First, this is important to understand what are some problems with medical research to then understand how cryptocurrencies can help solve these problems:
- Medical research has a money problem
- Many studies are poorly designed to promote an agenda.
- Replicating results is necessary for good science, but rare
- Peer review has many shortcomings
- Too much science is locked behind paywalls
- IP is slowing down science
Medical Research has a money problem
Medical research funding in many places around the world can come from public sources (tax money) as well as private organizations which distribute money for equipment, salaries, and other research expenses. This is one of the biggest challenges for medical scientists, is to find a sustainable source of many to run experiments and concentrate on the science.
In most places around the world, Governments or public organizations provide funding for research, which is good, as there are fewer chances of conflict of interest, but there is not enough. The USA offered 900 federal grant programs, and half of this funding, 800 billion USD goes to healthcare. In 2020, the National Institute of Health accepted only 21% of research grant proposals (11,000/55,000). Source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/20
So researchers then look for private funding, which will support science if it supports their corporate agenda. This is catastrophic because it means that some science is guided not by what is good for society/humanity in terms of science, but by what will make the most return on investment to these private funders. Much of nutrition science is funded by the food industry, and this is a major conflict of interest, food companies will not change the results of research, but they will not fund something if the hypothesis goes against their interests, thus shaping how science evolves. This is the same for drugmakers that fund most drug clinical trials. This means that drugs for a disease that won’t be profitable (In places with poor populations or very few people touched by the disease) might only get funding from charitable organizations (less than 3% of funding in the USA).
Since scientists have to compete for this finite and decreasing amount of funding (at least for public funding), it creates conflicts of interest between scientists of the same field, puts pressure to publish many papers instead of a few quality ones, and it forces scientists to oversell their work (use buzzwords to get funding). This competition between scientists for funding affects what people study, the risk they take, and the risk they don’t take, overall it pushes researchers to do predictable, safe and hyped science. This also means scientists have to spend a lot of time and energy competing for funding and writing grant proposals which means less time for science.
On top of that, grants are usually short-term (3-5 years), which means that scientists are less likely to apply for long-term projects, even though these are usually the ones that create the biggest discoveries. New, experimental, but potentially breakthrough research takes a long time to produce, requires the work of many people, and it does not always pay off. So scientists often avoid these types of studies that don’t easily get funding and prefer short-turnaround, safe research.
Science is pressured to display certain results
Medical researchers are judged by the research they publish, and they have tons of pressure to get certain types of results. If you get good splashy results, it will be easier to get published in a prestigious journal, but if they get mediocre results, many scientists consider presenting the data differently to keep it exciting.
“The consequences are staggering. An estimated $200 billion — or the equivalent of 85 percent of global spending on research — is routinely wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies, according to meta-researchers who have analyzed inefficiencies in research. We know that as much as 30 percent of the most influential original medical research papers later turn out to be wrong or exaggerated.”
Source:https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process
Rewards for medical research should be based on the research methods, and quality of analysis, not just the outcomes of the research.
Going back to the funding problem, this problem is exacerbated by private funding methods that expect certain results that align with their agenda.
Not rigorous enough
There might be a “crisis of irreproducibility”, a survey made by nature.com about reproducibility (1576 researchers) concludes that “70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”
The data from the survey also reveal contradictory thinking about reproducibility: “52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
On top of that, studies that fail to replicate results from a “good” study might not get published. Studies need to be at the cutting edge of science, with new and positive results, this pressure prevents necessary replication and might produce many false positive results.
Some causes could be a lack of understanding of statistics, poor experimental design, lack of mentoring from senior researchers, fraud, hyper-competition, lack of resources, or simply selective reporting of results.
Peer review needs to be improved
Peer review is an essential aspect of research, scientists send their articles to a journal, and if the journal accepts the article, it is sent to peers in a similar field, for constructive criticism, to then be published or not in that journal. The journals set up a blind reading, reviewing, and editing of the articles to reduce bias. This system in theory works, but it has many shortcomings, it often does not detect fraud, selective results, and other problems. Researchers are often not paid to review articles, which creates less incentive to do serious peer reviews.
Science is behind paywalls
A lot of science and research is locked away and not easily accessible. They are often costly to access and can be hard to find. The publication process can also be slow, which slows down many other processes. Many Researchers have argued that academic research should be free for all to access, as many for-profit publishers slow down the pace of science. One article in a scientific journal can cost you 30$, some yearly subscriptions are 300$ and up to 10,000$. On top of that, it can be quite expensive to publish a scientific article: “the average cost to publish an article is around $3500 to $4000” and most of that cost is falling on the researchers themselves.
Source: https://www.enago.com/academy/what-is-the-real-cost-of-scientific-publishing/
Science is slowed and locked by intellectual property
Protected patents are a relatively recent invention, the first modern patent system was created in 1474 in Venice, it has since evolved into a complex set of laws and regulations, both at the local and international levels.
Source: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=585661
When patent rights are expensive, it makes successive activities more costly, as research will have to seek permission from patent holders, and when patents are debated, this can slow down the progress of science and technology. Patents are also used as a business strategy, often used by large firms, that use patents to entrench their position in the market by making it expensive/complicated/impossible to research certain subjects (many times not even using the patent). The current patent system does not reward follow-up research, as scientists are scared of litigation.
Is the right to intellectual property or Human rights more important to you? I believe that patents should not extend so far as to interfere with individuals’ dignity and well-being. Where patent rights and human rights conflict, human rights must prevail.
This is an overview of present problems in medical research, and we could in much more depth about the systematic shortcomings in science. But this is good enough to understand what needs to be solved in the medical research field. A great example of a project that solves these problems is r/etica. But I am sure there are other cryptos that are similar.
What is Etica?
You can learn a lot from Etica on the main website: Eticaprotocol.org
From u/makeasnek: “Etica is a blockchain and platform for funding medical research. It also produces rewards for those who evaluate proposals and vote on them or otherwise participate in Etica. These can fundamentally change how scientific research is incentivized, opening a new world of patent-free, open medical research. Etica runs off its own version of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, which uses proof-of-work to mint coins and secures the network.”
Etica funds research with its inflation, the distribution of ETI coins will look like this:
Each Era is approximately 1 year.
Era 1: 1 890 000 ETI to mining reward and 210 000 ETI as protocol reward
Era 2: 1 680 000 ETI as mining reward and 420 000 ETI as protocol reward
Era 3: 1 470 000 ETI as mining reward and 630 000 ETI as protocol reward
Era 4: 1 260 000 ETI as mining reward and 840 000 ETI as protocol reward
Era 5 to Era 10: 1 050 000 ETI as mining reward and 1 050 000 ETI as protocol reward
The mining of ETI will then stop (in 10 years) and the 2.61% of inflation will be used to reward researchers and voters.
Grant proposals are grouped by disease on Etica.io, and then users (holders of ETI) can vote and get rewarded for correctly participating. In the long term, Etica.io will be only one of potentially thousands of websites connected to the Etica blockchain. Potentially, instead of having science locked in journals with paywalls, We could have websites directly connected to the Etica blockchain, without restriction and free of any patent. To that extent, the Etica blockchain can be called a permissionless decentralized science journal.
Any proposals can be anything, the community will decide what gets funded or not. I recommend reading this Reddit post to understand Etica better:reaction to makeasnek
If we go back to the main problems (TLDR):
- Big money problem: Etica provides a new additional decentralized funding system for medical researchers to use. We are not naive, most people will act in their own interest. Good and evil people will come to Etica but what is different is that Etica is not under the control of the incumbent of the system that chooses the pace and direction of research according to their vested interest.
- Poorly designed studies: It will be important for the community to select quality and not flashy research. In fact, the token holders have a collective interest that Etica maintains its value. If the network globally accepts useless proposals then the network is going to become worthless. A key part of the Etica system is that the token holders have a responsibility to get the best proposals rewarded so that people keep increasing the amount of work they do for each proposal and create a healthy open-source ecosystem.
- Replicability problem: Etica’s main aim is not to solve this problem, but open science contributes to more replicable science.
- Peer review: Peer review is incentivized on the Etica platform and can be a way to earn more ETI, this means researchers can be paid to peer review. Voters that make the curation work are rewarded with 38.2% of the ETI research rewards. Token holders will not necessarily be scientific experts on everything, but we can imagine different ways people can get informed on proposals and share information. They can use earned ETI to finance expertise and do quality peer reviews.
- Paywalls: All Etica proposals are public and free to read, as well as easy to access.
- Intellectual property: Etica removes intellectual property which is costly to medical research and human rights.