Simone Cicero:
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs. And we speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in this rapidly changing world we live. I’m Simone Cicero, and today I’m alone, initially. But I have a very special guest that will lead us through, I would say, known, usual exploration space for us at the podcast, which is decentralized science.

Today, with me, we have Jocelynn Pearl. Jocelynn is a PhD from the molecular and cellular biology program at the University of Washington. Besides being a scientist, she’s also a podcaster and company builder. Indeed Jocelynn also do podcasts, the UtraRare Podcast, which explores the intersection of science and Web3 and the Lady Scientist Podcast where she features diverse and far ranging conversations with scientists.

Jocelyn is also actively involved within the LabDAO, which she co-founded, that is an open community run network of laboratories accelerating the progress in life sciences. And she’s also the lead compiler of the DeSci Wiki, which is a place where she keeps an eye on the industry evolution. And she also writes on many very important outlets. She had some pretty interesting articles coming up recently on Not Boring, but also the a16z blog. So, first of all, Jocelynn, thank you so much for being here.

Jocelynn Pearl:
Thank you so much for having me.

Simone Cicero:
Since the topic is a bit unfamiliar for the people probably in our listening audience, I would ask you to kindly maybe give a little bit of definition, I would say, of what the DeSci is and probably also how this has changed lately. Because you follow this space from the very onset, and you are, I would say, fairly at the center of this. So, maybe you can really help us to understand why this is important and what we’re talking about quickly before we dive into some vertical questions.

Jocelynn Pearl:
Absolutely. DeSci or Decentralized Science is kind of a play on the acronym DeFi, which was decentralized finance, and expands on some of the principles of blockchain technology. So, for instance, the idea that we can now decentralize assets. But in the science community where there’s traditionally been a lot of centralization and gatekeeping, it explores the ability to now have decentralized networks that are working towards common goals. There’s obviously additional layers of complexity there. But in general, I like to survey the space as different groups, projects, DAOs that are embracing the principles of decentralization and blockchain technology.

Simone Cicero:
When we speak about Web3 and blockchain very often, you know, we get this knee-jerk reaction that people say this is a technology in search for use case. You know, I don’t like when we start from the technology and so on. But I think now that I’m also diving into the space a little bit from some personal projects, I think in science, there is such a clear use case for decentralization and Web3 in general that is related to these tragedies of, I would say, misaligned incentives around science between the scientists, the companies that create the products and the adopters, the users of the product. So, this is something that you also feel as the main, the leading use case for decentralized science to realign all incentives around good science or and maybe you can also mention other general patterns of use cases that you see interesting from the perspective of how decentralization can help solve them.

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah. I think it, to me, and I’m obviously very biased as a trained scientist, but I think it’s one of the best or better use cases of Web3 technology. And I loved this, to paraphrase a quote from Susanna Harris on Twitter, she was like, oh, I get DeSci now. It’s essentially how science is supposed to work. And I just love that as an explanation for the space. I think it’s brought forth a lot of conversations around existing incentive structures and how those are broken and how those are failing the system and allowing us to start to think creatively about how to fix those incentive structures. Because at the end of the day, we’re people and we’re motivated by incentives. And hopefully, these new conversations and a lot of the builders in the space will create new systems that work a little bit better than the existing kind of Web2 standards.

There’s a few areas we can dive into where that makes a lot of sense, like scientific publishing for one, has traditionally been controlled and regulated by these big corporations that tend to be very extractive of the research community’s where all of the researchers are paying these corporations to publish their science and then it’s living behind paywalls. And the reviewers who are putting in quite a bit of work to review these publications through the peer review process are also not supported for their time and effort. And so some of the conversations within the DeSci space and some of the projects that are forming are hoping to realign incentives within that system so that everyone is better supported in what they’re contributing.

Simone Cicero:
It’s interesting because you say Web2 alternatives. But in reality, maybe when we speak about science, we deal with institutions that they are more industrial than Web2. And also, there is quite a lot of public bodies. When I think about universities, even, we’re talking about sometimes, and if I think about Italy, for example, about institutions that date back maybe, something like a thousand years. And it’s not really just about Web2 in decentralize science. It’s really about rethinking a model that sits there since probably 200 years at least.

And also when we think about decentralize science, we tend to think a lot about health care, but maybe there are also other spaces that normally are less considered. So, when you think about the rubber hitting the road really in decentralized science and so dealing with real institutions, what are the major gatekeepers and the major institutions that are supposed to be transformed by these practices and maybe the new ones that you believe may come up, especially as we can’t really transform some of these incumbents. What’s your feeling?

Jocelynn Pearl:
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how we as the scientific community, our whole ecosystem changes quickly. Like 20 years ago, the kind of hub of molecular biology was Caltech, for instance, and that’s changed in 20 years. And there’s been these cycles of, like, institutional hubs for different areas of research that really form around people gravitating to these specific focal points. So, traditionally, there have been particular locations where people form and aggregate because they want to be enriched by their peers. They want to be able to have conversations and critique each other, and that’s part of how discovery happens. Right? That’s kind of part of the scientific process.

So, I think one of the interesting things that’s happening now and that I’m certainly hopeful for the space of DeSci is that we’re now seeing these hubs of collective intelligence and conversation happening within some of these DAO communities, for instance. It’s almost like we’ve taken this concept of the Reddit forum, but now we have these Discord servers for now. That’s kind of our medium where scientists and different people can aggregate and start to have the types of conversations that in the past happened in the hallway at universities. But the gatekeeping as far as having to live in Boston and having to be, you know, a member of that university committee to be able to have those conversations doesn’t exist for these communities. Right?

Like, we use the term permissionless — permissionlessness, which I really hate that term. But it’s essentially that there’s now a lower barrier of entry to participate in these types of scientific communities. Which I think is really thrilling and exciting because you see so many different curious minds coming in and wanting to participate. I mean, we have people who are still in high school, people who are in college, all the way up to people who are retired and they and they still want to be a part of these types of conversations.

Simone Cicero:
Certainly makes things more blurred. Right? So, for example, it doesn’t count very much if you are retired or not, it doesn’t count very much if you are here or there. It doesn’t count, I guess, also the traditional separation that maybe we formally used to have around disciplines. I guess, there is a lot of — more overlap between disciplines in DeSci, or at least people with capabilities can play in different spaces. So, as we transition from a model of science that is largely dominated by, on one hand, public bodies, especially if I think about Europe, maybe less familiar with the US.

For example, large universities funded by government programs and private corporations that are maybe involved in, I don’t know, drug discovery or other things and such that into a space where there is much more diversity. If you want, it’s much more important, the individual, right, the entrepreneurial individual that can create teams and interact around projects. So, what is the potential anti-pattern that you see? What are the potential, I would say, drawbacks as we move out of the current institutional setting of science into this entrepreneurial, independent, uncoordinated version of science that decentralized science may represent?

Jocelynn Pearl:
We’ve kind of lived in a system where we have these two buckets essentially. We have public versus private, privately funded researcher science. And within the publicly funded, as you pointed out, the current research spending for the most part goes to the university centric model of research. Which produces a very particular type of science that’s heavily motivated by publication record, that’s tied to a given person’s career and their ascension within their career. And they’re seeking to develop the type of science that’s going to be novel and can be published in things like Nature Science L. You know, those are the kind of top tier scientific journals that people are heavily motivated to publish in.

And then on the private side and the industry side, again, there’s a very particular type of research within the life science space motivated by drug development and the ability to develop something that can be, for instance, approved by the FDA and treat a reasonably sized patient population. So, we’ve now created a system where there are two heavily incentivized motivation systems that are going to produce a very particular type of output. And I think there’s so much more out there, both from, like, a process perspective, an organization perspective, and also an output perspective that we as scientists are naturally interested in pursuing and understanding, understanding the world.

And I think there is so much potential, for instance, that we’ve seen from places like amateur scientists or amateur technologists that could be the location of the next big discovery that advances human progress. So, I am particularly interested in how places like DAOs might allow for the advancement of discovery over the next couple of decades, at least, hopefully. And whether or not it’s like a DAO per se or a community of scientists that lives online, I’m kind of, I don’t care either way. But I am interested in how these communities might advance things.

Now as far as the drawbacks, I think, was your original question, yeah. There’s certainly organizational drawbacks to a decentralized community like a DAO. So, it’s supposed to exist kind of in contrast to our traditional hierarchical corporation structure, right, where you have almost too much management. Right? Like, the level of management increases as you get higher into the organization. And I think there’s pros and cons to both of these styles of organization. I’m not like an organization scientist by any means. There’s plenty of people out there who study these things. I’ll call out, there’s a book called Reinventing Organizations that gets into some of this. And there’s plenty of groups that are studying how DAOs operate and function and are trying to put together some of the learnings from many, many DAO organizations so that we can better understand how to run and operate these types of orgs.

So, talentDAO is one and the SCaRF Forum, it’s a smart contract research forum that was partly started by someone interested in the co-op structure. So, there’s plenty of people who are really digging into this and doing hardcore research, collecting data on DAOs, for instance. But in general, I think your communities are going to rely on people who are intrinsically motivated, who are willing to be flexible and adapt to new ways of working. And unfortunately, right now, similar to the open source software community, these are people who can spend a lot of time online, they have the type of free time to work in these communities, and it kind of lends itself to a particular type of person. So, I’m interested in how we expand that further and allow more people to come into this space, for instance, like more women to work in the space. At its current state is very male dominated.

Simone Cicero:
Like everything else…

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah.

Simone Cicero:
It feels like when you speak and when I read some of the things that you wrote, it seems like, let’s say, the inefficiencies and the bureaucracy is existing in the traditional science space kind of created these situations where we tend to develop solutions, only solutions that have a large scale applicability, I would say. And of course, this is a problem that is much more tangible in health care, which is just, as I said before, is just one of the phases of this decentralized science, science in general. But especially if we think about health care there’s always been this debate about, for example, creating a cure for rare diseases. Right? That is something that normally really doesn’t happen because you don’t have this large scale applicability.

I feel like by reducing these bureaucratic frictions that exists in science, we may be able to unlock some kind of niche opportunities or at least making it possible to work more easily with the new types of institutions, I would say, for example, I don’t know community founded organizations or even grants for scientists that are generated by a much smaller set of stakeholders so we can be able to work on more niche scientific problems with respect to the existing incumbent structure that the science relies upon. And on one hand, I would like to see if you have some, maybe some anecdotal samples of how, if you agree, how this is happening.

And also another aspect that I want to bring up for you is what does it mean from the perspective of people trusting science? Because my impression is that people don’t just trust science as a mindset, as a approach, as the scientific methods, you know. But trust science in terms of all the institutional structure that science is normally related with. So, is it a possibility that, yes, we unlock more niche opportunities, but then on the other side, these kind of solutions will be harder to trust?

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah. So, to get into the first question, this is actually something Elliot Hirschberg and I recently wrote about in Not Boring. We dug in a little bit to the history of kind of the scientific structure and funding in the United States, which was primarily founded by Vannevar Bush around 1945. And in the beginning, the government was able to finance science through grants around that time very quickly. But almost as a law of government and organizations, as they move along over the course of time, they become more bureaucratic. And so what we see now is that the NIH and the primary grant funding mechanism which finances — The NIH at least finances around $50 billion worth of research each year and is commonly described as the 800 pound gorilla in the room, is also very bureaucratic and slow moving system.

Grants suck up an estimated 40% of researchers’ time, and they primarily go to the more established PIs or principle investigators. And for young investigators who are typically doing the riskier and more interesting science, it’s a lot harder to access that funding and get those grants. And also the actual funding over time has decreased debt when you adjust for inflation. So, it’s a very competitive system, it’s very consensus driven. Like, what these grant committees are funding is very consensus driven, and it sucks up a lot of time that could be going to the actual science. Right?

So, some of the experiments in this space, one of them in particular, is fast grants. So, this was something a group explored during the pandemic when they felt like, “oh, the government is not really catching up to the need of the type of research we need to finance during this global pandemic”. So, we’re going to put out a call for grants, we’re going to review them very quickly, and we’re going to wire money in 48 hours. And those fast grants financed quite a bit of important research during the pandemic. And that’s a model that multiple organizations are exploring. There’s also impetus grants for longevity research. That’s led by Lada Nuzhna, a Thiel fellow. And, yeah, I’m seeing more and more people exploring that model.

Simone Cicero:
What can we tokenize? So, I’m thinking of, for example, tokenizing intellectual property, tokenizing the potential returns from the creation of a new science based solution. So, how do you see that democratizing element really playing out in terms of access to intellectual property, access to revenues, access to governance? What is really that we are going to unbundle of the existing organizational infrastructure and transform it in the process to do different science?

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I think there’s kind of two different schools of thought there. There’s the school of thought that intellectual property continues to be important in similar ways to pre existing organizations. And I mean, like, it’s something that, like, your org should be able to own and profit off of. And then there’s a school of thought that’s like a little bit more rogue of like IP or intellectual property in the sense that we normally dealt with it should be abandoned or reformed. And we need to find ways to kind of subvert the traditional IP system so that we can advance things like drug development for public good.

So, there’s a couple projects, like, in that second bucket. I’ll just call out Crowdfunded Cures as one of them where they’re interested in drugs like supplements for instance or psychedelics that might not be developed from a clinical trial perspective by traditional corporations because they can’t own the IP around vitamin D, for instance. But it would still be a net benefit to society to be able to evaluate these things within a clinical trial. So, Crowdfunded Cures, per the name, is interested in crowdfunding, those types of clinical trials, which I find really compelling. And we could get into more around IP and how that might be holding us back for their drug development.

Simone Cicero:
Do you see also the possibility that existing organizations that maybe are involved into ancillary elements that rely on the discoveries in science for the execution of the business. Someone in doing white goods relying on some particular new technology or maybe somebody doing, again, healthcare relying on certain specific type of pharmaceuticals. Do you envision also the possibility that DeSci shortens the distance between business and scientists? So, in a way that makes it easier for companies to fund and integrate rapidly science into their products in a way that is simply not possible today because just you know, scientists — I mean, I never heard about a freelancer scientist so far. You know, it’s very rare, you know, as an idea. Do you think that this is something that we can also expect, a way — this effect that DeSci can have of shortening the distance between business and science?

Jocelynn Pearl:
I’m certainly excited by the idea that a scientist could operate from anywhere. You know, like, a trained scientist could be living in, you know, rural America or Italy and be contributing to a project somehow. Maybe they have a garage lab, maybe they don’t. I love the idea that these communities could form online and be able to go after problems in new ways and maybe things that people aren’t necessarily focused on within a university or within a corporation.

Well, I mean, kind of an apparel track to what’s been happening in this DeSci space is there’s been an expansion in the last couple of years on the founder-led biotech community that’s been kind of pioneered by a few people. I’ll just call out Petri Pillar and this organization called Wilby, basically helping to provide tools to scientists, people with PhDs, postdocs who are doing the research, and giving them the business tools to lead their science within a startup or a corporation setting. I think it’s really exciting and compelling because we previously had a much more gate kept system where you had to be a part of this community for many decades before you are really allowed to lead a company within the biotech sector.

And also it was very extractive in the sense that unlike in tech where you could start a company and the founders would have a decent chunk of equity, within the science sector that wasn’t the case. Like, the scientists who were actually contributing to the formation of these companies, I mean, as little as, like, the last decade wouldn’t get much equity if at all. Like, they would get, like, stock options, but they wouldn’t have any of that kind of common stock. And so they didn’t really, like, benefit off of their own science and their own intellectual property. Right? It was very extractive. So, I think that’s one of the things, the themes of DeSci of DeFi as well is, like, retooling ownership, right, and allowing the people who are putting into the system to also co-own that intellectual property, which just makes sense and should be the way that it is. Right?

Simone Cicero:
Certainly have some good examples of companies that have embedded entrepreneurial spirit into the way they produce science and solutions. For example, I’m thinking of companies like Flagship Pioneering, for example, right, that is famous for having this kind of internal venture builder that ended up in creating Moderna more recently. So, it seems that the idea of the entrepreneur scientist is taking hold. You know, I’m also thinking about the initiative from NFX, the biotech initiative from NFX.

Jocelynn Pearl: Yeah. NFX is a good one and Flagship, certainly. But you have to remember those are all kind of, like, new. That model, I think, is either it was previously unique in a sense or it just like it’s becoming more in style these days. And they’re competing with each other for the same founders. Right? So, what you’re seeing is, like, a lot of these venture organizations kind of challenging each other to work in public more, share more resources, develop things for the founders and catering to the founders themselves and supporting them in different ways, whether that be podcasts or articles or networks for recruiting talent. So, yeah, it’s kind of exciting to see that, like, competitive ecosystem creating more tooling for the founders. I think that’s exciting.

Simone Cicero:
In software development, we have seen — not only in software development, I would say also in creative industries more in general. We have seen something that Lee Jin recently called the unbundling of the fordist bundle. Right? So, you can basically access lots of tools for doing marketing, for doing customer engagement. Maybe this is not really DeSci, but it’s more like how science infrastructure is being transformed. But do you see also this happening from the perspective of making science infrastructure more accessible to smaller groups of scientists and teams in a way that they have more leverage.

Like, the same amount of leverage we can now be familiar in software, for example, where a very small team can create a multi-million dollar business just because they can essentially programme infrastructures. Right? So, is this something similar happening in science with LabDAO is a good example. But more in general, how is the science infrastructure being democratized, unbundled and made available as a utility? You spoke about the scientist working from rural America, rural US. Is this really possible now? Is this infrastructure being unbundled and made available? Or there’s still a lot of work to do on this point of view?

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah. It’s definitely nowhere near the level of unbounding that tech has certainly, because so much of science still relies on physical lab space and not everybody is able to have that. Right? But we’re seeing this expansion of companies that are being called TechBio that are essentially tech companies that are trying to build out those tools for scientists. So, one company that I’m excited about right now is called Scispot and they are expanding the tool of having essentially a database for your science, being able to track things in an organized fashion. I think that’s really compelling.

There’s other, you know, the rise of electronic lab notebooks was huge for science. So, companies like Benchling where now scientists can manage and track experiments online from the browser, that has been huge for allowing this unbundling of science. And there’s a number of other tools, but it has been kind of lacking. I think building software for scientists is generally hard because science happens in so many different ways. So, how do you modularize that? But yeah, at LabDAO certainly we’re hopeful to build out a marketplace for scientists online.

Another prominent example is Science Exchange, which basically allowed companies to use a single contract to work with contract research organizations or CROs and really facilitated that type of work and that network because traditionally putting these contracts in place is the limiting factor. It takes a lot of time to set up research contracts between organizations. So, that’s a really powerful platform that allowed for even more ease of use of CROs. But yeah, I think it’s still catching up to the tech world. We certainly don’t have an AWS of science yet. But I think a lot of really smart people are working towards that goal.

Simone Cicero:
I think you mentioned something super important, which is collaboration between different institutions. I’m very convinced that one of the Web3 implications and impacts on industries in general is to make collaboration much more possible, like something much easier. Making affordances for collaboration, right, versus competition. But one thing that I think we’re still really behind the schedule with Web3 is what I call ontological convergence. Essentially, when we speak about anything, of course, also science, we use some ontology.

So, for example, in science, you can have a molecule, you can have an experiment, you can have a test, you can have some validation protocols, whatever. And these things are normally concepts, really, a description of the domain that we are dealing with. If I think about protocols, for example, in DAOs and Web3, we see very little convergence. So, it seems like everybody creates its own protocol. Do you think that we are set to see the emergence of protocols that make it easier to share data about what’s going on in a way that is much more shareable?

So, essentially, think about for example two players in the space. If they want to collaborate on certain experiments, first of all, they need to share their ontologies. I’m very faithful that, for example, new protocols can create the architecture of incentives for maybe two or more organizations, of course, to kind of co-own the protocol itself and maybe be rewarded for using this shared ontology. I don’t know, I’m thinking about, for example, protocols that can reward applications and users for their usage. Do you think this is something that is on the radar for the DeSci community? What are you seeing happening in this space of ontological convergence and shared domain models?

Jocelynn Pearl:
First and foremost, the Web3 community culturally is very very collaborative. I think that’s one of the exciting aspects of the space, and exciting for a lot of the early adopters of the space is that they individual contributors can join multiple projects. Like, if you look at Twitter bios, it’s more common now for people to be a part of multiple DAOs versus traditional, what we’ll say, Web2 corporate structure, you can’t work at Facebook and Google. Right? And I think that’s really exciting. Like, it is like a community principle in the sense that, like, if you’re not collaborative but you’re in this space, there’s an acronym like, not going to make it. Right? So, it is somehow like incentivized, I think, just by the culture and the nature of who was attracted to We 3 early in how that’s being maintained.

As for the kind of convergence of projects, I think that’s a good point. And we have seen with the early space, you know, often parallel projects that have similar goals. And I’m hopeful at least within the DeSci community that some of these projects will join forces. So, there was just an announcement that this one DAO that was focused on peer review of science called SciDAO, joined with another DAO, contract research DAO. And I think that’s an exciting signal that we’re seeing people recognize that they have a shared goal and that they can be stronger together and and and go after that goal. So, I think we’ll see more of that. And I think it’s just part of the culture of this community. And I think when you talk to people who have started some of these different projects, I think they’re certainly excited to collaborate and work together to solve these problems, especially within this kind of scientific publishing sector that I wrote about recently.

Simone Cicero:
Besides healthcare, do you think that there are other science branches that may enjoy most of DeSci potential? You know, I’m thinking about, you know, creating new materials or things like that. Maybe you spotted some interesting project in different spaces which had not so usual suspects.

Jocelynn Pearl:
Another sector that’s been forming is the regenerative finance community or ReFi, which includes a lot of people interested in climate science. And there’s now this kind of ReSci, regenerative science as well, you know, environmentalist. They are people who are interested in understanding the environment and protecting it and conserving it. So, I’m pretty excited about some of the collaborative efforts there. And at least within the DeSci Wiki, I think we’re going to include a ReFi, ReSci sector soon as part of that Wiki and understanding that space more, and there’s a lot of shared leaders across the space there.

Simone Cicero:
What is up for you in the future? Are you coming back to the podcast, starting new series, new projects?

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah. So, up next, I work as a bench scientist at a biotech company. As for podcasting, I’m going to be returning to my show Lady Scientist Podcast and interviewing women scientists there. I love featuring the work of women scientists. I think they’re kind of underrepresented in the podcast space. I also produced a show, UltraRare, the podcast, where I interviewed some of the leaders in this DeSci sector. So, make sure to check that out if you’re interested in learning more from some of the early leaders in the space. And, yeah, I continue to write on this topic through various venues. So, I’m always kind of doing background research and collecting my thoughts through my writing.

Simone Cicero:
Can you share a couple of bread crumbs for our listeners? So, something that they really should be looking into, and, again, not something necessarily DeSci but something that you feel you want to share.

Jocelynn Pearl:
So, in the DeSci Wiki, at the end, I have some book recommendations for people breaking into this space who want to understand it a little bit more. And there’s two books I love to recommend: Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen and Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal. So, both of them explore kind of flavors of the DeSci space. In Reinventing Discovery, Michael gets into how collective communities worked on a chess match, a famous chess match, as well as these like grand challenges in science that I think that’s kind of a neat example of case studies that we expand on within this DAO space. And then Working in Public focuses on the open source software communities and how those communities are managed and run and achieve different things. So, both great books that I recommend folks check out.

Simone Cicero:
Jocelynn, thank you so much. That was an amazing conversation. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Jocelynn Pearl:
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This has been really fun to chat about.

Simone Cicero:
And we’ll be sure to mention all your writings, your important writings, links to the podcast you run and the Wiki and so on so that our listeners can catch up with this new space that hopefully we open in front of them. And check out the show notes of this episode on Boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find Jocelynn’s episode featured there. And of course, like always, listen to me, try to think boundaryless.