Neurofrontiers<p>For the past month, I’ve watched in horror the unrelenting attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US: grants frozen, databases deleted, basic words banned, decades of progress undone overnight. And while the US is by far an extreme case, research budgets in other countries are also being reduced (or they weren’t that high to begin with). Plus, the rise of far-right extremism seems to be happening almost everywhere. </p><p>But what I’ve also seen during this time are incredible community efforts to back up data, to build decentralized infrastructure, to push back against these attacks wherever possible. And in the context of human health, it got me thinking: medical research already neglects portions of the population, so if traditional institutions won’t prioritize our health anyway, why don’t we? </p><p>What if we built a decentralized, citizen-driven research initiative, an open-source database to track and analyze health data from diverse populations across borders? A kind of bootleg science, resilient against institutional neglect and political suppression.</p><p>This is a very unbaked, maybe desperate and idealistic thought more than a plan. I have no clue where to start from, or if something similar already exists. But I’d love to hear what people think. Does this sound stupid/impossible/doable? All of the above?</p><p><a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/science" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>science</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/academia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>academia</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/neuroscience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>neuroscience</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/health" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>health</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/BootlegScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BootlegScience</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/grassroots" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>grassroots</span></a> <a href="https://neuromatch.social/tags/CitizenScience" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CitizenScience</span></a></p>