Crowd-funding Preventive Treatment for Breast Cancer | Hacker News Reader

Crowd-funding Preventive Treatment for Breast Cancer

microryza.com

75 pointsbmahmood19 comments

How is anyone supposed to evaluate the scientific merits of something like this? Or do we want funding based only on buzzwords, SEO, and video production skills?

NIH and NSF are often criticized for slow decisions, but a major reason for that is: experimental science is difficult and slow. Software people find this hard to comprehend, e.g. why would it take 10 years to find a new treatment? That's because you find an affected family (if it's hereditary), find appropriate controls, map the mutation, make a mouse model, use the mouse model to screen for pharmacological agents, and return to humans for testing them.

Microryza needs a vetting mechanism, at the very minimum, perhaps a dedicated science advisory board. Otherwise it runs a high risk of becoming a platform for snake oil salespeople.

Agreed...but: the NSF and NIH are sadly underfunded these days. Good research is getting left behind, because funding levels are up in the top 1% of grant applications.

I'm not sure if this is the right model for funding research -- regular people are completely unable to select scientific projects for their merit -- but combined with a legitimate peer review system, it just might work.

What I'd like to see is Microryza incorporate NIH grant scores, or some other established peer-review metric. If the public could crowd-fund interesting, legitimate scientific research, there's definitely a need for the money.

>What I'd like to see is Microryza incorporate NIH grant scores, or some other established peer-review metric. If the public could crowd-fund interesting, legitimate scientific research, there's definitely a need for the money.

Working on it. :)

I'd like to help with this process. I've been funded by both NIH and NSF and have been through the process. I've also reviewed grants as have my friends/colleagues. I emailed you a few days ago (irollboozers), so you have my email address.

As for incorporating the NIH scores, I'd actually like to see the opposite. It's funny how people think that the NIH/NSF scores are actually representative of a proper review. They really aren't. They are assigned by people, typically people who don't even really read the grant well because they have 20 to read and leave them to the last minute because they are doing 100 other things. As such, many times grants (actually, any of the peer review items) are not really evaluated properly. Any federal funded scientist who has been through the review process will tell you how faulted the system is.

This isn't the place to rant/rave about this, but I'm happy that we are starting to evolve this system and change it. My YC application will be working on something similar, with the goals of getting around the stupidity behind the current system. What we need is to revolutionize the way science is performed, from the ground up.

Also, in terms of the "snake oil" statement, when you dig deep enough, you see that the entire peer review system is not immune from snake oil. Buzz words get grants funded, papers published in high tier journals, and careers sky rocketing. Doesn't even have to be good work, it just needs to include the buzz word and its getting published like crazy.

The fact is, science is broken and it's a great time to fix it with the technology, transparency, and forward thinking groups that are breaking the mold.

The disease foundations and other charities are possibly a better model for this kind of funding, although there may be political and efficiency problems there too.

I actually really like the kinds of science education and literacy projects featured on Microryza's homepage, and fun ecology projects involving pandas and lemurs. That kind of stuff is very underfunded, and the $20k can actually make those projects happen and make a difference, while getting the broader public excited about science in general. But it's a mistake to pretend that this is any sort of solution to problems with NIH funding.

I strongly disagree with you, in that the big potential solution we offer is to simultaneously help small foundations and eat their lunch. The whole notion of someone at a desk stamping papers to identify what research to fund, when there is just not enough funding to go around anyways, is inefficient and wasteful. The real power of crowdfunding is that it allows people to really dictate what they want to care about, and not rely on some proxy to do that for them.

There are information completeness problems, but those are technical (in my opinion) and very solvable.

a peer review system is in the works.

i wouldn't underestimate regular people, these redditors are pretty smart: http://www.reddit.com/r/science

Um. There are certainly smart people in the Reddit crowd, but the average is decidedly sub-par. For that matter, HN is a pretty good site as far as scientific discussion goes, but it's still total garbage compared to a grant review panel.

If you want to be viewed as a source of legitimate scientific funding, you need to solve the credibility problem. If you get tagged as the funding source for crackpots, you'll never shake the rep.

Using PARP inhibitors to prevent transmission of a BRCA mutation seems like an exceedingly risky strategy, when pre-implantation diagnosis or selective termination are effective and have pretty well-defined risks. Messing with DNA damage detection and repair machinery is probably not something you want to do in gametes.

Even if this worked in mice, it is difficult for me to imagine how a trial could even be done to allow it to be approved for human use.

BRCA mutation they mention : http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/BRCA

If anyone's feeling disillusioned at this point on the lack of obvious progress: I'm not entirely sure if the problem at this point is funding as much as it is the correct allocation. Research branches off to many things, naturally, and that's how we find cures or even potential cures, but how much of it is effectively being allocated to promising areas vs just shotgunning everything? That's why I hope this project does take off.

Does anyone have a feel for microryza's near-future plans?

Looking at the grant applications on the first page, there are [5 5 25 4.7 9 6 17.5 10] * $1000 in goals. None of these can support a grad student for a year, let alone a postdoc.

Are they planning to broaden out into larger-scoped projects, or is the plan to stay small and get successful with small grants?

We do have several larger scoped projects in the works. The project sizes have been kept intentionally small up until now.

Thanks! Best 'o luck!

It's sort of a sad statement about our society that the Veronica Mars kickstarter project has raised $4.1 million with time to spare, while all of the worthy projects on Microryza combined couldn't do it.

Someone needs to make a for-profit movie/violent video game company with the goal of using the profits to fund this stuff.

People donate a lot of money to medical research through organizations like the American Cancer Society and many more specific foundations.

Just because crowdfunding is cool, it doesn't follow that it makes sense as a funding mechanism for science.

Of course, there are other funding sources, but I don't think it doesn't make sense for funding science. The problem is the never ending list of charlatans that can siphon badly needed funds from legitimate reserach, so a lot of these need some sort of strict vetting (especially for biological research) from qualified professionals. Unless they too are volunteering their services, that's an added cost right there.

It will take some time before it gets more and more into the public consciousness. Meanwhile, we have a giant backlog of things we can be doing to improve transparency and trust, so that when someone lands on a project they know exactly what they're getting.

Considering that we're funding projects without this is pretty awesome, so we think from here on out it's only up on all metrics. Couple this improved transparency with raw communities who haven't been able to directly affect scientific progress, and you have a self-service ecosystem.

It's not a matter of if we get a Veronica Mars level event on Microryza, it's when. From now until that moment though, we have a lot to build, which is why we're hiring engineers and scientists.

I love Veronica Mars and I can honestly say I'm more excited about that than anything I've ever seen on kickstarter. You wanna know why? Because it's a known entity, I know what I'm paying for, I know I'll enjoy it. I have no idea how I would even start to evaluate the worth of products (or science grants, in this case) when they don't exist yet, their applications and benefits are not entirely clear, etc. I have no expertise in most fields, so I would much rather let someone who knows what they're doing hand out (my!) grant money.

EDIT: For example, I'm all for research for breast cancer, but there's already a LOT of money out there for that. How on earth do I figure out whether my money will do any good? I can't exactly read the literature and have an understanding of the subject without many months of research and getting up to speed in, uhh, biology as related to the spread of breast cancer. My sister's getting her PhD in biology and I know enough to know I know nothing.

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