Science Exchange (YC S11) enables researchers to tap labs worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Science Exchange (YC S11) enables researchers to tap labs worldwide

economist.com

40 pointsmarkmassie9 comments

This is a cool idea. It seems like the meatspace analogy of BOINC[0], substituting physical lab equipment for computing power.

I wonder if this could lead to grant approvals requiring that procedures be duplicated in at least one remote lab and those results also discussed in publications. It would protect against tampering data tampering, but it could also potentially catch lab errors by providing a second dataset. Unfortunatley, I suspect the overheads will mean that such duplication in an external lab might be tough to justify, from a cost standpoint.

[0] https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Sometimes results won't replicate because the people or equipment at the second lab aren't skilled enough to do the experiment correctly. You can get type II errors on difficult tests because of impurities, noise, etc. But most of the tests listed on Science Exchange seem like standard tests, where the labs doing it are probably better at it than you are, so this wouldn't be too much of an issue.

I think another effect of this experiment-for-fee model would be to level the playing field for smaller labs that can't master every tool simultaneously. Whereas before a researcher would have to choose between (a) learning a new technique and buying new equipment and (b) finding an alternative way to demonstrate a result, presumably with older or less reliable methods, now they can do a very simple one-off collaboration of sorts without any of the overhead of real collaborations (esp. negotiations over authorship).

The article makes it sound more like Heroku for experiments than Uber, but I guess that comparison is too niche. Some other companies in this space are:

https://www.transcriptic.com/

and

http://www.emeraldtherapeutics.com/

Shouldn't it be more like "Airbnb for Expermients" , you are renting out unused lab resources, right?

Can companies/PR/media stop using "Uber for.." in their descriptions?

Uber as a company and their business practices isn't exactly positive to say the least.

My favorite is "Uber for genetic testing". That is exactly what I want, a company like Uber completely ignoring all moral and legal rules with complete access to all of my genetic information.

Thats exactly my point. Science Exchange (or 23AndMe) may be a good idea, but associating with a company that seems to be "ignoring all moral and legal rules" like Uber is not such a good idea.

I realize 22AndMe operates in a few legal grey areas but I believe they don't run the company by "ignoring morals" in their business practices and management.

"Uber for genetic testing" is what I imagine the startup version of Resident Evil's Umbrella Corp would call itself

No, you don't understand... this startup's goal is to provide a SaaS methodology for tracking down peer reviewers and threatening their families. Concurrently, the staff engineers will front-run patent applications based on users' experimental data.

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