The name “Next Institute of Health” or NxIH was not on our minds at the inception of this idea. For the early contributors, you may remember that our project was just titled “Medical Research DAO (Name TBD)”.1 Now the name has evolved into four characters that on the surface is simple and concise. However, below the surface is a more complex vision.
The obvious first question: what is our vision? The tagline decentralized NIH was apparent almost on day one, but the vision of the project is much more than that. We believe that the strength of our community will drive our success. This means being as open and welcoming to any and all scientists. Therefore we wanted to create something that functions in a familiar way.
DeSci and Web3 is itself an exciting area; this new infrastructure will allow us to create our more decentralized NIH. The DeSci space is already defined by its innovators. When we see several of the DeSci DAOs, many are upfront on who they are (i.e. VitaDAO, PsyDAO, LabDAO, BioDAO, etc.). These DAOs all have great pathways to success, but in order for us to be successful, we needed to take a different approach.
Despite the growth potential Web3 provides, it does not come without its negative connotations. Just last year a poll suggested that 57% of people knew what cryptocurrency was, but would not invest in it2. The term “scam” is often a recurring word around crypto and NFTs. When we talk about this project to the scientists we know, we hear that word with examples of “dogecoin”, “NFTs”, and other “meme coins”. No matter how much we try to explain the benefits, just hearing buzzwords like blockchain, crypto, and Web3 can be enough for them to shut it down.
At the core, Web3 is something academics find unfamiliar. This is the opposite of our core vision; no matter how much of believers we are of Web3 and DeSci ourselves. Therefore, we decided our name should not include the word DAO. We sought to be a scientific grant funding body that has Web3 features and not a Web3 company that gives out scientific grants.
Speaking of the NIH, it is clear that our name, NxIH, is a play off of the agency, but it also goes back to that core vision: familiarity. In the United States, it is fair to say that every academic scientist knows about the NIH and their grant process. A university scientist knows his or her salary not only comes from his or her institution, but also comes from grants. It is hard to approximate how much of their salary comes from the NIH, but one study estimates that university scientists earn 65% of their salaries from grants3. With $32 billion at their disposal, the NIH is the primary grant funder. In our twitter thread announcing our first blog, we quoted David Lang that government funding was not going anywhere4, this is a major reason why.
We posit that academic scientists are just as aware of the NIHs problems as we are. Just like us with our startup, EncepHeal, they rely on grants for part of their salary. We have heard from many PIs about the process taking too long. Furthermore, younger investigators may need to factor into their plans certain salary expectations. By building into our name we are solving these problems, it again becomes familiar.
The last part of the name was choosing the word “Next”. There is the obvious connotation that it plays on everything we mentioned so far, but it also has another feature. Just as we want to become the “Next” evolution of the NIH, we also want to support the next generation of investigators!
Even with everything our name stands for, there are still going to be challenges with brand recognition. The name itself is very U.S. Centric. It was not surprising that this bias occurred as the core team members are all from the U.S. and designed the project to solve U.S. problems. However, NxIH may not have the same instant recognition from international scientists5. Our goal over the next coming months is to have a minimum viable product of our model. This requires a level of traction and interest from a wide ranging community. Therefore, it is important that we work to better resonate our vision with our international crowd. If you want to help us do this or if our message/name already resonates, please join us on our discord.
DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. They are essentially community owned businesses, where transactions can be monitored by the community on a blockchain like Ethereum. https://ethereum.org/en/dao/
Huge thanks to Sarah Hamburg for pointing this out to us!