Guy Rohkin, Co-Founder of Scifind
Chapters:
0:00 Scifind - an expert platform designed for tacit knowledge that doesn’t get published
8:23 Will this undermine formal science?
13:36 Impact on reproducibility crisis?
18:15 How’s adoption?
23:05 A paradigm shift in synbio community toward openness
27:15 What about IP and career recognition?
36:40 Thoughts on a new age of biology/citizen science
Philosophers talk about various kinds of knowledge. There is knowing that something is. We learn that the sun is 90 million miles from the Earth. There is also knowing how to do something. This includes skills we learn like riding a bike or cooking spaghetti. Knowing how is different from knowing that.
Today’s guest introduces us to a new publishing platform where biologists can share more of their know-how along with their know-that. It’s an online forum where they can share--or find--the informal bits of knowledge that are not included in the more formal system of paper publishing. Yes, there is Reddit. But this new site is custom designed just for biologists. The platform is scifind.io. The founder, Guy Rohkin, is part biologist, part philosopher, and now entrepreneur. He makes a great case for what he calls the “Stack Overflow of biology.”
We finish with his thoughts on where biology is headed. Preview: toward citizen biology where every family will have access to “kitchen” tools to dabble in making their own meat or tinkering with their household plants. Are we going to soon see the Steve Jobs of biology delivering biotech to each household?
