This is a time for revolution in the methods of science and the funding of science, long overdue and enabled by the internet. It will be a mix of removing the barriers to entry, blurring the priesthood at the edges, open and iterative publishing of data, drawing crowdfunding directly from interested groups of the public rather than just talking to the traditional funding bodies.
Astronomy has long been heading in this direction, actually - it's a leading indicator for where fields like medicine and biotechnology are going. People can today do useful and novel life science work for a few tens of thousands of dollars, and open biotechnology groups are starting to formalize (such as biocurious in the Bay Area).
There is a lot of good science and good application of science that can be parallelized, broken up into small fragments, distributed amongst collaborative communities. The SENS Foundation's discovery process for finding bacterial species that might help in attacking age-related buildup of lipofuscin, for example: cheap, could be very parallel. In this, these forms of work are much like software development - consider how that has shifted in the past few decades from the varied enclosed towers to the open market squares below.
This greater process is very important to all of us, as it is necessary to speed up progress in fields that have great potential, such as biotechnology. Only a fraction of what could be done will be done within our lifetimes without a great opening of funding and data and the methodologies of getting the work done.
> People can today do useful and novel life science work for a few tens of thousands of dollars
makes me wonder if you've ever done bench work or furnished a lab. Sure, you can do a few weeks or months of work for tends of thousands of dollars (which doesn't produce a lot of useful results in that time frame, but can produce some), but that's assuming you have a functioning lab. It often takes $100K just to stock one, which is why most new investigators get special startup money just for that. To produce useful results often takes years at a rate of at least $100K a year. Equipment and reagents (especially enzymes) can be expensive. $300 for a gel box here, $1000 for a pipette there, $5000 for a thermocycler, $2000 for an enzyme, it adds up. And that's not even getting into salaries. Most people don't work alone.
I think it would be incredibly difficult to crowdfound science a la something like Kickstarter, especially with the amount of money currently spent on science (about $50 billion annually in the US alone). But maybe someone on HN will be the person who proves me wrong.
That's a cool point about parallelization. There was a fascinating experiment done a few years ago by the mathemetician Tim Gowers, called the 'Polymath project', where he took a problem in math, and asked for the mathematicians who read his blog to solve parts of the problem. 40 people took part, and 7 weeks later, Gowers announced on his blog that the problem was 'probably solved'. A couple of papers came out of it, published by 'D.H.J Polymath'.
You're right, it would be cool if we could see more of this kind of thing happening. There is now a whole site dedicated to applying parallelization to other problems in math http://polymathprojects.org/
Astronomy has long been heading in this direction, actually - it's a leading indicator for where fields like medicine and biotechnology are going. People can today do useful and novel life science work for a few tens of thousands of dollars, and open biotechnology groups are starting to formalize (such as biocurious in the Bay Area).
There is a lot of good science and good application of science that can be parallelized, broken up into small fragments, distributed amongst collaborative communities. The SENS Foundation's discovery process for finding bacterial species that might help in attacking age-related buildup of lipofuscin, for example: cheap, could be very parallel. In this, these forms of work are much like software development - consider how that has shifted in the past few decades from the varied enclosed towers to the open market squares below.
This greater process is very important to all of us, as it is necessary to speed up progress in fields that have great potential, such as biotechnology. Only a fraction of what could be done will be done within our lifetimes without a great opening of funding and data and the methodologies of getting the work done.