Laurence Ion & Vincent Weisser: Vita DAO – From DeSci to Longevity Research #488

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica hands and I'm here with meheroy today we're speaking with Lawrence iron and Vince adviser who are respectively stewards of longevity deal flow um at Vita Dao and the ecosystem need that molecule metadatao is a Dao whose goal it is to promote longevity research we had Vita Dao on a while back together with its sister project molecule which is an nftip project targeting targeting pharmaceutical researchers we're interested in the larger DSi landscape today and hope Lawrence and Vincent can

lay this out for us and we'll also hear about what's new at Vita so before we talk with Lawrence and Vincent and let me tell you about our sponsor this week Omni is your new favorite multi-chain Mobile Wallet Omni supports more than 25 protocols so you can manage all of your assets in one place but what's really special about Omni is what you can do inside the wallet want to get here Omni allows you to get the best apis with zero fees in three tabs need to swap Omni Aggregates on major Bridges indexes so you can bridge and swap across all supported networks in one transaction live nfts Omni offers the broadest nft support of any wallet so you can collect

manage your favorite nfts across all chains in one place Omni truly is the easiest way to use web3 and it's fully self-custodial meaning you never have to trust anyone with your assets other than yourself of course and they support Ledger give it a try at omni.app Fantastic Lawrence and Vincent it's a pleasure to have you guys on um before we kind of dive into this entire longevity and Desai um topic give us some background on yourselves thanks for having us pick a fan of the epicenter podcast um yeah so my maybe the my background is basically just like entering kind of early in in the building of like

websites and startups in my teens and then I think discovering ethereum in 2015 or 16 and actually being mainly excited really by this idea of the Dao like I discovered and heard of Bitcoin before from France but it didn't really capture me as much as um this possibility of of kind of like adapts built on ethereum such as the dial um so explored that into much more depth and um then build like a ethereum decentralized exchange called text balloon 2017 and Export also kind of like the D5 space and actually at the same time also um try to figure out like what are different ways to have the biggest impact and explore different

areas from effective altruism to um like Ai and other areas but really um also deeply got into longevity research went to conferences and read up on a lot of books to get into it and while my focus was mainly on more like the product design and software side I I wanted to kind of Leverage it for good and and to advance science so I actually met in uh Paul and Tyler who were at the time in 201 building out molecule as kind of like the marketplace fund research and there's a pnft Marketplace and at the time they already had explored a lot of experiments like bonding curves for science funding and a bunch of other

things and shared with me also the idea of Vita Dao so kind of like using this mechanism of dials to fund research which really sticked with me I actually funnily enough like a year before tried to register longevity.com uh and and but I didn't have 30 more people um to kick-start it with but then with Paul and Tyler I was really excited to join them and many other stewards and people that came together uh yeah to initiate this experiment um yeah so then I get involved into helping create beta Dao with many others and um yeah now I'm leading ecosystem efforts as well at molecule and really helping the Vita dial for X so the Vita

dial for Women's Health for climate research for other research areas to thrive so that's kind of like a short intro about myself maybe before we kind of cross over to you Lawrence Vincent you're a young guy you're in your 20s what kind of attracted you to longevity research because kind of kind of dying for people our age usually seems really long way off right yeah I think like the the easiest way I think to to describe it I think is actually probably from like my even grandparents generation like to see them like increasingly deteriorate and and suffer and really like not being able to

live anymore really like like being in old people's home having dementia of course dying um uh like at some point from age-related diseases and and I just realized I think was like subconscious at first that like that it doesn't seem really right that you're like suffering for like 20 30 years and are not able to really participate in society um and I think it's like very obvious for people that like solving cancer Alzheimer like all these things is extremely important and it wasn't obvious to me at the time that like uh there's actually like a more neglected and underappreciated way to treat these age-related diseases which is trying to tackle the root causes of those diseases so actually um yeah discovered also some books and I think actually by kind of

like getting into the weeds of like okay what what is the biggest ways to improve um Humanity like longevity stick out as one of the biggest um yeah potential opportunities to really improve health in a more radical and groundbreaking fundamental way instead of treating cancer once it's there I want to make sure I never get cancer or every anyone else for that matter so um yeah that was kind of like my driver into longevity and actually it was funnily enough when I reflected on it um also folks like vitalik and the crypto people really getting into it kind of like in intensified even the interest because that made it for me um yeah more even more obvious that it's

something to uh yeah look into more deeply why do you think longevity research societally somewhat stigmatized right so basically if you say you're a cancer researcher you know obviously that's fantastic if you're you're an Alzheimer's research obviously that's also fantastic your diabetes researcher go for it but it's basically if if you say I'm I'm a longevity researcher people usually assume your crackpot who kind of things you know people should live forever and never die and kind of like I mean it's it's kind of it's almost esoteric in a way right totally yeah I think the the main thing like my explanation for it is uh of

course that it's like a communication problem also by the people who really embrace it and then drive home this Narrative of like hey we want to live to A Thousand Years like I've heard from many people uh especially awesome crypto say which I think is not wrong but it of course gives the wrong impression to most uh people and I think it's also of course media driving home and narrative that is the divisive and kind of populist of like yeah billionaires want to live forever and this and that and ultimately I think it's it's not really true in a sense that like ultimately even if like a Jeff business is funding research in that space like uh everyone would benefit from that research in the same way as if you funds cancer research and no one would have a problem if he

solves cancer um and I think yeah it's ultimately I think a media thing but also that the community is um especially early on really embraced this Narrative of like living to 500 to a thousand so like being Immortal which of course doesn't stick well which I think probably even has some complex like religious Roots like no one of course would say today like hey we should only live to 50 because that's what we used to live to uh 100 or 200 years ago everyone thinks it's normal to live to 90 so I think it's yeah I think kind of like anchoring bias to the um what's known today but also a bit of Like A coping mechanism with okay like uh looking death into the eye well I'll die with 90 can't be 100 or like under

20. at the end it's just like a random number and I think like if one says okay like life is fun and good like why not have more healthy uh life I think is pretty obvious of course yes I think also some misbelief or misconceptions on like hey even if people live healthy to 90 that it's bad for the world it's actually the best thing that could happen to the world because it's like one of the biggest expenses in our world is for their frailing Healthcare System for all societies uh like for example Japan released struggling with um like a very shifting demographic and I think in that sense it's like a very very obvious really good thing especially get for example everyone to live healthy to 90

but I think uh there's also like a shift now happening I think to an extent I can also say that um this Paradigm really makes sense to address the root cause of disease instead of what Pharma usually does which is symptom palliation um it's it's mostly been that so maybe except for antibiotics and and vaccines most therapies for diseases today don't actually address the root molecular cause of the disease so for example Alzheimer's drugs they just enhance cognitive function in the near term cardiovascular drugs like statins or blood pressure meds they don't address the root cause of vascular

aging and so it's mostly been like damage control kind of cutting off the heads of the the ancient Greek Hydra you cut off its heads in in two one head and to grow back and it's like that with with aging and age-related diseases prevention is better than than symptom palliation right do you think um the entire um the entire ecosystem could kind of um benefit from a reframing from kind of living longer to you know living your full lifespan healthier because obviously no one wants to be old for a long time right because I mean as you

said being old often sucks I mean so basically kind of you know deteriorating mental function kind of deteriorating Health it's it's not a piece of cake so I wouldn't so basically if you look at the average 95 year old I wouldn't want to be 95 for 50 years so basically it's I want to be I mean I'm 36 now um I would like to be 36 for you know 50 more years and that would be awesome but do you think kind of reframing it that way might help definitely we I mean it's it's decentralized right some people are framing it in certain ways some people are framing it in another way this is obviously a better framing to start with

I think some people just like to catch that attention and say look we're gonna be immortal the first the person who lived to a thousand is born today and and kind of rising up some some interesting um just turning heads you know um so it's a lot of that um but yeah it totally makes sense and and people are usually okay with curing diseases you know they think oh curing cancer is great right but even if you cured every single type of cancer tomorrow uh that would only increase uh Health span or lifespan by about two to three years on a population level because all of these diseases grow up grow exponentially in incidents aging is an exponential

process so if you're not going to get cancer or if you cure cancer then you're gonna get cardiovascular disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's or stroke and so on um but yeah like we try to to communicate it in in various ways but other people will communicate in other ways uh question is who gets more attention [Music] we got sidetracked a little bit here into this longevity narrative um Arc um Lawrence tell us about yourself before we kind of uh dive into uh the much larger landscape of Desai so the tldr on me is that I I want to help

um work on Aging research and and establish this new medical Paradigm just like crypto is a is a new Financial Paradigm um because I love life and I don't think I'd really want to die as long as I'm healthy um so every year if I if I get to 99 and I'm healthy I probably want to be also 100 and I wouldn't really think about it um for many hundreds of years because I think it's it's impossible to to predict how technology Singularity Humanity will look like more than 100 years in the future so um yeah just let's just focus on on health I I I you asked Vincent but I also unlike most young people I know

what it feels like to to feel frail like like an old person um and not only um of course I also loved my my grandma and I I saw her suffer but um I personally also have had many health issues I've spent a lot of time in hospitals many surgeries so um I've always looked for Solutions becoming a doctor wasn't really one at least not for for me biotech wasn't initially an option and in Romania there wasn't much to do there but I was really good at science fashionable biology but also computer science math all of these things so I

kind of went into that direction of doing practical things um then startups entrepreneurship um I think initially it was kind of glamorous and I wanted to prove something to to my my bullies want recognition but then um I uh kind of spent a time in a sabbatical and I had some Financial Freedom I had some I was investing and started uh investing in in biotech and Longevity startups as well um but also spend time on looking at existential risks uh improving The Human Condition AI safety AGI brain machine interfaces all of these things but ultimately none of this these

existential risks or any of these Technologies seemed to be likely to to be a problem or or um to see the this amazing future in in my lifetime and aging is basically 100 gonna make us suffer and die and so I just didn't want to to have the same suffering and pain in the future when I would be old that I had when I was a kid um so yeah it just made sense to to work on this at least it helps the world medium term to to long term and potentially my own health as well and when aging isn't the biggest problem I definitely go on to make Humanity more resilient to help with existential risks

Global or Galactic or whatever catastrophes I'm super excited to see the future um so right now the bottleneck in the longevity field which I think we should focus on more um is this diversity uh of startups it doesn't really exist I think there's enough billionaires and and um and funding to to invest in things at like the angel slash VC level um but they usually don't find things to enough startups to invest in that are that are credible and um they're kind of ending up putting money into these behemoths like Calico the Google Founders but a few billion in in Calico since 2013 and it gets like super bloated and bureaucratic

um out of labs recently with Jeff Bezos um and um art Ventures and like super credible people from from Pharma um also three point something billion and many such uh even even Brian Armstrong started a smaller one and um there's a bunch of Mega startups um with a few hundred million and so on but vitadel can basically the reason I'm working on nvidad is because we can accelerate the research that would otherwise just be some some paper but would never become a like medicine um it we can sort of accelerate those create startups that wouldn't otherwise exist um and have this scalable Democratic

participation it's it's really a new type of organization as you all know these these Taos um and I'm excited because we can be sort of a first order organization um potentially becoming as big and resourceful as a small country maybe it may be bigger and the will of the people cannot be stopped so if there's enough uh people and the more people sort of get bought into this new paradigm I think yeah the will of the people cannot be stopped so um this is I think the best way we can make sure that we can have an impact thank you Lawrence um so let's change gears and talk about Desai a little bit the idea for this episode kind of came from my attendance

at DSi London earlier this year and I had I I told lots of people afterwards that I had gone to a fantastic conference about Desai and like 70 of the people even you know who are very much in the web 3 ecosystem um asked me what's Desai so DSi is um the much younger sibling to um well-established players like defy and D sock even if d-soc doesn't always go by that name but basically Tao Society has been uh Dow ecosystems have been around for a while so this is decentralized science but maybe question for you Vincent

what in regular science requires disruption and where does the blockchain component come in to kind of make it decentralized that's a great question I think um like one obvious answer I think like even with the other siblings like with decentralized finance and centralized Finance is of course like what's the problems in centralized science and I think there's multiples of one is of course um like very um kind of like funding bodies that are very bureaucratic like for example DNA in the US is like one of the biggest funding bodies it's like kind of like a monopoly on scientific funding especially outside the health space and um they of course have like similar

mechanisms like most of the application processes for example take half a year like a very long time in a very bureaucratic and most people don't get funding at the end of it but spend weeks or months um preparing the applications waiting for an answer and even if they get the money they also oftentimes don't get the follow-up and not the incentives to actually succeed with the science the only thing that's really measured is um Publications and I think that's one component so it's like the issues in central funding of science then the issues of centralized publication and accurate like status of science so kind of like Central bodies like nature and other Publishers

um centralizing the publishing of Science and gatekeeping of course some of the most groundbreaking signs so some of the leading signs that is now some of which were Nobel prizes like wasn't able to get published and it tells you something about of course the state of this gatekeeping that it's also a bit like can lead to group think and can have other issues and I'm not even saying that like centralized science doesn't have a place it's more of course about um acknowledging that like ultimately a lot of things could be done more effectively and in a more augment-free way in a decentralized fashion like in a similar sense I don't think like centralized finance will go away like the fed or like Central Banking will probably still

be a thing for a while but ultimately there's huge value in in the decentralized side of things so I think maybe to break it down concretely I think funding is one of the biggest ones and of course that we're directly for example tackling with video down molecule um publishing I think is like another um huge one where there's also of course a lot of issues with the centralization as mentioned then there's others like for example access to laboratory resources and infrastructure like it's very hard for you and me and most people in the world to access the computational or laboratory infrastructures to do science um like it's also gate kept in that sense like you need a PhD you need to be at like a famous lab or something to even have access to the tools to do

science like it's very not to be like um most places in the world and Practice Science it's it's very gate kept in that sense like it's ultimately I think the the most Stark I think um information is to an extent of course that like only every thousands person is like a scientist and um so 99.99 of humanity can't participate in science like they can't participate in the funding of science they can't do and or execute science they can't easily publish signs because they don't have a PhD they don't have access to the labs so I think that's um like maybe the the most important point is that it's way too hard to participate in science for the majority of humanity and it's I think

as evident for example with startups it's important to have like the disruptors that um Can Happen like a kid's room or like in a garage where someone is just able to to um do signs for example or to participate in science um even if it's like just like one alternative for example uh for scientific funding for scientific publishing for scientific credentials and other aspects so I think um increasingly it it is becoming an option also with the scientists we talk to there's still a lot of them are third universities and getting centralized sources of funding but we've been in sometimes like way quicker instead of taking half a year we took maybe one or two weeks of funding them or sometimes

maybe a month uh we've been way more helpful at least what many of them said in really providing them with valuable feedback and information and helping them translate their research and like while they're kind of like the interest lands a bit flat with their normal research like no one really cares no one is really aware of their research with us they have like sometimes community of like five or ten thousand people that really follow their research engage with questions want to understand what they're researching which they also really Embrace um so I think that's just a few things but I think in general the main thing is that a lot of scientists also are very unhappy with the current system because it is so gate cap because there are you know many ways very underpaid and not

fairly rewarded also for their work and because it's such a like long and hard process to to get to the other side of like a scientific discovery and it doesn't need to be I think to an extent so I think that's the yeah I think my thesis for why decentralized science is important and of course ultimately as a playground for novel experiments like for another experiments in science finding for another experiments in science publishing or in in novel forms of credentials and status and I think all of those are important to also improve the centralized and old system I can also add about a problem that's maybe closer to people's everyday life

um at the intersection of Science and Engineering a bit in medicine and also patriarchal government paternalistic sort of Nanny State I can give an example with clinical trials and and regulations of uh of drugs in general aging is not considered a disease and the same happened with birth control for example it wasn't women couldn't try the birth control pill because it wasn't considered a disease right so you couldn't have a drug for this and so they had to go and to try out the birth control pills in the 40s in in various um smaller countries that had lesser

regulations and only after the the women sort of lobbied the government a lot after many years then the FDA also approved it in the US um you you may be a lot of you I super recommend watching Dallas Buyers Club as well uh talking about um HIV in the 90s 80s and 90s people had this terminal illness but they were not allowed to try some protein supplements or something the afda was like really trying to to be super paternalistic and not allow people that had a terminal disease to try something that wasn't approved um and they found ways with something that's not that dissimilar from a Dao a Dallas Buyers Club for example these

people would sort of uh buy membership to a sort of club like tokens right and then they would get medicine for free so they weren't like technically selling the the drugs um which was the the issue with with selling drugs that were improved and many many such examples uh I would say moral failure of the the current system so the current system works by preventing people from making mistakes being super um careful but um nobody sees the risk in delaying access to life-saving medicine so the the status quo

people are dying of terminal illnesses even with covet I can give an example right that if we had done challenge trials we could have saved potentially hundreds of thousands millions of lives but usually if something goes wrong and and 100 people die of of some side effects or there's some issue that's a tragedy but millions of people dying is just a statistic and the incentives are set up for Regulators they're they're good people they're trying to to help prevent issues and side effects and so on but they don't have an incentive to to look at effective an expected value I hear the argument I think kind of

you're in danger of kind of veering off into utilitarianism there where basically you kind of just weigh how many lives on one side and how many lives on the other side and basically the Integrity of the person who kind of ends up making the decision um has no input or the way that people die because obviously you die of a natural disease this is not the same as dying in a clinical trial so those are very I mean I I know the outcome is the same but morally it feels very different to me so I kind of see why why this is why this hasn't been met with resistance so I understand people get covered anyway and so if with that's why I think anyway I don't want to get it too much

into challenge trials the pros and cons and so on but let's focus on like people who are terminally ill and and they have nothing to lose right uh why not let them make the decision and try some something yeah we had we had this discussion here in Germany probably like 10 years ago or so about legalizing marijuana um for for terminally ill people and then basically they were the the people who opposed this who said well it's a gateway drug and you know you know you you start taking marijuana and then you end up taking whatever but basically obviously for dying people this is this is I mean regardless of whether the gateway drug argument is good in principle or not for dying people it's

definitely not a good argument um I've kind of jotted down a couple of topics I kind of want to talk about in detail for decentralized science um namely their kind of funding widening participation so citizen scientists and so on publishing and then basically transitioning research from you know Labs into the actual applications and kind of looking at um the effect of patterns and patent laws those are kind of the major areas kind of that I jotted down um and I kind of want to talk about how um how blockchains and decentralized Technologies can help for each one of those but before we do that

um I have like a higher level question um for which kind of scientific disciplines is DSi actually applicable right so basically say I'm by training I'm a physicist right so say I want to fund um LH the Large Hadron Collider too right so I I'll need several billion dollars probably won't fund that with a Dao so kind of what kind of scientific disciplines do you actually see as within the scope of DSi yeah I think it's a good question I ultimately I think it's in stages I think like long term potentially every area of science could be fun with it like one when they made a

great point of like the different uh stairways of like an increase in public goods funding and and scientific funding that could happen via blockchains and I think it could rival uh those of nation states at some point and thus also take on those Mega projects I think to your point for now how I view it and we thought that was a great example is the smaller research projects with a extremely strong overlap with a crypto community's interest and I think longevity is an interesting example because ultimately I think um as as Lauren said it's a new paradigm that resonates with people in crypto that also um view cryptos in your Paradigm to do things in a better like foundationally better way and I think in that sense those areas that are closest

to the interest of um crypto people are probably those that um and are already those that are getting the most traction like longevity being a great example like most um people I can think of kind of like leading the crypto Revolution like have longevity as one of their core interests in the scientific sphere I think others are of course um other that are very close to the heart of many people like climate research for example being a good example um and then those um I think that are really tangible and almost like consumers maybe not the right word but that are very uh easy to understand for like a big part of people and I think that

um are able to also plug into some of the Native of course tools with um with crypto and capital formation being one end of course to your point it's still hard to raise like a billion dollars in crypto for like a wild scientific project that is can mainly be considered a donation like the Large Hadron Collider or other Mega projects in physics maybe so I do think that like the smaller uh check size let's say of donations and grants and um for example like with ipn FTS are already proving to be more successful and especially of course the research that can do a lot with a little but is still lacking the resources like ultimately I think the

Large Hadron Collider of course got funded I think there's some amazing research you could do with like small amounts of money that a lot of people would want to fund but like that they don't have the access to fund and don't discover so I think there's a lot of that so I think basically scientists with large audiences for example I think can tap into a bunch of crowdfunding methods crypto being I think one um interesting one so and I think it's similarly of course for um other areas for example on publishing even cryptographic research and some of the research crypto projects so I think obviously Reliance itself very well to be published and kind of like reviewed in very crypto native ways so there's actually some projects uh doing that kind of like exploring publishing of of

Applied crypto research um with crypto tools and I think that will probably also be one of the first successful use cases of crypto publishing just because there's a very high overlap obviously of crypto people being eager to explore and dog food their own solutions to do their own research so I think but from there I expected to grow to kind of every area and of course a bit driven by the interest of the people that are participating um not only financially but also with their time so I think that it's kind of like my intuition so on a high level it makes sense if you look at the traditional Financial system the traditional Financial system does

fund a lot of Biotech startups and actually the role of finances ultimately to you know allocate to allocate Human Resources productively and if it can be allocated towards science productively Financial Financial system will do it and in some way we can think of okay we're trying to develop um we have we have an emerging Financial system on our hands and Visa is the exploration of okay how can it be used to fund productive productive science could you tell us about some is there any early success story like uh

that was able to do interesting science we're leveraging either the underlying blockchains in a special way or by leveraging the financial Primitives in a in a yeah I think of course we're biased um being heavily involved also in for example I think Vita Dao was definitely one of the first and um bigger successes I think in um on first side like raising the necessary Capital to fund research but also funding a broad variety of different research projects and trying out different mechanisms to fund research I think there's actually also a few others although I'm not sure if they

they fully count into decentralized signs like the biggest that comes to mind was um this uh craze of Italy getting a lot of Shiva Inu coins and donating them to covert India's relief but also doing a lot of kind of fast grants via crypto with an organization called Baldi for covert research so I think they almost deployed like over 100 million or approximately 100 million into covert research and there's some good information on it if you search balvee I think on on video the earliest successes that I've seen is just in a very short amount of time giving the necessary resources to the researcher but also really having our community

um to to give feedback and input on the researcher like a lot of the researchers had ideas but our community kind of like challenged their ideas gave feedback improved the ideas funded the research then the first results come back and and they are inconclusive or like they don't know what to do next and our community like looks deeply into it and comes up with another ideas and I think that's actually the power of decentralized Science in action is not like a siled isolated lab that where like might still be waiting for their um application in the traditional system where we already funded it half the first round of reviews re-evaluated the research already on onto the second round of research and I think

that's really the powers like this crowd intelligence to an extent like there's a great book on this uh by Michael Nielsen um I'm not sure if it's called networked science or something like this but basically making the point that this kind of um research um is much more likely to succeed uh even historically there's like many such cases um a very collaborative and open ways to call um yeah Advance the research so yeah but on on Vita dial uh on the website We have basically an overview of all the research projects and also sharing some of the project updates so that's like I think the best place with an overview of our concrete projects but I think there's also a few others so as a former scientist I can tell you

one of the nightmares of a scientist in this day and age is being scooped so basically having someone else kind of publish the same research before you and if you think about it it actually speaks to a large degree of incentive misalignment right because if you look at um the incentives of the individual scientists and they don't line up with the incentives of you know science as a larger field so you you would think that um if someone something needs to be found out basically every everyone should benefit who've kind of who's working on this and shouldn't be like the first person to publish it in a you

know in a notable Journal it should be everyone so how do you think DSi can kind of help break up this uh this incentive disalignment that we actually see a lot in traditional Academia totally I think the the one way is of course um to really have like um cleared um traces of like who contributed what and I think actually cryptographic proves um already are very good at doing so um for example there's a project we also Support called lateral for knowledge graphs and um basically you can submit knowledge and it's like every knowledge submission is written to the blockchain and has

cryptographic proofs like your ens or Xerox address contributed this piece of knowledge and I think we we are working on on ways to do that in um also some of the more like research happening in the offline world of course like if someone researchers doing research address lab and shares his report and it's kind of like still very manual and so um traditional but the goals of course um to bring more of that online and for example into Cloud labs and um more computational work where everyone's contributions are um accredited like where ultimately if I contribute this data set um it shows that I shared this data set but also maybe like other people

contributed to that data set um and then you can just like see the whole chain of contributions and and for example also retroactively reward uh based on the contributions or give ownership in the research uh coming out at the other end based on the contributions and also evaluating the contributions so there's a lot of work being done on this um like another interesting project on this is for example hyper search which is giving these impact certificates to every contributor and then has also like an impact evaluator so they're kind of like also building this out in parallel I I think it's still early days and our goals are also to fully integrate this um into how we assign credit uh yeah to researchers but I think a lot of it is also needs to be figured out especially

with the a lot of the real world research happening at Labs where it is not um digitally submitted every minute and um basically if you look at um the impact of widening participation so as you said um one in a thousand people worldwide as a scientist that's super interesting statistic do you think you actually need to gatekeep this in any way do you kind of need a reputation system for kind of contributing knowledge how do you make sure that there isn't too much noise for people to actually you know you know get a clear signal of what other relevant people are doing yeah I think ultimately it's a bit like

with other things in the internet like an explosion of information needs like a better curation and better Discovery mechanisms to filter through the noise but I do think that like for example giving um people like having 100 times the amount of research might not lead to 100 times the impact but it will probably increase the impact if it's of similar quality and and of course also following novel directions of research that people in the traditional system might not have been able to follow so I think that's actually the main hope that ultimately very high risk High reward or very contrarian research might be more likely to be funded in a decentralized way and even having different cohorts of people fund the research or do the research will increase the diversity of the

research funded and the ways it is funded so I think that's uh usually I think good I think you could see it of course with art that like the traditional artwork doesn't like what uh the crypto Hardware world is doing but I think it increases the diversity of Art and and the diversity of sources of funding for artists and I think it's very similar for scientists Lawrence uh you you wanted to cover some examples of early early successes in designs could you could you give us some examples I think the the best way to look at it with how these I and why it's so important especially in longevity since

it's so dismissed by the incumbents um I would say imagine if crypto had needed Government funding most research usually needs Government funding right it would never have happened you you need this sort of bottom-up approach you need the people to say we we want to do things this way we want to fund this crazy experiment uh we want to take higher risks instead of that that sort of um iterative process that usually happens in in science um so we at the least in crypto you had VCS private money um that could fund these companies but VCS can't really fund researchers before there's any IP before there is a company formed right so I think we funded about

15 projects um and most of like or at least uh almost half of them I think wouldn't have happened um they were just academic researchers that had expertise in something but they were not starting companies they were not going to go raise VC funds they didn't have the IP so we gave them funds to create that so um I think if you look at the the ones funded in in Labs like um uh Newcastle by Victor coralchuk and Washington University in in the US Jonathan and Oslo University evanderfang these projects have been advancing quite

a lot they've now built ipe most of them apoptosense as well and and so some of them are ready to be spun out into startups and then you can get traditional angels and VCS involved so we're gonna have the first three spin outs I think this year stay tuned on on all of that we've deployed about 4 million into the projects far and with all funded by um initially we had this auction for anyone to be able to bid and buy the Vita tokens and that's how uh got born in June 2021 and then we also had strategic contributors

that are more institutional big Pharma like Pfizer crypto VCS some some individuals like Balaji srinivasan and [Music] or retro bio which is also a longevity company just kind of expanding the network of Vita dial to institutions as well but mostly I think there's um kind of bottom-up funds um and they're ready to be deployed in in things that would otherwise not happen as fast and also some things that are safer you know Partnerships with existing companies and so on and if you want I can also go into some of the the cool aspects of each project but I don't

know if we have time for that let me maybe uh dig in here a little bit more um so um I remember the Pfizer announcement and it actually caught a lot of lack in the ecosystem so what's in it what is what's in it for Pfizer what's Vita Dow doing that Pfizer couldn't do on its own well a lot of it is um deal flow we get all of these amazing projects um they help us incubate them usually it's not like a VC fund where people come for funding and they have a pitch deck or anything it's a lot of our team members including people from Pfizer

that have been helping for almost a year now um and so these projects get sort of advanced accelerated and then they would be ready for Pfizer 2 leaders here we say for example and um also they get to contribute to this new way of doing things um with towers and this I I think it's also a learning experiment for them it's it's sort of a win-win thing and another aspect of it is uh with the Vita token you don't only get governance rights you also have um a bunch of perks and for institutions the most important one is to be able to participate

financially in some of the projects we funded or will fund at the similar terms with us like syndicating with us either via fractionalizing these IP nfts where the community the community that has tokens Can stake the tokens and and purchase uh some of those but also through a sidecar fund a regular VC fund that can put money into these spin outs before they're ready for the traditional VC so basically a better better valuation and you only be you're only able to put money into these VC funds that are sidecar to Vita if you have video dial tokens Vita tokens but to Vita token holders automatically

partake in this so basically if is there is this kind of just an incubation crash for um for Pfizer to kind of reap the benefits after or do kind of Vita contributors automatically also partake in any upside that's kind of to be had from these projects so people can uh get Vita tokens by contributing capital or or work and then the Vita tokens uh basically provide that those resources to put into both capital and work put into these projects and Vita Dao will own a lot of the the upside so a lot of these will come back to the treasury and so on but also

people including Pfizer and so on can get involved in asset by asset specifically like you know you get researchers that know more about a specific thing they might help that project get some uh Coral took nft tokens instead of just Vita as like a whole portfolio thing and and also potentially put money into that doubling down and also it gives us an indication markets usually give you an indication right of what is more valuable and of course it's going to help us with figuring out the the asset value of our portfolio too because we have about six million liquid but also a lot of like paper assets and paper gains and so on but once we put put it out such that other people can buy pieces of H asset

then we also know the value of our Treasury and that's that's something that doesn't happen in biotech you have to wait until Pharma buys your assets or you get to an IPO as a biotech company um and or of course it's it's the equity of the companies as well but usually companies have multiple assets this is sort of bringing IP into the 21st century digitally and have it in having it liquid and priced by the market I think is very important I think we've covered quite a few of the topics that kind of we wanted to cover in terms of DSi so basically I will take off funding widening participation and taking research from Lab to application one area that is a huge pain point for

scientists today that we haven't really covered that much is publishing so obviously publishing for everyone who's not in science never has been in science um it's a very Antiquated process it's kind of like you're sending a letter to the Royal Academy about your findings and they see their kind of maybe passing it on to other people who can kind of comment on it and you kind of get it back as a letter actually today it's emails but it's it's very much could be letters I mean it takes I've I've actually had articles that have taken years to publish like literally years so what's what's there in publishing um that we can we can set up in a more

efficient way um with them the help of uh blockchains and Diesel yeah I think maybe like one good summary of the current papers is like it's still these paper PDFs that are very static like that are not actually made for like the internet age like they're like still you could do them on the typewriter like even AI paper you have to pay for color if you if you submit a paper and it has color graphs you actually have to pay extra I mean as a scientist you have to pay for publishing depending on where you publish and then you have to pay extra if you have color graphs as if people don't actually all look at the same PDF anyways it's it's it's maddening and I think that's the thing

is it's still stuck in like almost like a pre-computer it's not even internet and I think um the one is like almost like the medium I think like of course the what's the goal of publishing is to share research with other researchers so otherwise and with a like broad public that like all of us can understand this research that we funded inherently with tax dollars and that we of course for example use crypto terminology can Fork the research and build research on top of it and I think the one way is like in the in the medium which I think has now like a lot of ways to evolve like of course from like having different medium for example interactive models in the research search but also where you maybe

can like challenge the research and or where you can contribute to the research and where it's like a living breathing document and and thing so there's actually projects in this side for example uh one is called DSi Labs that is um building that like these interactive artifacts uh there's projects like research Hub that uh coinbase Honda um Brian um Brian Armstrong created and which is like a publishing platform and a bit like Reddit for research and and also with collaborative features I think the interesting things for example in beta does case we for example did like a biomarker review um and literally started this uh to announce it in the with like a bounty in

our governance forum and we're just like hey like this is the Bounty for people putting together this review I think like a week later with like four amazing researchers do together like a 20 Page review of like the different biomarkers and but the interesting thing is it's like a more continuous process so now we're like building a knowledge graph for for these biomarkers um and to basically put all the all the knowledge and all the different almost like as a literature review of the different biomarker research onto a Knowledge Graph where you now can cryptographically with your zero address on this tool called lateral um can I actually see a demo I think on ldg.lateral.io to just create your own Knowledge Graph but where people can

then like add claims question claims and then at the end get rewarded based on their contributions so if you jump into then our like um biomarker Knowledge Graph and you refute like a lot of the research and give sources and or if you add a lot of evidence and and interesting research you get accredited for that but that's then like still not the final result like ultimately it's a collaborative living thing and I think that that hints at like what publishing in a more design native way can look like it's it's just like much more collaborative much quicker and and assignment of like who contributed what is very clear and cryptographically proven literally with your like zero X

address on chain and I think um there's way more possibilities in this direction I think of course like um having for example the equivalent of GitHub libraries that people can fork and run into Cloud Laboratories that even wet lab research can be forked and you can maybe like change the mod molecule run the research again with one click instead of having to set up your own lab with millions of dollars that you can literally do research it currently might not even be possible at like a modern lab because something might be missing that research you can in the future do from your desktop browser and click run and and replicate the research because that's I think also

a very important Point by larger matters on a podcast with them and there's now also two building this called a scholar um is that like a lot of the current research doesn't replicate so not only is publishing completely broken but also most of the research is just false like it doesn't replicate and we've seen this with Alzheimer's where now the government probably spent like 50 billion like something on this order of magnitude of research based on hypothesis and research that proofed out to to be not not even wrong and false but literally fraudulent like it was like basically tampered with and of course that's also something where crypto strong is temper proof so ultimately having cryptographic signs that specific artifacts for example that sometimes are tampered with are cryptographically proven a bit like if

you take a photo with a camera that uh it does a cryptographic proof that it's not like a deep fake but that it's actually a real photo so I think a similar thing will also be necessary and happen in yeah with with Cam with like research artifacts and like research devices that the data is proven to be correct and and not tampered with I would also add that we are a big Community apart from our main focus on funding these these research projects and spinning them out in companies we have a bunch of initiatives that people start like like this biomarker thing that Vincent mentioned but also a peer review system that uses the token to upvote and things like to give people incentives to

provide good reviews um outside of their usual Journal system but also a journal we we call so the peer review system is called tldr the longevity decentralized review and the a journal the laundry list but also Vincent started a bunch of initiatives actually the one with the at the Bitcoin round for longevity I think uh we had about 500k from vitalik and a lot of it went into the longevity prize um and uh so we kind of rewarding progress in in the spaces as a whole um with small incremental prizes instead of like a big one that can be hit in 10 years or so and also other initiatives

like a fellowship to just have more people join the field the students microgrants for students to get into longevity um hackathon and all kinds of initiatives like that that are not usually mentioned yeah and I think maybe actually like just to add this um a small example like with the longevity price the first price we did was a hypothesis price for everyone like it could be like a 14 year old or like a like established researcher could probably um could contribute basically the submission of like a contrarian like underappreciated idea to solve um aging and Longevity and with I think over 200 submissions and of course all of them are blinded and the the top ideas not only get um kind of recognition and are

discussed on podcasts and but also get financial prizes so people didn't had to pay to submit their applications they didn't need a PhD literally some very young people or some people that are 30 years in the field applied and maybe the young person wins because we don't even know who who applied basically in the planning process um and and I think the interesting thing there is again that maybe there are like amazingly smart well red people that are just going through the longevity Reddit that might have better ideas on contrarian novel ideas to solve it then some phds were like 30 years in the field and might have gotten more dogmatic than like a weird nerd on the internet that just let the literature so that's one example of

something which goes also in this direction of um yeah rewarding knowledge and information and and not just the execution of research but another example is also incentivizing people to disprove a popular research paper so we're going to have a prize for that we have a price for biomarkers with Methuselah Foundation that also you might know from uh the famous sort of vitalik sending them uh all the like half the shiba sorry to have the dodgel on uh coins that he got um it's a few hundred million I think in in deutschelon a bunch of ideas for prizes that are coming up as well yeah so let's let's check out

longevity.review that's a really interesting link how does this new collaborative model of publishing interact with the IP system because in the intellectual property system anything that is prior art or prior knowledge okay you cannot file a patent for it and then you need the intellectual property in order to build Commerce of it so that beta Dao and Pfizer these guys have something investable uh for the future I tend to see a contradiction of terms here right so if if the if the early signs

is being done in a collaborative fashion and it's all public knowledge then wouldn't it be really hard to actually build off IP and then get into the finance side of it yeah I think that's of course like also shows a bit like how the current system is broken that it like it can't be collaborative or very open because then you kind of like can't file a patent and and the promise actually is like um you can be against pain but it's like if you invalidate a patent there is no incentive to for someone to pay 100 200 million which is necessary for the clinical trial it's actually there's people dying because some scientists um uh basically publish too early some stuff that could otherwise have become a

patent and otherwise have a financial incentive with clinical trials to reach patients so actually um basically in theory it's easy to say okay patents are bad but in the current system if you like don't have a patent you don't have a chance to bring it into humans so I think that's important to understand but I think of course you can still generate a lot of ideas in the in the open of course just like a few things you can't give away as a researcher to otherwise it would invalidate your your patent filing and of course those things need to be confidential but of course you can also enable more collaborative work by 20 people signing an NDA which is what's happening for example in in videos plays concretely if we find out the research say with twenty thousand dollars and

there is some very like confidential important information every researcher in the community that's stepping up and bring this project forward of course can access the data but has to sign an NDA that they don't share it so it doesn't invalidate the potential patent filing but you still have the benefit then of this collaboration the whole Community can still get like video updates text updates that don't invalidate the patent and give away the crucial information that would and I think so we're of course trying to work around those issues that are fundamental um and I think in the future it might even be um more ways to enable collaboration without giving this away but to your point I think ultimately the purpose is not just to get a paper out

of it like for the researcher but it's to solve a disease and ultimately do so on the most cost effective way and of course to share the information with the community with the research field with the people that supported research but I think we we we're finding a way to do so and of course like people present at conferences all the time about stuff they're working on that doesn't have patents filed yet but of course usually have them to like for example not say which molecule they're investigating that has these effects but they just say molecule a b and c like I want to highlight to clarify the difference between science and and just publishing and then drug Discovery drug development right so in um the current we we are mostly playing

within the current model of drug discovery of just uh keeping the actual molecular structure and confidential things private and ultimately getting a patent and so on um and working with Pharma and biotech and so on because yeah currently through the current regulatory system it's very expensive uh you need billions for per each drug because some drugs fail um so ideally um we would move towards more of a price Model where the government says hey if you extend healthy lifespan by one year we earn actually there's a few trillion for just the US that that you would earn in in not only extra productivity for from those people on taxes and so on but

also not having to pay for sick care Medicare keeping people on a poor state of health for longer uh so they would say look if anyone does this or helps with uh delay Alzheimer's or reverse Alzheimer's by a certain percentage or something you get this this many billion or something which is what's work what it's worth it to us so we're trying with the longevity prize and other initiatives to set up uh pay for Success prices where life insurance or governments or or philanthropy pulls this money and only pays it on success like the usual price but right now it's more for like repurposing existing compounds which are cheap to get into clinical trials like rapamycin so we put up some money for

Brad stanfield's uh rapamycin trial and he he's still still trying to get the rest up to 350k and uh we're also still trying to get a payer that would pay potentially like a million or two million or something if it would show success in in extending healthy lifespan in in that uh in that study or subsequent studies and so on super excited yeah I think that's one actually mechanism that for example optimism might get coin and others of course pioneered also a lot is uh RP uh like like a retract of public goods funding like having basically incentives for someone to proactively fund something because they then potentially have upside in being retractively rewarded so

there's a lot of experiments on those like we're collaborating with protocol Labs project called hypersets which is building these impact certificates um good consoles involved on that and the goals of course that Beyond science for everything you you then can in a very native way get like one in a certificate for a thousand bucks and if it's able to solve for example a longevity you get like a financial reward potentially or you just get a status of having been part of that um breakthrough but I think that's like an interesting new mechanism where you don't need patents anymore um but of course there are some other um diseases where you clearly need clinical trials um and of course like the repurposing of research is

um of basically off paying drugs it's much cheaper because it's already proven to be safe in humans you you have much less burden to prove that this researchers um like not deadly uh so I think that's some interesting experiments basically I think that this is also enabling which like the current market system uh that is doing science is completely not good at it so I think in that sense like this whole public good space of of ethereum and crypto is also extremely interesting and useful in the context of science make funding decisions is it literally like a coin Vote or I say like some sort of reputation system involved because I

imagine that a lot of the um decisions to be made um rely on the actors having an extraordinary amount of information we have a what's called a senior reviewers a bunch of experts that review projects when they're ready and um we put up a proposal and put their stamp of approval basically With A Brief Review and and a conviction score from one to five and then the token holders are informed by that ultimately they could still say yeah these experts are not getting it it's it's you know it's our Dao together with the token you know if it's majority of the token Supply

wants that they can say look we're gonna do this crazy experiment that the experts are saying it's it's uh it's it's not good but it hasn't happened it's usually been yeah people are kind of listening to to The Experts and and deploying capital and how do you become an expat so anyone can join and so on and try to do various bounties like Source a project for us and get tokens for that or or dollars and so on but um we as a group of uh well there's there's many phds postdocs and professors and so on already in the group and when there's a new person or we reach out to to the top experts

um in the field we kind of know all of them um to help us and just ask them to review and just there's a sort of consensus in the group that this person is a senior reviewer I think the maybe the important thing is also uh you can also just come in even like Sidetrack the process and like put up a project for for governance proposal and review so you don't have to follow that process in every step but of course then basically the review happens completely in the open oftentimes and just in the governance form I think another thing is of course that we're also still experimenting on this like review and governance component I think some of the like early steps of this review you can also do on chain um and of course I think there's some

interesting stuff like with like we're now introducing like basically following the the governance patterns that others are doing which is delegation and of course then for example encouraging bigger holders to delegate to scientists they um like trust or find interesting um but I think this other more interesting mechanisms that are still super early even from the technology so if we have for example snapshot um as a mechanism of course they now for example enable I think quadratic credential voting since very recently with like a git coin passport integration if I'm not mistaken but that happened like a few months ago like it wasn't even around like a year ago and I think a lot of those governance experiments like we want to be at the frontier but we not

also don't want to be uh the guinea pig and like just focus on governance experiments for the sake of it but we want to see okay like what proves promise and I'm very certain that like the next five years we will see a lot of experimentation on governance mechanisms and then those that are the most promising I think will also explore and adopt and of course that would be a governance proposal for the community so everyone can come in with a governance proposal to change governance and and that's something that actively we also have a work group um working on governance perfect thank you guys so much so um we will kind of attach a list of uh desire projects that we talked about to the show notes but if one if people want

to partake in Vita Dao um where should they where should they go how can they become a part of this I would say from the website you can see a bunch of information and and click join the Discord or join the community join our mission and things like that um and then I would say the Discord is definitely the best way uh try to see what's going on how you can help um even just come for a week to hang out with us and and maybe you learn something um do some bounties potentially um apply to join the working group do onboarding calls join the onboarding call and and see how you could help um we have a lot of people we we need a

lot of people um in in various aspects from from you know coding legal marketing and all that but also of course the scientific aspects especially recruiting uh biotech operators to help us spin out these companies and and also we have um I just came this weekend to Montenegro we have um an experiment pop-up mini city called zuzalu uh here and um we have a focus on healthy living and and Longevity but also crypto research and um public goods and um ZK and and all of all of these things to ultimately explore how we can build more

new cities potentially a jurisdiction for doing um for medical Innovation and potentially evolving Vita out where the network state so you can check out vidad.com and there you'll see to sign up as a visitor we're full for we have uh 200 residents as a cab for now and um you can join some of the conferences that are happening especially May 55 to 15th there's a a bunch of uh from zero to one classes in longevity biotech but also May 1314 basically a normal conference for longevity but also

there's there's others on on network states building new cities Charter cities and alternatives to network States and so on you'll see the schedule on there yeah and I I think another place um of course that we didn't talk that much about it but is uh with a molecule basically you can also have like an overview of like different research projects even Beyond longevity and see also a bunch of the other um biotech dials that we support on bio.xyz which is kind of like our program to support other people building these biodials in other areas from like women's health to synthetic biology and other areas so if you also want to discover other biotech dials uh go there and I think another

great place is on ethereum slash DSI it's like a explainer of also kind of factor pros and cons from traditional science to decentralized science and the different projects and the different ideas so that's a very good starting point and then there's also like a Decay Wiki if you just Google it with like a lot of information on almost every project in a space and on dsi.global you see like a bunch of events and meetups so also for like local groups um so there's a bunch now of like local communities like this London or DC Berlin like um in a lot of cities popping up am I actually surprised like there's literally like an explosion like from Belgrade to Tokyo to India it's really nice to see these communities pop up

everywhere so there's also a lot of local communities similar to like early ethereum or Bitcoin local communities now popping up fantastic so no excuses not to get involved thank you both so much for coming on it's been a pleasure thanks for having us thank you