[DIYbio] the Fight Aging! matching fundraiser for SENS research has started, plus some thoughts on science crowdfunding

This past week I launched the 2014 Fight Aging! matching fundraiser: a number of long-standing supporters of the SENS Research Foundation came together to assemble a $100,000 matching fund, and we'll match all donations made to the SENS Research Foundation before the end of the year with $2 from the fund for every $1 donated:

https://www.fightaging.org/fund-research

These donations go to help fund various cool biotech projects related to reversing aging, such as building the fundamental toolkit of protocols and knowledge needed to work with (and assess strategies to safely clear out) glucosepane cross-links in tissue extracellular matrix, one of the causes of loss of skin and blood vessel elasticity with advancing age. The present lack of this toolkit has always struck me as a surprisingly large terra incognita for today's world. But it certainly implies that there are more of the same unexplored reaches and a lot of good that could be done within the bounds of citizen science and semi-professional development networks. This is a lot more chemistry than biology, and something well suited to low-cost and distributed projects.

But folk here know all about SENS, the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, so I'll talk about crowdfunding, because a number of groups here have tried it or will be trying it, and it's always interesting to see what is going on across the way. Science crowdfunding is an evolving space, and one I think is still trying to find its way past being a case of jamming the square peg of kickstarter methodologies into the round hole of research fundraising. All the incentives and realities are completely different, and in a way it's interesting that experiment.com works at all, let alone as well as it has. Not that I know any better as to how to run crowdfunding for research goals: to pick one example, we match donations out of tradition in our community of supporters, and because we believe that it helps to lend credibility when approaching new communities - a demonstration that we are serious and have skin in the game - not because we have solid evidence to suggest it is a better way of doing things.

Beyond experiment.com a number of other crowdfunded science ventures with quite different approaches launched this year or are launching soon, including at least two with a focus on aging/longevity science. So far labcures.com is one of the more interesting: they are trying a "support the team" approach wherein supporters fund labs, not projects, and the labs have enough in the way of spare resources to put together some very good-looking presentation materials on their work. They are also noteworthy for being a spin-off from the Buck Institute for Aging Research - a startup right out of the lab.

I don't run crowdfunding through a platform like experiment.com yet. I've had a lot of success in not doing so, and those platforms can offer only a few things: (a) a halo community of people who you wouldn't otherwise have reached in your communications, (b) payment processing infrastructure that would be a pain to maintain yourself, and (c) immediate gratification feedback (donation total thermometers, etc) that would be a pain to maintain yourself. None of the science crowdfunding efforts can yet provide enough of (a) to bother with, and (b) only starts to be an issue when you are looking at a large number of potential donors. "Can you accept Bitcoin?" "Do you support <obscure credit card>?" and so on. Point (c) is thing I'd really like to have, and it is the one that is a real pain to organize when you are Group A supporting Group B, and everyone would rather spend money on the research rather than fundraising technology. I'm on the fence on this issue of whether or not to use a platform, and it is really the immediate feedback for donation totals that drives me here: this might be the last year I do this without using one of these platforms, as the feedback loop of a donor seeing the donation total rising immediately is probably worth the cost of entry.

I kicked off the Fight Aging! fundraiser this year with a post to /r/Futurology, a futurist community supportive of efforts to build treatments for degenerative aging:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2hzld3/hey_rfuturology_lets_make_a_little_future_well/

Reddit communities are justifiably very suspicious of anything involving money: this is the sort of thing you can only do with the support of moderators and a respect for the community in question. The response was very gratifying in this case, not just scores of donations but also some interesting conversation on the topic. One of the things that came up, and that I have seen elsewhere in the past, is an unease about scientific crowdfunding that casts it as an end-run around the gatekeepers of science, i.e. it is a way to let the Wrong People make choices about what research to fund, for any particular definition of Wrong People that bothers the uneasy person in question. This seems a little silly to me: the people setting up the options and projects are scientists, and the people choosing to donate are not. How is this any different from giving to an established medical research charity? Nonetheless, some researchers and other folk are made uncomfortable by this breaking down of the priesthood of funding.

This is a theme I'm sure you're all quite familiar with.

Personally I'm pleased to see the priesthood gnawed away at the ankles. Uneasy or not, it is clearly the future that there will be more communication and more interaction and more small-scale transactions in funding of research. This is an inevitable result of falling costs of communication. You no longer have to be a six-figure donor to talk to scientists and suggest what should be researched. You and a thousand other people can send an email and a hundred dollars via PayPal, and have an appropriately fractional input apiece. The middleman layer that formerly consisted of charitable foundations and the like will shift and evolve as a new balance point between what is beneficial and what is onerous for the researcher emerges. Grant-seeking is so horrible, and has such a low success rate, that I have to imagine that it would take a lot of time spent interacting with the public in fundraisers to outweigh that.

Ultimately, do we power research with $10 and $100 donations from thousands? I don't believe so, for anything more than the very earliest stage and smallest projects. That scope is increasing year by year, however, as the cost of biotechnology plummets and the capabilities of the tools increases. You can do a fair amount of useful work per $10,000 funding unit given a coven of grad and postgrad students and an established lab infrastructure with some spare capacity. That productivity measure is only going to increase. But still, that isn't the millions of dollars needed to run five year studies and large projects. Crowdfunding is a means to an end in that sense. It is the way you demonstrate sufficient support for your work, and bootstrap the first convincing results, to ensure that large funding sources take you seriously. Early stage research in medical science is (a) much cheaper than what comes later, and (b) is usually paid for by philanthropic donations or strategic shuffling of resources scraped from the corners of other grants. You can almost never obtain resources from an established funding body unless you've already done the early stage work and demonstrated your results. It is this gap that I see crowdfunding doing a great deal to help close, since it is an entirely new path added to the older options for obtaining funding for early stage research.

In the case of the SENS research programs that I support, philanthropy and crowdfunding serves both these purposes, helping to make this disruptive approach to the problem of aging ever more attractive to mainstream groups who presently have more in the way of money and grant pipelines. All it takes for the next phase of success in the growth curve is for one of them to change their minds enough to pick up one of the SENS rejuvenation research projects and work on it instead of chasing sirtuins or rapamycin or whatever dead-end path they're presently meandering along.

In that sense crowdfunders are the pebbles who start the avalanche, and that is just as true elsewhere in the life sciences.

Reason