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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what they are outsourcing. Could someone explain?

Hi Jess - Science Exchange allows scientists to outsource individual experiments to specialist labs and facilities. For example gene expression profiling can be outsourced to specialist microarray providers. This is becoming a bigger and bigger issue as technology advances and scientists are forced to become more specialized.

I guess you're better off calling it 'lab exchange' or something then. There's no 'science' being exchanged, just some elbow-grease work (I don't know anything about the field you're in, so I may be oversimplifying, but I know some lab techs in the life sciences and it seems you don't need to be particularly bright to do that kind of work - just have, admittedly quite thorough, skills training).

Well, I don't have any problem with a romantic name, but there should at least be a clear description somewhere.

I get the strong impression you have a very specific area or areas of science in mind, but you seem to speak in generalities. One can't outsource, e.g., physics, anthropology, or geology. So what specific fields typically run experiments which can be outsourced? Is it just biology?

In some sense some of experimental physics is getting "outsourced" already. For example (my understanding is that) there are many physicists working on experimental data coming out of CERN who are not participating actual design/running of the system. In that sense they are outsourcing the work to specialists.

This is a bad example, as those scientist are still part of the collaboration. (I was one of them.) The key part of outsourcing is that it is work done in exchange for money. And it's an exchange between two independent parties which are each self interested.

Otherwise, every time a business split up a project between multiple people or departments it would be "outsourcing".

CERN is a particularly bad example, because it has deep heritage from Manhattan, as in being spoilt by the abuse of power. It is a self-referential hierarchy operating on the need to know basis, which helps to avoid real challenges (obviously ruining the research/educational aspect of the projects).

Many physicists accept to operate at the need to know level and do not satisfy their curiosity, for fear of being left to "find other opportunities".

Yeah, and it's really just getting specialized facilities to do the grunt work. The 'research' itself isn't outsourced or whatever, it just looks like a system for more efficient allocation/utilization of capital equipment. Which is only relevant for an, in my estimate, smallish percentage of researchers (percentage-wise, maybe high single or low double digits?)

Outsourcing is already reasonably well establihed in biology. There are a number of companies, notably from South Korea, that offer sequencing, probe library creation and a host of other services that take the grunt work out of a lot of lab work. The services are cheap and the results are very reliable. The real benefit of all this is that is opens up the field to a lot more people that could otherwise not afford the infrastructure in equipment and lab staff.

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