Personalized medicine is around the corner. I watched it get closer from inside the work: embryonic stem cells, then engineered mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), then iPSCs, then a cGMP facility built to carry bench work into the clinic. The science is going to arrive. The open question is who it arrives for.
My position is simple: it should arrive as a public good. Not another divider of haves and have-nots. I helped run the labs and stand up the facility where this kind of science gets made.
Why decentralized science
The bottleneck in translational medicine is rarely the biology. It is coordination: who funds the work, who owns the IP, who gets to read the results, who decides what happens next. Those decisions run through a small number of gatekeepers, and gatekeepers are slow.
Decentralized science is an attack on that bottleneck. Open funding rails instead of grant committees: in spring 2023, Gitcoin's Allo protocol carried funding to Zuzalu, a pop-up community running experiments in learning, health, and coordination. Community review instead of paywalled journals. Shared ownership of research IP instead of a license nobody can afford. The mechanisms are new; the goal is the oldest one in science: more people working on hard problems, faster.
I spent years around that movement: public-goods funding work with Gitcoin, and time inside DAOs while the infrastructure took shape. The organizations building it are worth knowing by name, because each one is an experiment in a different bottleneck: Molecule for decentralized biotech funding and research IP, VitaDAO for longevity R&D, LabDAO for community tools in computational life science, TalentDAO for community-reviewed publishing in the social sciences.
I wrote about the mechanisms while they were new. Understanding Quadratic Funding (October 2023) explains quadratic funding: why many small supporters can outweigh one large check. Pop-Up City Zuzalu (April 2023) covered the Zuzalu experiment as it was happening. Explainers, not manifestos. The movement needed more people who could read the mechanism, so I wrote the mechanism down.
The handle has a history. KryptoShrimpPhD came first, dropped long ago; I don't have a PhD, and a handle shouldn't claim one. Then KryptoShrimp, still the byline on the Paragraph pieces above (kryptoshrimp). Now DeSciMike: I run the DeSci Mic account on X (@DeSci_Mike) with Twitter Spaces, grown to about 2,000 followers. Not much, but a first attempt, and this movement runs on first attempts. Same person, same mission, different room.
Two rooms, one problem
The day job was helping run academic labs and standing up a cGMP facility. Most of crypto's coordination problems (funding, incentives, governance) have older, uglier cousins in translational medicine: payers, tech transfer, compliance, donors. I had lived those.
The same problem shows up in both rooms: coordinate strangers around a shared goal, win small, earn the next stakeholder. In a DAO that looks like open proposals and community votes. Inside a university it looks like pilots inside of pilots. Translational medicine is a team sport. DeSci is an experiment in making the team bigger.
The stance, plainly
The tools of personalized medicine (cell therapies, gene editing, patient-specific manufacturing) are moving from heroic one-offs toward routine. Access decisions are being made now, mostly by default.
Defaults favor whoever is already at the table. Open funding, open review, and open infrastructure are how you widen the table before the defaults harden.
A cure you can't access is a paper, not a cure.
That is why the open-science work sits next to the lab work and the AI work on this site. They are the same project: accelerate the science, and make sure the acceleration is shared. The AI work is how one person builds the connective tissue for both.