HandleTheJandal

Genetic rescue & de-extinction. The Genetic Rescue Foundation https://www.geneticrescue.science/ and Revive & Restore http://longnow.org/revive/ have research projects that are advancing the scientific techniques required to do this. Having YC Research also take an interest in this would help to expand a field that already has the attention of some pretty talented individuals e.g. George Church.

Human beings are now the curators of planet earth. This is the Anthropocene era. We can either continue to intentionally and unintentionally destroy the earth's biodiversity; or through technology we can develop the means to preserve it.

We're not preserving biodiversity because panda's are cute and starving polar bear pictures make us sad. We're doing it because biodiversity is useful to humans and it takes a very long time to get it back when it's gone.

Comment · 10 years ago

Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a system that promotes accuracy of information.