Experiment.com Gains Big Venture Backers To Bring Crowdfunding To Science | Hacker News Reader

Experiment.com Gains Big Venture Backers To Bring Crowdfunding To Science

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129 pointsskndr61 comments

Microryza/Experiment founder here, we're excited to launch a new landing page introducing the new name. http://experiment.com

Love the new name! Microryza was very unwieldy.

Edit: I'm getting an error when trying to signup with FB:

"The change you wanted was rejected.

Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to."

Thanks for pointing this out, we're looking into it right now!

we hope the new name is easier to remember..

This is amazing, a real glimpse into what scientific research will look like in the future. One issue I see is actually motivating average people to back research - unlike Kickstarter, the reward is intangible (although much more worthwhile). I think this will gain a lot of traction amongst affluent and/or altruistic people, but building a true crowdfunding platform will be challenging, although certainly not unattainable. I'll pass this along to everyone I know, best of luck to your team!

Hi there,

We've been working on a site that helps connect science projects with skilled (volunteer) developers. We're about ready to launch to the general public, and would absolutely love to connect and discuss how we can help each other out if you're interested.

Please drop me an email at davedx@gmail.com

Thanks, and great job!

Congrats on the new launch! I'm so excited for you and your team. I genuinely believe that you are creating the platform by which many people, who otherwise may have been shut out, will get their chance to contribute to the sum of all knowledge. That's something very dear to me. I wish you and your team all my luck and support.

Thank you! It means a lot to us to hear that.

thanks if you're in san francisco, feel free to stop by and meet the team

As someone facing the first terrifying steps of funding their research program, I certainly hope this works out.

Brilliant relaunch and rebranding, nice work guys. Going to be amazing seeing where this goes.

This is excellent news. I really look forward to seeing Experiment grow. These are two challenges I foresee...

1. At the moment, the people posting projects are mostly PhD students. This is excellent for PhD students, but the real challenge is getting more entrenched scientists to explore this new medium. I've seen a few professors, but not many. I'd love to know how Experiment are planning to engage the science community.

2. Currently it's only open to US scientists. This really sucks for the rest of us. A major potential benefit of this platform is to open up science to those in places where science funding is really bad, unlike the US where it's just not as good as it used to be, but is still tens of billions per year. Please fix this.

Guessing you aren't seeing many professors since funding numbers are too low right now. Looks like biggest projects getting funded are ~$10K. Presumably that changes as it gets more popular.

yeah, most of these grants won't even cover a grad student for more than 3 months. Most professors are going to spend their time on NSF and NIH grants that will support multiple students for 5 years.

This is the big problem for me. Even a "hit" crowd funded project is a pretty tiny slice of a real grant, and still takes time and energy.

It is on the other hand great to let a PhD student get some funding for their work, pay for a field visit, etc. Crowd funding is a supplement to internal grants and pilot grants at this point, not the NIH/NSF lifeblood of most labs.

Don't administrative fees and tuition suck up a huge percent of grant money?

Could crowdfunding get so much more bang for the buck, as compared with traditional funding?

Yes they do, but I wonder if those still apply in this case or not. At the end of the day, it is still money coming into the university.

Edit: To answer my own question, funds are currently not subject to university overhead according to their FAQ.

The funds aren't currently subject to overhead according to the funder, but that seriously demotivates grant staff to shepherd a tiny little grant that isn't particularly helping.

That's what I meant by more trouble than it's worth. A staff member going "meh" can turn into a huge time sink.

It's not so much "fees" in the traditional sense. When a grant is awarded, a researcher is asking for what are known as "Direct Costs" - the costs of staff, certain types of equipment, reagents, patient recruitment, travel and publication fees, etc.

This is not how much money goes to the university. The university negotiates an overhead rate, which gets tacked onto the cost. This can often be more than half the cost of the grant. This helps cover indirect costs - the costs of administrative staff, copier paper, computing infrastructure, startup funds for new faculty, etc.

"More bang for the buck" assumes the researcher would get that overhead back for their own use. What actually happens is researchers get the same direct costs, the overhead % is zero, etc.

For minor grants, like where crowd funding is now, this isn't such a big deal. But if this somehow became the dominant paradigm, the overhead costs are going to have to come from somewhere...

Aren't a lot of University of Washington professors on there though?

Agreed! We've had so much demand for international projects, however we just can't handle it right now. This is on our horizon, and hopefully soon!

one day soon anyone anywhere in the world will be able to start an experiment on the site

Is it possible to Kickstarter to fund science or engineering projects?

Kickstarter seems geared towards the music, arts or engineering with clear visual impact. Most science does not have elevator pitches -- they are hard to explain or visualize, and they deal with unsexy issues.

Einstein said if you can't explain a theory to a 5 year old you don't understand it. Is that even really true?

I doubt you can explain the technical details of web apps to the typical 5-year old. Perhaps that is just a defect of our current explanations?

As part of my physics degree we were greatly encouraged to hone our layman explanation skills. We had at least 4 presentations aimed at scientists not specialised in our area, and a couple for the "general public", including an elevator pitch.

I think scientists just need more practice.

Check out this (non-Kickstarter) campaign: https://pledge.immunityproject.org/the-free-hiv-aids-vaccine

the team behind the immunity project is awesome!

Thus far, there have been some campaigns on IndieGogo, with modest success. Usually, funding is in the realm of "Initial data collection for a grad student" or "Enough to fund some field work" not "Keep the a lab running" because of the costs involved.

generally not possible. I very briefly considered Kickstarter for my project (http://indysci.org/projectmarilyn), found it violated about half of kickstarter's rules and ultimately went with crowdtilt. We didn't successfully fund, will try again on crowdhoster after getting 501(c)(3) status, hopefully later this year.

Kickstarter is fairly restrictive about what you post, but you could certainly do so with IndieGoGo or another similar service.

I once spoke to a doctor that was trying to raise funding for a lab to develop a drug that he'd been working on and take it to the next stage.

I asked "How much are you trying to raise?"

"Oh, about $300 million."

I had to rehinge my jaw.

Apparently physical labs are expensive.

This is just one second hand data point. Does anyone else have experience in this space? Are setting up labs and development/manufacturing environments for relatively early stage bio companies really this expensive?

There are a places you can rent a wet lab biology bench for <$1K/month in both Boston and SF. You still need to buy equipment and materials but you'll have lab infrastructure/permitting OK. If you just need to do really bare bones basic molecular biology (no major equip needs) I think you can get off the ground for $50-100K per year for lab/materials. Once you get any real traction will get more expensive.

In Boston - VDC: http://www.umb.edu/vdc In SF - QB3: http://qb3.org/startups/incubators

labor costs are going to swamp this unless you're assuming volunteer/low cost. And in that case, it's hard to get a good throughput because people are... well, volunteering and that rarely works out well.

yeah, founder salaries would be on top of that - I was just talking about lab/materials. Fortunately if you are coming out of PhD program you're used to working for low cost.

$100/month in the greater san diego area.

you should check out scienceexchange.com

at $300 million, I would expect this person to be going into clinical trials.

At that stage, you are dealing with things like FDA GMP compliance[1] and then actually putting molecules into humans and monitoring them for several efficacy end points as well as toxicity. And often you are doing this at multiple sites.

If the doctor wasn't looking to do trials, then he was being ripped off. And if he wasn't looking to do trials for a major disease, he was also being ripped off. Trials for orphan diseases are often cheaper because they are limited by the number of people who even have the disease.

Also, with the rise of CROs[2], you can often find one that will "risk-share". The CRO will lower your bill, often significantly, in exchange for some of the upside on the molecule.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_manufacturing_practice [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_research_organization

He seemed to be pretty far along and it was a drug for a very common disease.

It seemed to me from the discussion that he was beyond the exploratory phase and had a very specific drug that needed to go to the next stage.

$300 million sounds like too much.

In oncology, once you have a molecule lead, you should be able to do preclinical in 200k or so if you really pinch the purse. Typically clinicals will run you on the order of $20 million, not 300.

That sounds much more reasonable to me. But he insisted that it would take much more.

Would developing an educational computer game about science (i.e. based on SimCity but with special features to support using it in the classroom and teaching topics like global warming, pollution, economics, etc) be within the scope of this site?

Yes it would. Can I email you about this? I think we can help. Alternatively please feel free to email me - see profile.

Great, thanks!!

we require that all projects are using the scientific method to answer a research questions, so if the answer is yes then go ahead and start a project at experiment.com/start

Coincidentally, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics recently announced that they would look to crowdfunding for financing their fusion reactor. I find it both sad and hopeful that one of the most promising projects for solving humanity's energy problem looks for funding this way.

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/index.php?option=com_l...

Sad because you prefer that the government somehow choose to fund this worthwhile project? Because you don't trust the public to support worthwhile projects?

Sad how? Would you rather the funding be enforced through brutality?

i'm going to reach out to them--if you have a contact there feel free to send an email to cindy at experiment dot com

Awesome to see crowd funding getting leveraged for such great potential. The team's been at this for a while and making good progress. Great to see the new name!

thanks jenn!

I am all in favour of funding more science (I seem to remember Brian Cox quoting that the UK banking bailout was more than the cost of all science funding globally, since the Renaissance.)

I would like to clarify a couple of instant worries

- ethics committees ? Who runs the ethics committee? Is it public which ones they reject ? UHauling dinos is one thing but bio-ethics will get messy fast.

- peer reviewing - if I invest I want to know the output is a success - is there a systemised approach for this? must they publish to get final drawdown? it's not really an in estment as the usual measure that you did not stuff up your last experiment is that a grant committee finds you again

Would the site be geared more towards projects with translational or immediate impact value? Is there any room for basic research? I guess it depends on how you sell it to people.

all three

One of the bigger obstacles to me, besides the current level of crowd funding being at the "student project" or "preliminary data" level, and thus still needing to heavily compete for grants is institutional level resistance.

Every grants office I've talked to has essentially responded with "Wait, what?", and the amounts are small enough that it's often not worth the administrative hassle.

Interesting. I was just thinking about how expensive it would be to quit my job but still do science on the side. And I'm not in a field with expensive experiments or anything just travelling to conferences etc. adds up to a lot.

Good luck, seems like a good idea :)

Edit: Found a typo: "research funded ourside of the traditional science funding system" ... should (probably) be outside

Thanks very much! We'd like to encourage people to think about 'indie science' in the same way as independent film, music, and art when those first started. Our researchers are both tenured professors in academia as well as citizen scientists!

Thanks for pointing out the typo, should be fixed!

i stand behind quitting your job

Unfortunately seems like a great opportunity for wastes like free energy, perpetual motion, homeopathy and a so on.

we have a review process, and recently started bringing in the community to help review

Congrats to Denny & Cindy! They've come a long way in just one year.

thanks!

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