I agree that the system is just "reality" right now. I think the idea of a cryptographic data commons is an interesting idea, I'm just trying to imagine how it'd play out in my day-to-day research. If a system would tell me that my hypothesis is correct, but I couldn't look at (and share with colleagues) the raw data being computed, it'd be tough to believe that system. Maybe there's some type of zero-knowledge proof system that could facilitate this, though.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of blockchain technologies, but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.
Another idea would be to completely socialize all biopharmaceutical research, but that type of system would require an extremely radical societal shift.
Yes, it's admittedly an incredibly tough problem (how do you get those competing to cooperate?), and how to compute on data that is trustworthy. Ultimately, in biotech/pharma you have to ultimately know what an underlying gene or say pathway actually is, it can't be totally obfuscated. Still not sure how to set this up (if it's really even possible) that solves for this use case.
> but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.
I think ultimately this is how a research cooperative could work. If distributing and re-allocating fractional ownership is efficient enough, it seems like something like this might be feasible. The idea with multiparty communication (MPC) is that in this setup a research entity would contribute their data in an encrypted fashion, and any parties would be granted access to compute on it based on some set of rules/buy in etc.
This is a really difficult technical approach, as MPC is really only in it's infancy, made only to seem easy by the far more difficult and distant prospect of socializing medicine, which would seem to be of the greatest benefit.
I only have a rudimentary understanding of blockchain technologies, but a system where pieces of a research puzzle are stored on chain and each user can claim ownership of those findings, a resultant drug's profits could be proportionally split by every entity which contributed to the research.
Another idea would be to completely socialize all biopharmaceutical research, but that type of system would require an extremely radical societal shift.