Genetic rescue & de-extinction. The Genetic Rescue Foundation https://www.geneticrescue.science/ and Revive & Restore http://longnow.org/revive/ have research projects that are advancing the scientific techniques required to do this. Having YC Research also take an interest in this would help to expand a field that already has the attention of some pretty talented individuals e.g. George Church.
Human beings are now the curators of planet earth. This is the Anthropocene era. We can either continue to intentionally and unintentionally destroy the earth's biodiversity; or through technology we can develop the means to preserve it.
We're not preserving biodiversity because panda's are cute and starving polar bear pictures make us sad. We're doing it because biodiversity is useful to humans and it takes a very long time to get it back when it's gone.
Science Exchange (YC S11) is solving this problem. The basic idea is that instead of the "authorship bartering" model that's pervasive in research today we move towards a market-based collaboration model. Basically we encourage researchers to collaborate because it's financially lucrative to do so. By making researchers wealthy they're able to release themselves from being dependent on prestige publications for generating funding. As a result of this we can start to deprecate the somewhat toxic "public or perish" incumbent system. If your entire livelihood relies on being published in a high impact journal you're incentivized to do anything to make that happen. That is not a system that promotes accuracy of information.
So you can help out by organizing your own conservation project or by getting involved with our existing projects. Email info at geneticrescue.science to continue the conversation. Thank you for your interest!
Please take a look at https://www.geneticrescue.science. We're looking for collaborators to help advance the science of genetic rescue and de-extinction.
Science Exchange (YC S11) - Palo Alto, CA: Order experiments from the world's best labs.
Our mission is to improve the quality and efficiency of scientific research by using market-based incentives to promote collaboration between scientists.
Thank you for helping to promote reproducibility of published results by supporting anonymous peer review! Science Exchange (YC S11) is also making great progress in the facilitation of scientific reproducibility. We just completed independently validating select results from 50 cancer biology papers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731274
Human beings are now the curators of planet earth. This is the Anthropocene era. We can either continue to intentionally and unintentionally destroy the earth's biodiversity; or through technology we can develop the means to preserve it.
We're not preserving biodiversity because panda's are cute and starving polar bear pictures make us sad. We're doing it because biodiversity is useful to humans and it takes a very long time to get it back when it's gone.