'Petridish' Aims To Crowdfund Science And Research Projects

I have been working on this idea in Python/Flask in my spare time while doing school. Perhaps not a smart move on my part. I thought my science background would really help things get off to a good start.

This has been a terrible month. Breakup with SO of four years, killer midterms, this. How does HN deal with this kind of thing? Do you still push forward with your unfinished work?

Edit: I'm a computational biochemist / computational chemist with LOTS of lab experience. I can work gloves-on or gloves-off.

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Edit: Moved the following from a grandchild post for greater visibility.

I'll have to drop out this semester and find some Atlanta Python hackers... Is it wise to do so? (PyAtl may have some.)

I wanted to do it as a labor of love, but force open publication for anyone accepting funds. I don't want a pay cut except to keep things running. I also want to focus on molecular bio, medical and disease research, etc. Maybe it's "less romantic", but it has a much greater potential to collapse technological reverse salients.

Amazon payments would also keep out a large segment of the world. That's unacceptable. I'd rather have someone on staff to handle things manually.

Equipment procurement, etc. would be great for smaller schools and labs.

I also thought it would be cool to let the teams have a blog/vlog where they show the public how their ongoing research is progressing. The public would be very intrigued to see how difficult and painstaking it can be. Public education is a major return from this.

Here's a big problem though--you can't just fund a "project"! You have to fund every step along the way of inquiry:

Question A --> (fund) --> Answer, New Question B --> (fund) --> Answer, New Question C --> ... --> Question N --> Wrap it up in a pretty bow for publication.

Every step needs funding, because quite often you reach dead ends when traversing some large inquiry space.

It's science. Since you're exploring new territory, you never know how deep the rabbit hole is. You don't know how hard you'll have to look. You can't anticipate how much you'll screw up and lose weeks/months of hard work.

I also wanted to pull in rankings of the top/most-cited authors, etc. as a factor for more informed funding decisions. It would also be a great way for new scientists to start gaining a track record instead of waiting to become the "grey beards in charge".

This sort of process would be _amazing_ for cancer researchers. You can really break it down to every question being asked and let the public become fully aware of how things are progressing.

Basically, this can only work for tiny projects. Any life sciences related project can't be funded at all. Consider a single vial of antibody (50uL of liquid) costs roughly $300. Reagents are expensive...there is a reason the NIH hands out grants which are $100k to $1m.

Hell, just paying for a technician to perform the experiment is about $25-30k/year (which is dirt cheap compared to basically any other field of skilled labor), ignoring benefits.

Science is expensive.

BTW is just me or these crowdfunding sites are all the same? are there any examples of someone modifying the "formula" and coming up with something new?