Just to clarify, I followed up "you can have people who are bad at science but are good at fundraising in public," with "and you can have people with very good science who are bad at fundraising," and I think you probably have a lot more of the latter than the former, which I perceive as the larger injustice. I didn't mean to come across as a downer on the project. I was clear to point out that I know very little about the team behind the Immunity Project and definitely wasn't in a position to evaluate the quality of their science; I was speaking very generally. Even if these projects are unsuccessful, anything that gets the public excited about science is probably a good thing, as long as high-profile failures (which are inevitable; welcome to biology) don't lead to a backlash and general burnout.
"you can have people who are bad at science but are good at fundraising in public,"
You can also have people who are bad at science and are good at obtaining NIH grants. In my professional opinion, this characterizes a LOT of researchers out there. Which is the greater injustice?
Dis?claimer: I happen to think that I'm good at science and indeed I failed at a crowdfunding attempt.
Agreed! I was following closely to your efforts to see what happened with "http://www.indysci.org/". I hope your fundraising efforts turn out well in the future.
My issue is the examples in the article are also extremely limited. These are "Kickstarter"-type crowdfunding ventures. Immunity Project is backed by YC, and the Perlstein Lab is for all intents and purposes acting like a regular biotech startup. Those are both pretty narrow opportunity bands.
Since your username and your actual name from the article aren't very similar, you should probably add something that says - "Hey, I was the one quoted in the article".
Just in case people don't put two and two together or don't click to see your HN profile.
We as physician scientists never really learned how to communicate science broadly to the public - I think our open science approach, which will bring people close to what we are doing in the lab, is the best way to go! This is a learning process for us and I appreciate your support!
We are setting up an open science web site within the next few weeks that will update people on the project on a regular basis. We are exploring options for rapid publication including ways to post our work during the review process. If you have any ideas here, please let us know using team@immunityproject.org
"Fail fast, fail often" is less of a good thing when it's actual people's lives.
It depends. A lot of people are already losing their lives through inaction.
This is slightly tangential, Alex Tabarrok's book Launching the Innovation Renaissance is good on the subject of FDA inertia and spending too much time trying to prove efficacy and too little emphasis on experimentation and rapid iteration: http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Marke... .
Hi- Ian from Immunity Project here. Thank you for your support! We know our fundraising approach for this experiment is novel, and we believe it's the fastest way to get it done.
I'm probably missing something obvious here, but who would be desperate for a vaccine?
If there were offering a cure, then I could see a complaint where they were preying on people with the disease who were desperate for a cure. Since that's not the case, do they mean the contributors, wanting to help develop the vaccine, are desperate, and being preyed upon? Because I hardly think that applies.
Yes, and I prefer many "desperate" healthy people choosing to give little money to fund alternative researches (even if sometimes it fails) than big pharmaceutical companies bankrupting "desperate" ill patients (and families) for a cure that's not guaranty to save them.
Reading this http://priceonomics.com/the-rapidly-escalating-price-of-canc... makes me think that drug industry is broken.
I didn't view it as a hit piece, because that's not the author talking. And while I don't necessarily agree with it, I do think that they're long on "Crowdfunded free HIV vaccine" and short on specifics.
Hi! This is Reid, CEO of immunity project. Thanks for your comments! Our previous work is under review by a PRJ - our crowd funding is allowing us to do additional work which we will try to publish as quickly as possible! We have our white paper on our web site - if you want to discuss more details please shoot us an email at team@ImmunityProject.org
Thanks for your comments! We have a great team with a lot of experience in computer science, drug delivery and HIV-relevant lab immunology. I studied biochemistry and computer science at UC Berkeley - then going to Stanford for an MD and MS in Computer Science - was in the PhD program in course 6-2 at MIT - left (without getting the PhD) to start Aradigm in Hayward where I worked for 10 years on inhaled insulin.
That was a complex project that required a lot of special technology, much of which we developed ourselves, to make and characterize micro-particles.
CV Herst, Pete Lloyd and I (all part of the Aradigm founding team) have been working together at Immunity Project since the beginning - Pete is an ME (UC Berkeley and Davis) who built and operates our precision spray drying system for sphere manufacturing. CV got his MPH at Berkeley in Med Micro and his PhD from North Western in Mo Bio later doing a post doc at MD Anderson. He has extensive experience working with HIV in both the diagnostic and lab research setting requiring handling the virus in cell culture.
That there isn't a single, in press or published paper supporting this research, when the amount of evidence you have to bring to the table for your average NIH grant is staggering set off some red flags for me.
They have enough data to have completed an INDA and are proceeding to phase I clinical trials. That's a much, much higher bar than an NIH grant. Paper publication is not necessarily a useful metric.
And when you're evaluating science, the paper itself, in the literature, is the only real way to evaluate it's quality.
This is incredibly short-sighted. Overvaluation of the literature is exactly why people pollute the literature with fraudulent results. It's why paper reviewing process and citations are polluted with political machinations. Ultimately, science is the entire corpus, from experimental design, through data collection, and presentation of work as papers. Reification of the publication process quietly enables researchers who keep everything up to publication a black box.
Moreover because some NIH grants fund clinical trials doesn't mean that all (or even the average) NIH grants have that level of scrutiny
How is it short sighted? What other mechanism is there to evaluate the quality of scientific work? They haven't presented at meetings as far as I can tell, and not in ways that manifested in say, a proceedings publication. Their internet postings have been vague on specific details.
Am I to magically observe their experimental design and data collection? Or do I evaluate their work like I do all others - through the literature they present?
Hey! You gave some great examples! Go to meetings. Talk to them. Send them emails asking about their work. Observe experimental design and data collection (if that's not public, that should be part of your judgement). Read non-publication sources (patents, regulatory submissions).
And then yes, do squishy stuff like "judge their character", "talk to their postdocs", "ask around about professional opinions". It's a conceit to operate as if science isn't a human endeavor.
Also you are now conflating the specific case of this project with the general case. Read their INDA, if you are really itching for details.
I've read their white paper, it too is short on details. Right now, their experimental design and data collection aren't public. I go to meetings - I saw nothing about them at the largest infectious disease conference of the year this year.
I'm really not conflating anything. I'm very skeptical of any project getting this much attention that doesn't have some papers published. It's not the only step, but it's a step, and one that hasn't been done yet.
But, as an infectious disease epidemiologist, I'd be thrilled if I were wrong, and they were somehow paragons of vaccine research operating in stealth mode.
