The problem is that bootstrapping takes significant effort without full time funding from a VC or institution. Most of the applied sciences are done right now on private/semi-private Slack groups.
I think another challenge would be balancing moderation between scientific accuracy and general discussion/speculation. Posts on reddit r/science usually become a sea of deleted off-topic comments. The Eternal September problem aside, a bio-focused site would have to be seeded with people of life science backgrounds. It is tempting to just do a Show HN and hope for cross pollination. I suspect, however, the discourse would quickly get dominated by data science/bioinformatics and machine learning on healthcare topics if HN users are the earliest users. Finding a large core group of users with strong biotechnology backgrounds to set the initial tone will be the foremost priority. Life science is ultimately grounded in the wet lab, pure computational hype and speculation without theoretical rigor would just bring about another Theranos.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25853298
The problem is that bootstrapping takes significant effort without full time funding from a VC or institution. Most of the applied sciences are done right now on private/semi-private Slack groups.