Pod: “What Is the Zuck Really Doing In Science?”

On the heels of stories related to how MAHA is exploiting preprints on medRxiv to disrupt vaccine policies — especially two with the head of medRxiv as a co-author — and how this same individual (Harlan Krumholz) failed to disclose his role as an officer at openRxiv in an essay this week in JACC where the word “transparency” was used a dozen times, today’s podcast tells part of the story of how Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg got involved in funding preprint servers and other science projects, with an emphasis on how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) is structured as an LLC, what this means for initiatives within it, and why bioRxiv and medRxiv consolidating in a new CZI-run entity (openRxiv Corp.) means that most major preprint servers in science are now run by large, for-profit organizations.

From Sam and Amy Molyneux and their original Meta.org AI system for science to the more recent dreams of cellular AI and biohubs, CZI LLC has been making hundreds of millions if not billions transacting in science while producing no obvious or declared scientific advances.

• And these people would declare a scientific advance if they made one — they’d probably name their company after it, or name it after their company or themselves.

The conflicts of interest between platforms all serving one family’s political and financial interests are beginning to surface, as well. We discuss it all, and our permissioning of these things under the banner of “open.”

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