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As someone who works in neuro lab who occasionally reads about "Neurohacking" I could easily dismiss it as 100% hype, but I won't (although I do call out when s

As someone who works in neuro lab who occasionally reads about "Neurohacking" I could easily dismiss it as 100% hype, but I won't (although I do call out when someone talks to me about any of the devices on the market having seen manufactures come through our lab and try to peddle their… stuff). "A lot of biohackers (even PhD level biohackers ensconced in academia) are basically script kiddies – cut and paste these bits of DNA and cross your fingers and hope the result you expect pops out." Same is true of Neuro phds: "scan brains in fmri/eeg that i have no idea how it works from a physics perspective", run this matlab script here, use this proprietary software there, calculate "connectivity|power|correlation" - "does this look good for my paper? yes, shiny grant coming right up! Will it move the field forward? Not anymore than the thousand other papers out there but the university pr office is on it!" (in no particular order). I say this because if all this was more out in the open (methods, software, caveats on every level on a git repo) and more available to people in other fields/expertise to look at and source materials and parts, a lot could be moved forward in general from what I'm observing going on in academia now along the lines of: "As I worked on insulin in grad school, I risked my job as a lowly postdoc, chiming in and pointedly telling him (in front of the program manager) why it wouldn’t work. Some of my coworkers speculated that I might not show up the next day, but I survived to tell the tale." I see some well intentioned people fumbling around, being derided in private by academics (who play the same human status games in different ways) who are still willing to talk with such people (because $$$, and maybe because some other academic they "collaborate" with is talking with them), who are pretty smart in their field (who are finding alternative funding sources!) who I secretly hope burn a fire under the ass of what goes now, so I won't write it all off.

dnautics 11y ago
Author of the blog post here - to be a good sport, I gave the open insulin guys the design they're using. I think the chemistry is solid and it will work, but I can't say I'm confident the team will be able to get it together. Insulin is hard. I could probably whip it up myself, but I'm already stretched thin doing two biology projects that aren't paying me anything - and in fact are costing me (my nonprofit and a startup) and I make barely enough on some part-time contract coding work that I am really lucky to have landed through roommate-nepotism. As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for. I've decided to quit impostor syndrome and accept that I am kind of a biochemistry badass (I redesigned an enzyme and made it 4x better on my first shot based on first principles), and that if anyone wants my expertise they have to pay $$ for it. The other week an ALS advocate showed me a drug candidate structure and I correctly identified the mechanism of action without knowing much about the target. I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that. But good luck to them.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  > "I've decided to quit impostor syndrome and accept that I am kind of a biochemistry badass…" I think the work you do is pretty awesome (at least from reading your posts here and on your blog) and can understand that you are stretched, but I can see that you also want to move the field forward (and not in the "lets shit some papers out and maximize for 'impact factor'" way). >"As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for." I can see where you are coming from about the whole Postdocapalypse economics… I see it heating up as well with mindfulness being the current carrying agent in moving the neural tech forward (some neuro phd i was talking to on twitter said this to when I was mocking the "run matlab on cluster for months mentality" and saying it could be done way faster (hours) and cheaper: "Sounds a little bit more complicated than just reporting what you did in a paper.", so yeah, the investors who fund people like that are going to get exactly what they are paying for), but I'm going to help people milk it for what its worth just to help foster something that can compete with the abomination that academia has metastasized into that masquerades such games as science. > "…I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that." Yeah I can understand that, but I also think the way that resources are allocated as a society are in for a major shake up (esp with the whole crowdfunding bonanza across so many industries, and have people who worked for the UN and a gov agency in Turkey contact me about the software I wrote to track it on social media), which I think is why people aren't terribly excited on top of the personal stress all the uncertainty brings which I'm familiar with being a drop out who's in the neck of it up here in the boston area (and happen to be the only one it seems to have open-sourced a spacial beamformer in c++ for real time neural feedback for eeg that can be adapted for dual eeg/fmri). I do think though, because you aren't necessarily confining yourself to what things have to be (as defined by the status quo), you'll probably end up doing way more than you think you are capable of now.
dnautics 11y ago
Oh. Some bonus content (I hadn't read that blog post in quite a while). That DARPA program manager... About a year ago on pubpeer very credible claims emerged suggesting that all of her work in grad school was an instrument artefact. Her PhD advisor committed some ethically questionable actions overdefending it. And after spearheading several bio-hacking-type calls within DARPA, and seemingly being groomed to take Arati Prabhukar's position, she seems to have suddenly disappeared from her position at DARPA altogether in the past few months.
- cinquemb 11y ago
  Wow, yeah, not surprised at all lol. DARPA is doing the same pretty much with some stuff going on at MIT in neuroimaging… so i hear… :P And there's a lab in Wisconsin that's sucking up 10's million of dollars from private foundations of which a co pi of that lab visited ours to tell us about their soon to be created public outreach arm… on top of the questionable custom eeg head cap for dual/eeg frmi thats close to a million who knows nothing about e&m, who I confronted directly about that while getting the backing from the senior research scientist (who is on a visa…) in my lab whose phd is in soft condensed matter physics who worked on SQUIDs at yale, who is now conveniently "volunteering" most of the time doing mobile apps for some company attached to our lab who wrote most of the code for the system people saw Anderson Cooper hooked up too on CNN not too long ago… but you'll never hear about him over others trying to capture 100% of what they think is the only opportunity now. #WhatAFuckingJokeThingsAre and this is why things are due for a shake up lol
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    since when are SQUIDs soft condensed matter?
    - cinquemb 11y ago
      That was just another project he worked on.

dnautics 11y ago

Author of the blog post here - to be a good sport, I gave the open insulin guys the design they're using. I think the chemistry is solid and it will work, but I can't say I'm confident the team will be able to get it together. Insulin is hard. I could probably whip it up myself, but I'm already stretched thin doing two biology projects that aren't paying me anything - and in fact are costing me (my nonprofit and a startup) and I make barely enough on some part-time contract coding work that I am really lucky to have landed through roommate-nepotism. As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for. I've decided to quit impostor syndrome and accept that I am kind of a biochemistry badass (I redesigned an enzyme and made it 4x better on my first shot based on first principles), and that if anyone wants my expertise they have to pay $$ for it. The other week an ALS advocate showed me a drug candidate structure and I correctly identified the mechanism of action without knowing much about the target. I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that. But good luck to them.

cinquemb 11y ago
> "I've decided to quit impostor syndrome and accept that I am kind of a biochemistry badass…" I think the work you do is pretty awesome (at least from reading your posts here and on your blog) and can understand that you are stretched, but I can see that you also want to move the field forward (and not in the "lets shit some papers out and maximize for 'impact factor'" way). >"As to why I'm not really that excited about helping the Open Insulin Project any further: I've become kind of wary about prevailing attitudes in the tech-to-bio transition field that basically takes an exploitative attitude following the Postdocapalypse... There's this investor class expectation that they can hire frustrated grad students and postdocs for cheap. I think this is true, but they better watch out, in 99% of cases they are going to get what they are paying for." I can see where you are coming from about the whole Postdocapalypse economics… I see it heating up as well with mindfulness being the current carrying agent in moving the neural tech forward (some neuro phd i was talking to on twitter said this to when I was mocking the "run matlab on cluster for months mentality" and saying it could be done way faster (hours) and cheaper: "Sounds a little bit more complicated than just reporting what you did in a paper.", so yeah, the investors who fund people like that are going to get exactly what they are paying for), but I'm going to help people milk it for what its worth just to help foster something that can compete with the abomination that academia has metastasized into that masquerades such games as science. > "…I've never been terribly excited about bringing the marginal cost of scientific labor closer to zero, and the OIP is basically that." Yeah I can understand that, but I also think the way that resources are allocated as a society are in for a major shake up (esp with the whole crowdfunding bonanza across so many industries, and have people who worked for the UN and a gov agency in Turkey contact me about the software I wrote to track it on social media), which I think is why people aren't terribly excited on top of the personal stress all the uncertainty brings which I'm familiar with being a drop out who's in the neck of it up here in the boston area (and happen to be the only one it seems to have open-sourced a spacial beamformer in c++ for real time neural feedback for eeg that can be adapted for dual eeg/fmri). I do think though, because you aren't necessarily confining yourself to what things have to be (as defined by the status quo), you'll probably end up doing way more than you think you are capable of now.

dnautics 11y ago

Oh. Some bonus content (I hadn't read that blog post in quite a while). That DARPA program manager... About a year ago on pubpeer very credible claims emerged suggesting that all of her work in grad school was an instrument artefact. Her PhD advisor committed some ethically questionable actions overdefending it. And after spearheading several bio-hacking-type calls within DARPA, and seemingly being groomed to take Arati Prabhukar's position, she seems to have suddenly disappeared from her position at DARPA altogether in the past few months.

cinquemb 11y ago
Wow, yeah, not surprised at all lol. DARPA is doing the same pretty much with some stuff going on at MIT in neuroimaging… so i hear… :P And there's a lab in Wisconsin that's sucking up 10's million of dollars from private foundations of which a co pi of that lab visited ours to tell us about their soon to be created public outreach arm… on top of the questionable custom eeg head cap for dual/eeg frmi thats close to a million who knows nothing about e&m, who I confronted directly about that while getting the backing from the senior research scientist (who is on a visa…) in my lab whose phd is in soft condensed matter physics who worked on SQUIDs at yale, who is now conveniently "volunteering" most of the time doing mobile apps for some company attached to our lab who wrote most of the code for the system people saw Anderson Cooper hooked up too on CNN not too long ago… but you'll never hear about him over others trying to capture 100% of what they think is the only opportunity now. #WhatAFuckingJokeThingsAre and this is why things are due for a shake up lol
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  since when are SQUIDs soft condensed matter?
  - cinquemb 11y ago
    That was just another project he worked on.