Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Laurence Ion & Vincent Weisser: Vita DAO – From DeSci to Longevity Research

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

Scientific research & publishing are gruelling tasks that extend outside the scope of science itself. Centralised publications abound in archaic practices that span from submitting a paper to getting it peer-reviewed and finally published, process which may take even up to years. In addition, research requires funding from very early stages of pursuing an idea, all the way to its finality (i.e. clinical trial or real-life applications). In TradSci (traditional science), funding is usually obtained once progress has already been achieved or when a startup has been formed.DeSci (decentralised science) sets out to change this paradigm by funding early stage research via DAOs. When it comes to scientific publications, peer reviewing is also decentralised and incentivised, considerably speeding up the process. Moreover, contributions can be clearly retraced, avoiding false claims over IP, and the research itself becomes much more easily accessible and disseminated.We were joined by Vincent Weisser & Laurence Ion, stewards of Vita DAO, to discuss the advantages of DeSci in general, and the progress of longevity research in particular.Topics covered in this episode:Vincent’s background and his interest in longevityLaurence’s background and his interest in biotechThe purpose of DeSciWhich science branch is better suited for DeSciHow DeSci fixes contribution acknowledgement & incentive misalignmentFrom research idea to startup via DeSci funding$VITA token utilityAccelerating scientific publishing via DeSciHow IP is attributed in a DeSci settingProject review and governance in Vita DAOEpisode links: Vincent WeisserLaurence IonVita DAOMolecule DAOVita DAO projectsMoleculeBio DAO launchpadThe Longevity PrizeThe Longevity Decentralized ReviewThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/488

This is Epicenter, Episode 488, with guests Lawrence Ayan and Vincent Weiser from Vita Dow. Welcome to AppaCenter, the show which shocks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedrich Erns and I'm here with Meheroy. Today, we're speaking with Lawrence Ayn and Vincent Weiser, who are respectively stewards of longevity deal flow at Vita Dow and the ecosystem need at Molecule. Vita Dow is a Dow whose goal it is to promote longevity research. We had Vita Dow on a while back, together with its sister project molecule, which is an NFTIP project targeting pharmaceutical researchers. We're interested in the larger D-Sai landscape today,

and hope Lawrence and Vincent can lay this out for us, and we'll also hear about what's new at Vita Dow. So before we talk with Lawrence and, 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 yield?

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And they support ledger. Give it a try at Omni. Fantastic. Lawrence and Vincent. It's a pleasure to have you guys on. Before we kind of dive into this entire longevity, and DISA topic. Give us some background on yourselves.

Thanks for having us, big fan of the Epicenter podcast. Yeah, so maybe my background is basically just like entering kind of early 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 this possibility of kind of like depths built on Ethereum such as the DAO.

So explored that into much more depth and then built like an Ethereum decentralized exchange called Dex Blune, 2017, and explored also kind of like the defyce space. And actually at the same time, also try to figure out like what are different ways have the biggest impact and explored different areas from effect of altruism to like AI and other areas but really 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 wanted to kind of leverage it for good and to advance science.

So I actually met then Paul and Tyler, who were at the time in two. 21 building out molecule as kind of like the marketplace to fund research and this IPNFT 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 Dowel, so kind of like using this mechanism of DAO's to fund research, which really stick with me. I actually, funnily enough, like a year before, tried to register a longevityDAO.com.

but I didn't have the team or people to kickstart it with, but then with Paul and Tyler, I was really excited to join them and many other stewards and people that came together to initiate this experiment. Yeah, so then I get involved into helping create Vita Dow with many others. And now I'm leading ecosystem efforts as well at Molecule and really helping the Vita Dow for X, so the Vita Dow 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 cast 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 dying for people our age usually seems a really long way off, right? Yeah, I think like the easiest. way I think to describe it, I think is actually probably from like my even grandparents' generation,

like to see them like increasingly deteriorate and suffer and really like not being able to live anymore really, like being in old people's home, having dementia, of course dying like at some point from age related diseases. And I just realized I think it was like subconscious at first that like that doesn't seem really right. You're like suffering for like 20, 30 years and are not able to really participate in society. And I think it's very obvious for people that are like solving cancer, Alzheimer, like all of these things is extremely important. And it wasn't obvious to me at the time that like 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, yeah, discovered also some books. And I think actually by kind of like getting into the weeds of like, okay, what is the biggest ways to improve humanity, like longevity stick out as one of the biggest, 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 anyone else for that matter. So, yeah, that was kind of like my driver into longevity. And actually, it was funnily enough when I reflected on it. also folks like Vitalik and the crypto people really getting into it, kind of like intensified even the interest because that made it for me, yeah, even more obvious that it's something to, yeah, look into more deeply. Why do you think longevity research societally somewhat stigmatized?

Right? So basically if you say you're cancer researcher, you know, obviously that's fantastic. If you're an Alzheimer's researcher, obviously that's also fantastic, your diabetes researcher, go for it. But basically if you say, 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 kind of, it's almost esoteric in a way, right? Totally.

Yeah, I think the main thing, like my explanation for it is, 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 it for many people especially also on crypto say which i think it's not wrong but it's of course gives the wrong impression to most people and i think it's also of course media driving home and narrative that is 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 the sense that ultimately, even if like a Jeff Bezos is funding research in that space, like 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. And I think, yeah, it's ultimately, I think a media thing, but also that the community is, especially early on, really embrace this narrative of like living to 500 to 1000. 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 100 or 200 years ago. Everyone thinks it's normal to live to 90s.

So I think it's, yeah, I think kind of like an anchoring bias to the what's known today, but also a bit of like a coping mechanism with, okay, like looking death into the eye, we'll all die with 90, can't be 100 or like 120. 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 life? I think is pretty obvious. Of course, there's, I think, also some misbeliefs 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 the frailing healthcare system for old societies. Like, for example, Japan really struggling with like a very shift. demographic and I think in that sense it's like a very very obvious liquid thing especially get for example everyone to live healthy to 90 but I think there's also like a shift now happening I think to make sense I can also say that this paradigm really makes sense to address the root cause of disease instead of what pharma usually does which is symptom palliation it's it's

mostly been that. So maybe except for antibiotics 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, you don't address the root cause of vascular aging. And so it's mostly being like damage control, kind of cutting off the heads of the ancient Greek hydra. You kind of off its heads and one head and two grow back. And it's like that with aging and age real diseases. Prevention is better than symptom palliation, right? Do you think the entire, the entire ecosystem could kind of 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 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. I would like to be 36 for, you know, 50 years. I wouldn't like to be 36 for, you know, more years and that would be awesome. But do you think kind of reframing it that way might help? Definitely.

I mean, it's decentralized, right? Some people are framing it in a certain way. Some people are framing it. 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 going to be immortal. The first, the person who lives to 1,000 is born today and kind of rising up some interesting just turning heads, you know.

So it's a lot of that. But yeah, it totally makes sense. 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, that would only increase 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 going to get cardiovascular disease or diabetes or Alzheimer's or stroke and so on. But yeah, like we try to communicate it in various ways, but other people will communicate it in other ways. Question is who gets more attention. We got sidetracked a little bit here into this longevity narrative arc. Lawrence, tell us. about yourself before we kind of dive into the much larger landscape of D.Sai. So the TLDR on me is that I want to help work on aging research and establish this new medical paradigm, just like crypto is a new financial paradigm, because I love life and I don't think I really want to die as long as I'm healthy.

So every year, if I get to 99 and I'm healthy, I probably want to be also 100. And I wouldn't really think about it for many hundreds of years because I think it's impossible to predict how technology, singularity, humanity will look like more than 100 years in the future. So yeah, just let us focus on health. You asked Vincent, but I also, unlike most young people, I know what it's, feel like to feel frail like an old person and not only of course I also loved my my grandma and I saw her suffer but I personally also have had many health issues I've spent a lot of time in hospitals many surgeries so 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 in Romania. There wasn't much to do there. But I was really good at science, passion about biology, but also computer science, math, all of these things. So I kind of went into that direction of doing practical things. Then startups, entrepreneurship, I think initially it was kind of glamorous and I wanted to prove something to my bullies, want recognition. But then I kind of spent a time in a sabbatical and I had some financial freedom. I was investing and started investing in biotech and longevity startups as well. But also spent time on looking at existential risks, improving the human condition, AI safety, AGI, brain machine interfaces, all of these things.

But ultimately, none of these existential risks or any of these technologies seem, to be likely to be a problem or to see this amazing future in my lifetime. And aging is basically 100% going to make us suffer and die. And so I just didn't want to have the same suffering and pain in the future when I would be old that I had when I was a kid. So, yeah, I just made sense to work on this, at least helps the world, medium-term. 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. So right now, the bottleneck in the longevity field, which I think we should focus on more, is this diversity of startups. It doesn't really exist.

I think there is enough billionaires and funding, to invest in things at like the angel slash VC level. But they usually don't find things to enough startups to invest in that are credible. And they're kind of ending up putting money into these behemates like Calico, the Google founders put a few billion in Calico since 2013. And it gets like super bloated and bureaucratic out of labs recently with Jeff Bezos. art ventures and like super credible people from from pharma also three point something billion and many such uh even even brian armstrong started a smaller one and uh there's a bunch of mega startups

with a few hundred million and so on but vita dau can basically uh the reason i'm working on vita dao is is we can accelerate the research that would otherwise just be some some paper but would would never become a medicine. We can sort of accelerate those, create startups that wouldn't otherwise exist, and have this scalable democratic participation. It's really a new type of organization, as you all know, these DAOs. And I'm excited because we can be sort of a first-order organization, potentially becoming as big and resourceful as a small country, maybe bigger.

And the will of the people cannot be stopped. So if there's enough 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 this is, I think, the best way we can make sure that we can have an impact. Thank you, Lawrence. So let's change gears and talk about D-Sai a little bit. The idea for this episode kind of came from my attendance at D-Sai London earlier this year. And I had told lots of people afterwards that I had gone to a fantastic conference about DSI.

And like 70% of the people, even, you know, who are very much in the Web3 ecosystem, asked me, what's D.Ci? So DSI is the much younger sibling to well-established players like D-Fi and D-Soc, even if D-Soc doesn't always go by that name, but basically D-Sach is. society has been, but Dow ecosystems have been around for a while. So these are obviously 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, 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 multiple so one is of course like very kind of like funding bodies that are very bureaucratic like for example bnage in the u.s is like one of the biggest funding bodies it's like kind of like a monopoly on scientific funding especially also in the health space and they of course have like similar mechanisms like most of the application processes for example take half a year, like a very long time and are very bureaucratic.

And most people don't get funding at the end of it, but spend weeks or months 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 signs. The only thing that's really measured is publications. And I think that's one component. So it's like the issues in centralized 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 centralizing the publishing of science and gatekeeping of course some of the most groundbreaking science so some of the leading science that is now some of which were novel prizes like wasn't able to get published and that 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 for other issues. And I'm not even saying that like centralized science doesn't have a place. It's more of course about acknowledging that like ultimately a lot of things could be done more effectively and in a more open and 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 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 Vita Dau and Molecule. Publishing, I think, is like another 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. Like, it's also gate-capped 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. It's very hard to be like most places in the world and practice science. It's very gate kept in that sense. Like it's ultimately, I think the most stark, I think, information is to an extent, of course, that like only every thousandth person is like a scientist. And so 99.99% of humanity can't participate in science. Like they can't participate in the funding of science.

They can't do or execute science. They can't easily publish science because they don't have a PhD. They don't have access to the labs. So I think that's like maybe 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 can happen in like a kids. room or like in a garage where someone is just able to do science, for example, or to participate in science, even if it's like just like one alternative, for example, for scientific funding, for scientific publishing, for scientific credentials and other aspects. I think increasingly it is

becoming an option also with the scientists we talk to. There's still a lot of them are still at 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. 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. 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-capped, because there are in many ways very underpaid and not fairly rewarded also for their work.

And because it's such a like long and hard process. process 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 novel experiments in science funding, for novel experiments in science publishing or 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 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 regulations 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 various smaller countries that had lesser regulations. And only after the women, sort of lobbied the government a lot after many years, then the FDA also approved it in the US.

You may be, a lot of you, I super recommend watching Dallas Byers Club as well, talking about 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 FDA was like really trying to be super paternalistic and not allow people that had a terminal disease to try something that wasn't approved. And they found ways with something that's not that dissimilar from a Dow, a Dallas Byrus Club, for example, these people would sort of 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 drugs, which was the issue with selling drugs that weren't approved. And many, many such examples, I would say. moral failure of the current system. So the current system works by preventing people from making mistakes, being super careful. But nobody sees the risk in delaying access to life-saving medicine. So in the status quo, people are dying of terminal illnesses. Even with COVID, give an example, right? If we had done challenged trials, we could have saved potentially hundreds

of thousands, millions of lives. But usually if something goes wrong and a hundred people die 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 good people. They're trying to help prevent issues and side effects and so on. But they don't have. have an incentive to look at effective and expected value. I hear the argument. I think kind of you're in danger 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 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 know the outcome is the same, but morally, it feels very different to me. So I kind of see why this is, why this has been met with resistance. So I understand people get COVID 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? Why not let them make the decision and try something? Yeah, we had this discussion here in Germany probably like 10 years ago or so about legalizing marijuana for terminally ill people. And then basically there were the people who opposed this who said, well, it's a gateway drug. And you know, you start taking marijuana and then you end up taking whatever. But basically, obviously, for dying people, 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. I've kind of jotted down a couple of topics I kind of want to talk about in detail for decentralized science, 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 the effect of patents and patent laws. Those are kind of the major areas kind of that I jot it down. And I kind of want to talk about how blockchains and decentralized technologies can help for each one of those. But before we do that, I have like a higher level question.

For which kind of scientific disciplines is DISA actually applicable? Right. So basically say, I'm, by training, I'm a physicist, right? So say, I want to fund LH at the large Hadron Collider 2. Right. So I'll need several billion dollars. Probably won't fund that with the Dow. So kind of what kind of scientific disciplines do you actually see as within the scope of DISA? 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 Juan Benet made a great point of like the different stairways of like increase in public goods funding and scientific funding that could happen via blockchains. And I think it could rival 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 Vita da was a great example, is these smaller research projects with an extremely strong overlap with the crypto community's interest. And I think longevity is an interesting example because

ultimately, I think, as Lauren said, it's a new paradigm that resonates with people in crypto that also view crypto as a new paradigm to do things in a better, like, foundationally better way. And I think in that sense, those areas that are closest to the interests of crypto people are probably those that and are already those that are getting the most traction, like longevity being a great example. like most 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 other that are very close to the heart of many people like climate research for example being a good example. And then those I think that are really tangible and almost like consumers maybe not the right word but that are very easy to understand for like a big part.

of people. And I think that are able to also plug into some of the native, of course, tools with crypto and capital formation being wanted, of course, to your point, it's still hard to raise like a billion dollars in crypto for like a wild scientific project that can mainly be considered a donation, like the Large Hadron Collider or other mega projects and physics maybe. So I do think that like the smaller check sizes, let's say, of the donations and grants and for example, like with IP NFTs 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 heteroncolate 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, I think can tap into a bunch of crowdfunding methods, crypto being I think one interesting one. So and I think it's similarly of course for other areas, for example on publishing even cryptographic research and some of the research crypto projects do.

I think obviously we lends itself very well to be published and kind of like reviewed in very crypto native ways. So there's actually some projects doing that kind of like exploring publishing of applied crypto research. with crypto tools. And I think that will probably also be one of the first success for use cases of crypto publishing, just because there's a very high overlap,

obviously, of crypto people being eager to explore and dock through 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, not only financially, but also with their time. So I think that'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. Actually, the role of finances ultimately to allocate human resources productively. And if it can be allocated towards science productively, financial system will do it. and in some way we can think of, okay, we're trying to develop, we have an emerging financial system on our hands and decide 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 a project that was able to do interesting science

by leveraging either the underlying blockchains in a special way or by leveraging the financial primitives in a special way. Yeah, I think, of course, we're biased and being heavily involved also in, for example, Vita Dow. I think Vita Dow was definitely one of the first and bigger successes, I think, on the 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 fully count into decentralized science. Like the biggest that comes to mind was this craze of VitaLic getting a lot of Shiba Inno coins

and donating them to COVID-India's relief, but also doing a lot of kind of fast grants via crypto with an organization called Balvi for COVID research. So I think they almost deployed like over 100 million or approximately 100. million into COVID research. And there's some good information on it if you're searched Balvi. I think on Vita Dow, the earlier 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 to give feedback and input on the researcher.

Like a lot of the researchers have 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 they are inconclusive or like they don't know what to do next. And our community looks deeply into it and comes up with novel ideas. And I think that's actually the power of decentralized science and action is not like a siloed, isolated lab that might still be waiting for their application in the traditional system where we already funded it, have the first round of reviews, re-evaluated the research already onto the second round of research.

And I think that's really the power. It's like this crowd intelligence to an extent. Like there's a great book on this by Michael Nielsen. I'm not sure if it's called network science or something like this, but basically making the point that this kind of research is much more likely to succeed. Even historically there's like many such cases. are very collaborative and open ways to advance the research. So on Vita Dowell, 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 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 would think that if someone,

something needs to be found out. Basically, everyone should benefit who's 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 DISA can kind of help break up this, this incentive disalignment that we actually see a lot in traditional academia? Totally.

I think the one way is of course, um, to really have like cleared traces of like who contributed what. And I think actually cryptographic proofs already are very good at doing so. For example, there's a project we also support called lateral for knowledge graphs. And 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 X address contributed this piece of knowledge. And I think we are working on ways to do that. And also some of the more like research happening in the offline world.

Of course, like if some research is doing research at his lab and shares his report, it's kind of like still very manual and still traditional. But the goals, of course, to bring more of that online and for example, into cloud labs and more computational work where everyone's contributions are accredited, like where ultimately if I contribute this data set, it shows that I share this data set, but also maybe like other people contributed to that data set. And then you can just like see the whole chain of contributions. And for example, also retroactively reward based on the contributions

or give ownership in the research 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. like another interesting project on this is, for example, hypercerts, which is giving these impact certificates to every contributor, and it has also like an impact evaluator. So they're kind of like also building this out in parallel. I think it's still early days.

And our goals also to fully integrate this into how we assign credit to researchers. But I think a lot of it is also needs to be figured out, especially with a lot of the real world research happening at labs, where it is not digitally submitted every minute. And basically if you look at the impact of widening participation, so as you said, 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, 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 better curation and better discovery mechanisms to filter through the noise. But I do think that like, for example, giving 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 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 usually I think good. I think you could see it, of course, with art that like the traditional artwork doesn't like what the crypto art world is doing, but I think it increases the diversity of art and the diversity

of sources of funding for artists. And I think it's very similar for scientists. Lawrence, you wanted to cover some examples of early successes in D science. Yeah, could you give us some examples? I think the best way to look at it with how D-Sai, and why it's so important. important, especially in longevity, since it's so dismissed by the incumbents. I would say, imagine if crypto had needed government funding. Most research usually needs government funding, right? It would never have happened. You need this sort of bottom-up approach. You need the people to say, we want to do things this way. We want to fund this crazy experiment. We want to take higher risks instead of that sort of iterative process that usually happens in science. So very, very,

At the least in crypto, you had VC's private money that could fund these companies, but VCs can't really fund researchers before there is any IP, before there is a company formed, right? So I think we funded about 15 projects, and most of like, or at least almost half of them, I think, wouldn't have happened. They were just academic researchers that had expertise in something, but they were not starting companies. we're not going to go raise VC funds. They didn't have the IP, so we gave them funds to create that. So I think if you look at the ones funded in labs like Newcastle by Victor Krollchuk

and Washington University in the U.S., Jonathan Ann, Oslo University, Evander Fang, these projects have been advancing quite a lot. They've now built IP, most of them, atopopold. sense as well. 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 going to have the first three spinouts I think this year. Stay tuned on all of that. We've deployed about four million into the projects so far. with all funded by initially we had this auction

for anyone to be able to bid and buy the Vita tokens and that's how Vita Dow got born in June 2021. And then we also had strategic contributors that are more institutional, big pharma like Pfizer, cryptoVCs, some individuals like Pallagisorne and Joe Betts LaCrao or Retro Bio, which is also a longevity company, just kind of expanding the network of Vida Dow to institutions as well. But mostly, I think there's kind of bottom-up funds and they're ready to be deployed 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 cool aspects of each project, but I don't know if we have time for that. that. Let me maybe dig in here a little bit more. So I remember the Pfizer announcement and it actually caught a lot of flak 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 deal flow. We get all of these amazing projects. They help us incubate them. Usually it's not like, 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 I've been helping for almost a year now. And so these projects get sort of advanced, accelerated, and then they would be ready for Pfizer to lead a series A, for example. And also they get to contribute to this new way of doing things with DAWS and DISA. I think it's also a learning experiment for them. It's sort of a win-win thing. And another aspect of it is with the Vita token, you don't only get governance rights. You also have 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 IPNFTs,

where the community that has tokens can stake the tokens and purchase some of those, but also through a sidecar fund, a regular VC fund that can put money into these spinouts before they're ready for the traditional VC. So basically a better valuation. And you're only able to put money into these VC funds that are sidecarred to VitaDal if you have VitaDot tokens, Vita tokens. But do Vita token holders automatically partake in this? So basically, is there, is this kind of just an incubation crash for Pfizer to kind of read

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 get Vita tokens by contributing capital or work. And then the Vita tokens basically provide that those resources to put into both capital and work put into these projects. And Vita Dow will own a lot of 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

assets specifically like, you know, you get researchers that know more about a specific thing. They might help that project get some Koraluk NFT tokens instead of just VDA as like a whole portfolio thing 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 value. and of course it's going to help us with figuring out the asset value of our portfolio too, because we have about 6 million liquid, but also a lot of like paper assets and paper gains or so on. But once we put it out such that other people can buy pieces of each asset, then we also know

the value of our treasury. And 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. or of course 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 having it liquid and priced by the market, I think it's 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 tick 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.

It's a very antiquated process. It's kind of like you're sending a letter to the Royal Academy about your findings and basically they're 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 very much could be letters. I mean, it takes, I've actually had articles that have taken years to publish,

like literally years. So what's there in publishing that we can set up in a more efficient way with the help of blockchains and desize? Yeah, I think maybe like one good summary of the current. papers. It's 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 could do them on the typewriter. Like even AI papers. You have to pay for color. So basically 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 you 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 age, not even internet. And I think the one is like almost like the medium. I think like, of course, what's the goal of publishing is to share research with other researchers and with the like broad public that like all of us can understand this research

that we fund it indirectly with tax dollars. And that we, of course, for example, use cryptic terminology can fork the research and build research on top of it. And I think the one way is like 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, 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 thing. So there's actually projects in D-Sy for example.

One is called Dysai Labs that is building that like these interactive artifacts. There's projects like Research Hub that Coinbase Honda, Brian Armstrong created, which is like a publishing platform and a bit like Reddit for research and also with collaborative features. I think the interesting things, for example, in Vita Dau's case, we, for example, did like a biomarker review and literally started us to announce it 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. But the interesting thing is it's like a more continuous process. So now we're like building a knowledge graph for these biomarkers 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, 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 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 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's that hints at like what publishing in a more dsia native way can look like it's it's just like much more collaborative

much quicker and and the 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 molecule run the research again with one click instead of having to set up uh your own lab with millions of dollars um that you can literally do research at 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 replicate the research.

Because that's, I think, also a very important point. Balagie made this on a podcast with him. And there's now also a tool building this called a scholar, 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 proved out to be not even wrong and false, but literally fraudulent. Like it was like basically tempered with. And of course, that's also something where crypto strong is temperproof. So ultimately having cryptographic signs that specific artifacts, for example, that sometimes are tempered with are cryptographically proven a bit like if you take a photo with a camera that it has 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 research artifacts and like research devices that the data is proven to be correct and not tempered with i would also add that we are a big community apart from our main focus on funding these research projects and spinning them out in companies, we have a bunch of initiatives that people start like this biomarketing 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 outside of the usual journal system, but also a journal. We call, so the peer review system is called TLDR, the longevity decentralized review. And a journal, the longevity, the longevity But also, Vincent started a bunch of initiatives, actually, the one with the Gitcoin round for longevity.

I think we had about 500K from Vitalik, and a lot of it went into the longevity prize. And so we kind of rewarding progress in the space as a whole with small incremental prizes instead of like a big one that can be hit in 10 years or so. and also other initiatives like fellowship to just have more people join the field, students, microgrants for students to get into longevity, hackathon, and all kinds of initiatives like that that are not usually mentioned. Yeah, and I think maybe actually just to add this small example, like with the longevity price, the first price we did was a hypothesis price where everyone could be like a 14-year-old or like an established researcher

could contribute basically a submission of like a contrarian, like, underappreciated idea to solve aging and longevity. And with, I think, over 200 submissions. And of course, all of them are blinded. And the top ideas not only get kind of recognition and are discussed on podcasts but also get financial prizes. So people didn't have 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 applied basically in the planning process. And I think the interesting thing there is, again, that maybe there are like amazingly smart, well, read people that are just going through the longevity Reddit that might have better ideas on like contrary and novel ideas to solve it than some PhDs who are like 30 years in the field

and might have gotten more dogmatic than like a weird nerd on the internet that just read the literature. So that's one example of something which goes also in this direction of, yeah, rewarding knowledge and information and not just the execution of research. 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 Matuselah Foundation that also you might know from the famous sort of Vitalik sending them all the half the Shiba, sorry, half the Dojolon coins that he got. It's a few hundred million, I think, in Dojolon. A bunch of ideas for prizes that are coming up as well. Yeah, so listeners check out longevity. review.

That's a really interesting link. I am curious, 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, you cannot file a patent for it. And then you need the intellectual property in order to build commerce of it. So that Vita Dow and Pfizer, these guys have something investable for the future. I tend to see a contradiction of terms here. So if the early science 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 can't be collaborative or very open because then you kind of like can't file a patent and and the problem actually is like um you can be against patent but like if you invalidate a patent there is no incentive to for someone to uh pay. 100, 200 million, which is necessary for the clinical trials. Actually, there's people dying because some scientists basically published 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, basically in theory, it's easy to say, okay, patents are bad, but in the current system, if you 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 open. Of course, there's like a few things you can't give away as a researcher to otherwise it would invalidate 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 Vidal's case concretely, if we funded research, say, with $20,000. And there is some very confidential, important information. every researcher in the community that's stepping up and bringing 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 to 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. And I think in the future, there might even be 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 in 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'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. I want to highlight, clarify the difference between science and just publishing and then drug discovery, drug development, right? So in the current, we are mostly playing within the current model of drug discovery, just keeping the actual molecular structure and confidential things private and ultimately getting a patent and so on and working with pharma and biotech and so on. Because yeah, currently through the current regulatory system, it's very expensive.

You need billions per each drug because some drugs fail. So ideally, we would move towards more of a prize 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 you would earn in not only extra productivity from those people on taxes and so on, but also not having to pay for sick care, Medicare, keeping people in a poor state of health for longer. So they would say, look, if anyone does this or helps with delay Alzheimer's or reverse Alzheimer's by a certain percentage or something, you get this many billion or something, which is what it's worth it to us. So we're trying with the longevity prize and other initiatives to set up pay for success prizes where life insurance or governments or philanthropy pulls this money and only pays it on success, like the usual prize.

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 Stamfield's rapamycin trial and he's still trying to get the rest up to 350K. And 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 extending healthy lifespan in that study or subsequent studies and so on. Super excited. Yeah, I think that's one actually mechanism that, for example, optimism and Gitcoin and others, of course, pioneered also a lot, is RP, like a retroactive public goods funding, like having basically incentives for someone to proactively fund something because they then potentially have upside in being retroactively rewarded.

So there's a lot of experiments on those. Like we're collaborating with the protocol labs project called HyperSerts, which is building these impact certificates. get consoles involved on that. And the goals, of course, that beyond science for everything, you then can, in a very native way, get like one in a perfect 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 the status of having been part of that breakthrough. But I think that's like an interesting new mechanism where you don't need patents anymore. But of course, there are some other diseases where you clearly need clinical trials, And of course, like the repurposing of research is of basically off patent drugs. It's much cheaper because it's already proven to be safe in humans.

You have much less burden to prove that this research is like not deadly. So I think that some interesting experiments basically. I think that this is also enabling, which like the current market system that is doing science is completely not good at it. So I think in that sense, like this. this whole public good space of Ethereum and crypto is also extremely interesting and useful in the context of science. How does Witte Dao make funding decisions? Is it literally like a coin vote or is it like some sort of reputation system involved? Because I imagine that a lot of the decisions to be made rely on the actors having an extraordinary amount of information.

We have what's called senior reviewers, a bunch of experts that review projects when they're ready. And we put up a proposal and put their stamp of approval, basically, with a brief review and a conviction score from 1 to 5. And then the token holders are informed by that. Ultimately, they could still say, yeah, these experts are not getting it. It's, you know, it's our DAO together with the token, you know, if it's a majority of the token supply wants that, they can say, look, we're going to do this crazy experiment that the experts are saying it's, it's, it's not good. But it hasn't happened. It's usually been, yeah, people are kind of listening to the experts and deploying capital. How do you become an expert?

You cannot. Oh, it curate. Curate. 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 dollars and so. But we as a group of, well, there's many PhDs, postdocs and professors and so and already in the group. And when there's a new person or we reach out to the top experts in the field, we kind of

know all of them 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 maybe the important thing is also you can also just come in even sidetrack the process and put up a project 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 just on the governance forum I think another thing is of course that we're also still experimenting on this review and governance component I think some of the early steps of this review you can also do on chain. And of course, I think there's some interesting stuff

like we're now introducing, like basically following the governance patterns that others are doing, which is delegation. And of course, then, for example, encouraging bigger token holders to delegate to scientists they trust or find interesting. But I think there's other more interesting mechanisms that are still super early even from the technology.

So if we have, for example, a snapshot as a mechanism, Of course, they now, for example, enable, I think, credetic voting since very recently with like a Gitcoin 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 also don't want to be the guinea pick 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. next five years, we will see a lot of experimentation on governance mechanisms. And then those that are the most promising, I think we'll also explore and adopt. And of course, that would be a governance proposal for the community. So everyone can come and with a governance proposal to change governance. And that's something that actively we also have a working group, working on governance. Perfect.

Thank you guys so much. So we will kind of attach a list of DESI projects that we talked about to the show notes. But if people want to partake in Vita Dow, 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 click join the Discord or join the community, join our mission and things like that. And then I would say the Discord is definitely the best way. Try to see what's going on, how you can help even just come for a week to hang

out with us and maybe you learn something, do some boundaries potentially, apply to join the working group, do onboarding calls, join the onboarding call and see how you could help. We have a lot of people, we need a lot of people in various aspects from, you know, coding, legal, marketing and all of that, but also, of course, the scientific aspects, especially recruiting biotech operators to help us spin out these companies. And also we have a, I just came this weekend to Montenegro. We have an experiment pop-up mini-city called Zuzalu here. And we have a focus on healthy living and longevity, but also crypto research and public goods and ZK and all of all of these things to ultimately explore how we can build more new cities, potentially a jurisdiction.

a jurisdiction for doing for medical innovation and potentially evolving VidaDao towards network state so you can check out VitaDau.com slash Zuzalu and there you'll see to sign up as a visitor we're full for we have 200 residents as a cap for now and you can join some of the conferences that are happening especially May 5th, 5th, to 15th. There's a bunch of from zero to one classes in longevity biotech, but also May 13, 14, basically a normal conference for longevity. But also there's others 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 think another place, of course, that we didn't talk that much about it, but as

with 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 biotech dials that we support on bio.xyz, which is kind of like our program to support other people building these biodiles in other areas from like women's health to synthetic biology and other areas. So if you also want to discover other biotech dolls go there. And I think another great place is on Ethereum slash Desai. is like a explainer of also kind of like the 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 DCI Wiki if you just Google it with like a lot of information on almost every project in the space. And on DCI.global you see like a bunch of events and meetups. So also for like local groups. So there's a bunch now of like local communities like these are London or DCI Berlin. And a lot of cities popping up, I'm 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. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.

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