Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a_bonobo | Hacker News Reader

Make a digitally verified lab book

It would be kind of a wiki but each update/edit is externally verified.

In science, each lab has several lab books where everybody documents everything they did. In the rare event of a patent discussion between two labs or unis the first entry in the lab book decides who gets the patent (it seems to be way more complicated than that by now). Usually these lab books are regulary counter signed by the supervisor to 'prevent' tampering but it's not a particularly secure system. Having the blockchain verify each entry's date and originality could be fun. (but I wonder how useful it would be in the real world - would patent lawyers take this up or just ignore it and say they're happy with the old system?)

In my lab experience, electronic lab notebooks were incredibly bloated, slow, and buggy to the point of being unusable. I’m most familiar with what was in place at Merck about 8 years ago: ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook). I agree with comments that the countersignature is both lax and absolutely necessarily from a records perspective. Most importantly, building a new lab notebook system would require importing data from whatever it is you’d be attempting to displace. Lab notebooks have significant roles in IP disputes, and it would be critical that the contents and timestamps are preserved.

To underscore how terrible ELN was at our site, many managers instructed their reports to keep traditional paper notebooks, photograph each page, and upload to an ELN entry. Countersignatures were then performed on the ELN platform. This was at a relatively small Merck site, and maybe the issue wasn’t as pervasive elsewhere.

Just wanted to say that I think this is a interesting idea, and that labs often have 'signing parties' where they do the counter signing.

Forgot something - most wetlab laboratory lab-books are physical copies with handwritten content, mostly so you can quickly glue in photos and take notes in spaces where PCs are not allowed, this could also hamper uptake of any PC-based lab-book.

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