better. There's some very impressive scientists that are already involved. There are some impressive projects but there's a lot of criticism also about uh the tokens meaning that um science is a big

deal like whatever you have to do in cancer now or d life is huge like in terms of experiment and scientific kind of work that you need to manage you need to find the right people uh I mean as any scientific company you have your hands full Now the funding is very attractive yet these tokens need to deliver value to their token holders. And here comes a completely different domain of token management which is by nature completely new and even weird to the scientists.

This is the criticism that we heard uh from people like Karum in the community and others saying that is this the right way to go. So what's your opinion on that on the token management mixing it with uh scientific research? Yeah actually um this is a very challenge things. So as you just mentioned scientists is not very familiar with how to launch their own tutor, how to manage it, how to build the toomics and and I think a lot of scientists try are very interested in how to get funding from the virus community. So I think um I'm not sure do

do you know a scientist named way who is a baby? Okay, I'm sorry. Okay. He he he he has posted a Twitter maybe one or two months ago uh a voting so to ask his follow if he he should launch a mimic coin to get funding for the sounds like the genome editing project. So yeah I'm not sure. So and a lot of scientists I'm not sure who is still scientists or not. So a lot of scientists are interesting to get funding from web3 but didn't know how to manage it and uh from my personal perspective I don't think it is a good

idea that's the traditional scientistic research team to issue their own token on their own so is a dark forest okay a lot of good or bad people so it is also too complicated for them to maintain the valuation of the token and yeah how to actually get the funding from the token that is and how to connect the real research to the token. So that is too complicated for the traditional scientist research uh team. So this is the first current point of my personal perspective and I I think another point I want to mention here is that

uh token can be used for a lot of other purpose especially utility token. For example we can use a token to encourage people to donate their data to donate their maybe their idea and for example the the buy bit news just mentioned in the last panel. So there is a lot of so-called crowdfunding model for the information security research. So a lot of people can join the research to to to how to share their the bars they found they found in the system or software ball and get token or maybe US dollar as reward is another kind of of usage of

the token. So the token can be used to have one one one style one specific style of the research point research but not just the fun. So I think that is another kind of usage of the token in the in the in the scientist research field. So that is my personal perspective. Thank you. Thank you. I have a little different uh views with uh Dr. Ch. Yeah, because uh I think uh this time I know is very young as you mentioned about it. It's just happened in the mount neighbor's uh baby con I was there. Yeah, even I attend this. So I think now we running faster

because um I believe that all the way to the su succeed it's not by it's by uh more attention and uh and uh effort on people the wrong way we have we we we cannot avoid we cannot do the zero wrong uh things in this uh attention. So I think now everybody should use the existing uh infrastructure to try their token. They don't they don't really need make it succeed make it a successful token but they should know how to use

those tool how to engage people come how to attracting community members. uh web stream uh to now is also uh has very respectively uh respectively knowledge. So the scientific part if they they want to come to web3 they must know the rules they must have the knowledge here. So in this processing they may we we get the opportunity to be wrong. So I I think everybody can try but they should manage the rescue. Yeah. To don't be evil, self discipline and uh trust me token. Yeah.

Tokenize first and then think about how to uh put it in. Yeah. This is because web three is not only uh the way of funies. Once the people hold your token, hold your asset, it they they can be your uh seed clients, they can be your community member, they can be your volunteers. Yeah. You you just use this way to organize a group uh organization to support uh the things you want to do. Even you you can use this to select your potential business partners. So this is I think Dr. is more uh carefully but I'm more web three native so in the way in

the perspective of the web three I think run fast go first and then go yeah thank you so you heard two different perspectives I think uh caveat is still in order before you invest into things understand what you're investing in um I think amazing things are happening in this ecosystem We will hear a bit later from Paul that I'm not sure. I see a message on my screen. I'm not sure. Uh Eric, do we have another panel now? And Paul is coming later. Paul Kas. Yeah. Okay. So, we wrap it up and you will hear from Paul Kas who is um I think his venture got an enormous boost from Zuzalo in

Montenegro. He's the founder of molecule and bio and he will give his perspective on how bio is enabling scientific research in decentralized um economy. Thank you all very much for listening to us and thanks to our speakers for coming all the way. Thank you.