The new science

April 7, 2008

Call it scientific Bursty Work, independent science, whatever, but I continue to monitor the progress of Pawel Szczesny over at Freelancing Science with a great degree of interest. It’s not only that we have some of the same scientific interests (and for some reason I have been able to make friends with a few Polish scientists), but his current efforts portend a future that should be welcomed with open arms.

In a blog post Pawel writes

I’m neither a genius nor a big shot but I have bunch of ideas I consider cool and which I’d like to get funded. It looks like for that I need to step out of academic money-flow system, and apply for funding to people who are less conservative and who can take a risk of supporting non-established ideas

It’s pretty clear that in the web space, the transition to a new way of approaching problems has happened. Today, companies or individual projects can get of the ground in a pretty short time, with a small amount of funding. Bioscreencast is an example of taking an idea and making it a reality. Of course, to scale a project or idea, it takes time and money, but the sources of funding, the scale of funding and the nature of implementation are a lot different than they used to be. The same is true for in silico science. There is little reason why some of the same concepts cannot be applied. The monetization models will have to be different. You are not going to get the same level of scale and usage, at least in terms of number of people, that you would for a consumer web app, but it would be worth our while to think of an appropriate reward system.

What about bench science and projects? Well, that’s a trickier question, but there can be collaborations between bench and computational scientists, and even between bench scientists. We have the beginnings of an infrastructure that can support that. What’s lacking are the incentive models and the education. That said, it’s early days. Scientists are not early adopters by any means, but there are enough of us now that in a few years, especially if we get some of the challenges of data sharing, publication, etc sorted out.

You know, I kinda like the Nike tagline

Just Do it

There are still challenges, but until those who have the interest and willingness to take risks start exploring this space, it’s not going to happen. Which is why I admire Pawel and Chemspiderman, who are also examples of going this route at different points in a career. Pawel is getting started, while Antony has been round the block. I suspect over the coming years others might also take this route. Perhaps web working life scientists, or co-working life scientists (co-working in some lab space) will become a decent chunk of the life science populace.

Further reading
Monkchips
Bursty Work
The Scientific Entrepreneur

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