In this week’s newsletter

✅ The power of the decentralized science movement. ✅ HydraDAO is up and running. ✅ Virtual labs powered by AI agents. ✅ Longevity Hackers - the movie. ✅ Winter is coming. ✅ A molecule identified by Karolinska Institutet researchers promotes intestinal healing.

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The power of DeSci and the new DAOists

I sometimes think about the American tv producer, actor and writer Dick Clair. He had AIDS and died on December 12, 1988, at the young age of 57. Unlike almost every other person who died that year - or any other year for that matter - there’s still hope for him. He’s cryopreserved. He’s still under medical care. There are people working hard to bring him back.

When Dick Clair passed, George H. W. Bush had just been elected president, and the Iron Curtain was beginning to crumble.

But 1988 was a vastly different world. There was no internet*, no smartphones, no self-driving cars. Google and social media didn’t exist, and it would be nearly three decades before the invention of large language models.

And no one had yet dreamed of the scientific movement known as DeSci.

* Well, there was, but you know what I mean.

DeSci, short for decentralized science, is powered by blockchain technology, specifically Ethereum-based smart contracts*.

* A smart contract is a self-executing piece of computer code that operates on a blockchain.

There’s no shortage of claims about how blockchain technology and the new web will revolutionize everything. In the case of DeSci, it’s said to offer a platform for individuals and scientific projects that don’t align with the traditional, often centralized and dysfunctional, research model.

Let’s take a look at a comparison from bio.xyz:

Inevitably, some uninvited skeptic will step in and dismiss it all, claiming that nothing has really changed and that blockchain technology is nothing more than a glorified database.

Well, I think the new biotech DAOism might beg to differ.

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