

Soylent raises $750k on Crowdhoster – what’s next for open source crowdfunding? - garry
http://blog.crowdtilt.com/post/53534200723/soylent-raises-750k-on-crowdhoster-whats-next-for

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freshbreakfast
I know you're probably dealing with 2 different systems, but I'd love it if
Crowdhoster campaigns could also be hosted on Crowdtilt.com. I get that
Crowdhoster is supposed to enable all types of cool group transactions way
beyond the controlled scope of Crowdtilt, but even just generating a secondary
Crowdtilt.com landing page for a Crowdhoster campaign would be cool.

I also get how this isn't a big issue for now. But as Crowdtilt grows, I would
think it becomes a "brand" that people trust to handle transactions, and would
tip a certain % of the market to then give up the CC digits. So for example,
as a consumer, I might be more inclined to purchase something on
crowdtilt.com, as opposed to xanga.com.

Just like how right now, your average consumer might be more inclined to
support a Kickstarter project over a Crowdtilt project, due to inherent trust
he feels in Kickstarter as a curator/brand. But since I'm bullish on Crowtilt,
I think Crowdtilt eventually develops and trusted brand name.

As an campaign director/organizer, in and ideal world, I want both the
flexibility of Crowdhoster and that brand stamp of "Crowdtilt". Just a
suggest... otherwise, these updates are actually really cool, love where it's
going!

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dnautics
I'm going to try to raise money to bring an IP-unrestricted anticancer
compound up to the point of FDA clinical trials. (i.e. as far as you can go
without involving humans). I'm pretty sure that I'll be using crowdhoster as
the platform.

~~~
Blahah
This is awesome. Are you developing it unfunded at the moment?

~~~
dnautics
Work on it was discontinued when my boss quit her job at the university of
maryland. The 1 year patenting period has expired, I have no love for patents
anyways, so I'm going to generate several analogs and register them as
something called "US Statutory Invention Registration" which prevents them
from being patented. I have her blessing (not that I would need it from a
legal POV) to continue work on this project.

Since then I've been accruing a lot of synthetic biology experience (I'm
currently probably the most experienced person in the world at a new technique
called "gibson assembly" \- I've done upwards of 100 successful gibson
assemblies on a wide range of molecular biology targets), which should help
the process go even more smoothly.

Details are at: [http://indysci.org](http://indysci.org),

currently we're waiting for the IRS to approve our application for 501(c)3
status before launching our fundraising. Our target launch date is January
2014

~~~
Blahah
That's an awful lot of Gibson! What tools are you using to design your
constructs? I briefly joined the developers of Gibthon (FOSS gibson assembly
design software; [http://gibthon.org/](http://gibthon.org/)) last year - they
will be thrilled to hear if you use it. In fact, if you would be willing to
share some of your experience, no doubt it would be invaluable for improving
the design tools. We've also got lots of people in our department doing lots
of Gibson assembly. If you ever want to compare notes or anything... my email
is in profile.

How are you doing for computational biologists?

~~~
dnautics
We use CLC.

Basically the workflow is 1) find sequences that you want to stitch together.
2) build a draft plasmid. 3) make fine tuning changes (making sure RBSes are
ok, we aren't stomping on terminators or promoters, etc, add mutations if we
want). 4) annotate primer regions. 5) cut and paste into IDT's primer orderer.

The bulk of my gibson assemblies (about 50 of the ~100 that I've done
personally, plus 12 that my college intern last year did, and 13 going on 48+
that my intern this summer is doing) are for site-directed mutagenesis;
quikchange blows, and the plasmid I'm playing with is 20kb anyways, with 12kb
of mission critical DNA. The general scheme is: design 2 mutagenic primers, 2
PCR using primers that flank a pair of unique restriction sites near our site,
then gibson the left hand and right hand products with a stock of pre-digested
plasmid. Since bacterial plasmid propagation is "error-free", we don't bother
sequencing all but 1kb or so of the final product - saves on cost - and our
plan is to do shotgun sequencing of all of the plasmids, barcoded, with
ionTorrent when we're done.

We're also doing combinatorial installation of promoters that my boss' intern
has done (27 constructs) - that I've partially supervised. Among the other
things that I've done are gene fusions, leader sequence deletions, moving
around restriction sites, swapping plasmid backbones, assembly of complex,
highly repetitive sequences, and we attempted (but only partially succeeded
at) capturing a eukaryotic chromosome by the telomeres.

We cut a lot of corners, but for NEB's sake (I like them) I'm not going to
discuss exactly what those corners are, quite yet. Even with ours sloppiness,
it works nearly every time, often with 8/8 correct (and sometimes you have to
screen 48 to get one, but that's rare and I haven't had that happen in about a
year or so). My general philosophy is the more sloppy you can get away with
being, the more robust your procedure is - I like gibson assembly because I
can teach it to an undergrad in a week and have them rip roaring on a project.

There are lesser known properties of gibson assembly (and this is in the
original paper if you read it carefully, which most people don't) - you can
have inexact ends, for example, if you want to have a template that is
released using restriction enzymes - the 3' exonuclease activity of the
polymerase will remove it and create a seamless construct with no evidence of
the former restriction site. I have to warn: This would be hard (but not
impossible) to implement in a design suite, and nearly impossible for
automated design unless you are using exactly the same RE protocol each time.

Slight disclaimer - I'm a coworker of Dan Gibson's, so take my evangelism with
a little bit of a grain of salt. I will also say, that there are plasmids that
you absolutely can't gibson clone into and _we don 't know why_. pBR322 tet
marker is an unclonable position, for example.

Finally:, we don't really use computational biologists. Actually, we're
designing enzyme variations from first principles and previous literature
report, without appealing to simulation or model, with quite a bit of success.

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cupcake-unicorn
I keep seeing Soylent pop up on blogs and stuff and I don't know what the big
deal is. He made some shady claims before about things like "suffering from a
severe iron deficiency" in just a few days, which was magically fixed when he
remixed the formula. I'm also shocked that he's marketing it to this extent
and _still_ doesn't say _anything_ about the ingredients. People have
allergies, people have dietary restrictions. How is this at all different from
a protein shake at the Health Food store?

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gilgoomesh
> I don't know what the big deal is.

It's basically junk science (or a de-facto scam) by a guy who is doing well at
marketing himself.

Food replacements already exist. The biggest is a product called Ensure. There
are others. It's not clear that there's a need for Soylent at all.

You're right, iron deficiency can't be detected in a few days (3 months would
be closer to the time frame required assuming you had healthy iron levels to
begin).

Most of the other continual reformulations he discusses also seem pretty
ridiculous on the timeframes involved. Basically, this guy doesn't seem to
have any understanding of stochastic experimentation, limiting confounding
factors or limiting free variables.

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Tloewald
I did some googling about ensure:

[http://www.naturalnews.com/002698.html](http://www.naturalnews.com/002698.html)

It doesn't seem to me that any product made with high fructose corn syrup as
its main ingredient represents a credible attempt to make a healthy food
product (just using sugar would be healthier).

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gilgoomesh
High fructose corn syrup is just a sugar. Your opposition to HFCS sounds a
little skewed. HFCS is not substantially different to other sugars biological
effect and is not really any more or less healthy.

From Wikipedia ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
fructose_corn_syrup_and_he...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
fructose_corn_syrup_and_health)):

> Epidemiological research has suggested that the increase in obesity is
> linked to increased consumption of sugars and/or calories in general, and
> not due to any special effect of fructose alone.[1]

If you're worried about "not natural" then meal replacements are not for you
(unless you've had your stomach or jaws surgically removed). They are heavily
processed and artificial by design.

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nhangen
I think what's next, and quite frankly, what's already been happening, is that
crowdfunding will move away from platforms and onto self-hosted websites.

~~~
rdl
One of the things I like most about Kickstarter is having the "activity feed"
of friends who have funded other projects. I'm sure there's a way to recreate
that without having the restrictive ToS kickstarter has, though, or it could
be solved by publishing "I've funded this" to twitter/fb/etc.

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asdfologist
Am I the only one surprised by the choice of name "Soylent" for a nutritional
drink?

~~~
baddox
It's an apt name. In the film "Soylent Green," soylent was just a line of
meal-replacement rations. The green variety was the newest one released, and
the one that happened to be made of humans.

~~~
nbouscal
Additionally, Soylent Green wasn't even in the book that the film was based on
('Make Room! Make Room!'). The book was about the impact of unchecked
population growth.

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weston
Hi Garry,

With all due respect, isn't your headline a bit backwards? Crowdtilt is just
the platform. Soylent raised most of this on their own, due to their own
efforts and the press they've been receiving. Even the original headline is:
"Soylent raises $750k on Crowdhoster." Why switch that around?

I'm not trying to diminish Crowdtilt and their efforts, but your headline
makes it seem like Soylent didn't do anything.

~~~
garry
Fair point! Did not mean to imply that; I love and support the Soylent team
too!

~~~
weston
No problem! :-)

