How should medical and pharmaceutical research be decentralized?
Discussion
How to achieve an effective and difficult (or impossible) to corrupt model for scientific research is an excellent question. Maybe Nostr, with some custom NIPs could help.
One big problem is money, as it is the tool used to corrupt. So, research financing would have to be reimagined.
#[3] has an interesting episode (I think 80) on research and the role fiat money plays in the equation
Peer reviewing should be rethought, too easy to buy (even for intent to censor). Maybe something with more participants, more distributed where reputation is given awarded via aggregated trustworthiness.
There is a whole lot to dream, consider… implement. I have thought much more about decentralized education than research but there is some obvious overlap. Easier for me to understand private education with learning as the product than research financing.
Let me just finish with this… in the pre internet era, pre-prints (long form notes) were sent to the relevant libraries (relays) for anyone to browse, get inspired by, criticized… if somehow this process could be put in direct contact with funding, also in layman’s term focusing on research objectives. Fix the money is a good start, fix the scientific process (or respect for it) is also needed.
Thank you for this long, well-thought out answer. I agree scientific funding needs to be fixed, and there should be more transparency. I don’t know how Nostr-like protocol would figure into the equation. I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to depend on zaps to fund major research projects. Some of the things you mentioned are already at play in the current system but could definitely be refined.
No worries.
Look at the twitter like experience Nostr provides as one very basic way of interacting with the network. Nostr is not memes and zaps, that’s the Trojan horse. Nostr is a decentralized publishing behemoth in the making that plugs straight into the BTC economy from inception. Built on top of decentralized, non government controlled money. All sorts of publishing, once publishers understand what is cooking under the hood here they better quickly adapt. The possibilities are endless, this show only getting started.
And did I tell you about marketplaces… 🤣
My point is this (and I should really save it so I can copy and paste it for how often I use it)
Decentralized finance… running (Bitcoin)
Decentralized communication… running (Nostr)
Decentralized production… loading
Decentralized law… awaiting command
I might not get to see it, I hope my son does.