FAH Non profit conflict of interest

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mdk777

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Hey, all
I know I am not an active member of your forum. I was familiar with some here before I was banned from the FF.(for supporting BIGADV donors)

Anyway, not trying to spam, but I thought you might have an interest in knowing the leadership issues facing FOLDING@HOME. Dr. Pande has taken a job with a venture capital firm while retaining directorship of the FOLDING project. The issues are discussed here in case anyone is interested in exploring them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/foldingathome/comments/4eyg45/inherent_conflict_of_interest/
Best regards
 
AFAIK the folding results are in the public domain and free to use for anyone, they are also basically primary research and the results need to be applied to even begin drug development, until/unless that changes I don't see a problem.

Besides if a drug is made off the back of all this work that might cure some disease that I am diagnosed with at some point in the future I won't give a fuck where the research came from
 
Nathan_P said:
AFAIK the folding results are in the public domain and free to use for anyone, they are also basically primary research and the results need to be applied to even begin drug development, until/unless that changes I don't see a problem.

Besides if a drug is made off the back of all this work that might cure some disease that I am diagnosed with at some point in the future I won't give a fuck where the research came from
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Well, as I mentioned, I am not here to argue or spam.
I think the reddit contains some good information about the venture capital group, Dr. Pande's own description of his work there and some of the companies that they have already invested in.
I encourage everyone to read and see what they think. I see some ethical issues, perhaps others do not. In general, not enough donors participate in the reddit to give anyone a real feel for donor opinion. Hence, why I posted here.
Best regards all.
 
The reddit may as well be a notreddit. As long as PG/Stanford don't profit from it based on what they have publicly stated as their moral stance/goals/viewpoint then I don't see an issue. Question:- Selling to cover costs or selling to make money, covering the costs of the server farm we hammer the crap out of is one thing, actually making money is something else - whats your thoughts?
 
Nathan_P said:
As long as PG/Stanford don't profit from it based on what they have publicly stated as their moral stance/goals/viewpoint then I don't see an issue.
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So, for example, you work for the pentagon...you work 15 years qualify a weapon system...say the F-22 or some high end drone system...after the qualification...you immediately take a job with the winner, Boeing, General Dynamics....whatever.
Have you actually broken any laws? Nope. You retired, and just happened to land a fat job. You are really very qualified...you spent 15 years on the project. There are few who know more about it than you.

However, there is the nagging ethical questions...did the promise of a job influence your decision...did you actually qualify the best system or the one that promised you the biggest payout.

The irony is that no one would try and do both jobs at the same time. It would just be too obvious.

So, my question isn't if the data should be commercialized. Yeah, someone, somewhere, sometime is going to make money off the research we donated. That is a given. My question is that an obvious conflict exists with Dr. Pande doing it while still running the project. Have the decency to at least put some distance, at least the facade of ethical following through on your promise. Nope. Just start doing it and claim that everyone does it...so it must be OK.

PS, they just deleted a thread on the reddit asking about the non-profit tax status ramifications...so you can take that as you will....too close to home?
 
No problem for me. I gave up on F@H, PG and VJ years ago. Got tired of suppling free computer time to post grads so they could further their education. 15 years and nothing but papers.
 
ChelseaOilman said:
No problem for me. I gave up on F@H, PG and VJ years ago. Got tired of suppling free computer time to post grads so they could further their education. 15 years and nothing but papers.
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This is my concern with a lot of projects. I think WCG is about the only project I have seen that has directly linked any real life results to our contributions beyond papers or publishing of Primes. I'm still hopeful, but I think many people these days want a little more return on their contributions. This may be why donors are drying up.
 
Too bad this is going on. I had switched my farm back to F@H a few months ago but now I'm back on BOINC since I was no longer getting WUs with the bigadv flag. What a freakin' mess.
 
ChelseaOilman said:
No problem for me. I gave up on F@H, PG and VJ years ago. Got tired of suppling free computer time to post grads so they could further their education. 15 years and nothing but papers.
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Yeah, but that is pretty much the stated goals.
What I am concerned is that the line between non profit and for profit work has been obliterated!
This is what Dr. Pande posted on the FF:
"This role is very compatible with my role at Andreessen Horowitz; in fact, it is very synergistic, as I benefit greatly from being at the center of cutting edge research in software eating biology (our primary investment thesis) with Folding@home and FAH benefits from my VC ties. Moreover, it’s common for Silicon Valley VC’s to have these sorts of ties"

A defense of "everyone is doing it" hardly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling of assurance.
 
mdk777 said:
Yeah, but that is pretty much the stated goals.
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I fully understand that. I'm guessing there's a lot of people that don't. Then there's the people that get caught up in the points hysteria. WCG is the only project I feel comfortable with that's actually doing some good. Is anyone aware of any outside company using PG papers to produce anything?
 
Pretty much every University has ties with some commercial/governmental entity to utilize their research. Many of which get revenue back from patents and such or are sponsored directly by that entity to help fund the "non-profit" research to begin with. Then they use that research to get a return on that investment. The only real issue here is whether it was ethical for him to be in charge of the non-profit side while "profiting" from that in a commercial area. That would make things a bit more "sketchy" in regards to the goals of the project versus goals of the commercial entity. Is PG now being steered solely for the goals of this company? That is probably the question at hand.
 
Gilthanis said:
Is PG now being steered solely for the goals of this company?
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I think the ethical standard should be a little higher than "solely" .
As some posts on the reddit indicate, simple access to insider information can be a huge advantage for start-ups in getting the first chance at patents.
How does Dr. Pande intend to maintain a firewall between his access to unpublished results? According to his post, he doesn't see any ethical conflict at all.
Millions of donors made donations of their equipment and electricity.
setting up a pipeline of start-up corporations through a venture capital firm to exploit those donations might not be the only purpose....good research might still happen...it is just not ethical to engage in such obviously conflicting priorities....public, open source donor driven research....and exclusionary, patent driven data mining. You just can't wear those two hats and keep the two jobs separate... No saint could keep the two purely separate.

Donors deserve a much higher standard of behavior.
 
mdk777 said:
Yeah, but that is pretty much the stated goals.
What I am concerned is that the line between non profit and for profit work has been obliterated!
This is what Dr. Pande posted on the FF:
"This role is very compatible with my role at Andreessen Horowitz; in fact, it is very synergistic, as I benefit greatly from being at the center of cutting edge research in software eating biology (our primary investment thesis) with Folding@home and FAH benefits from my VC ties. Moreover, it’s common for Silicon Valley VC’s to have these sorts of ties"

A defense of "everyone is doing it" hardly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling of assurance.
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you've not had a warm fuzzy feeling about F@H in a long time
 
Nathan_P said:
you've not had a warm fuzzy feeling about F@H in a long time
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That is true.
However, I used to think it was due to simple neglect, misplaced priorities (researchers having little respect for the donor community)

This compete reversal of the promise to donors to not profit from their donation is news to me.

However, if anyone else has concerns, I guess you will have to keep them to yourselves.
Thread on the reddit is highly redacted and locked now.
 
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In case any one is interested in the details of the investments and their relationship to Dr. Pande, the VC firm and Folding; further detailed discussion and details are at the EVGA forum.
Won't spam by repeating them here. ;)

non profit conflict - EVGA Forums
 
I cant speak for anyone else, but I personally dont care what he does.
I fold for my own reasons, and will continue folding until I no longer have a reason to ..the politics of it all mean nothing to me.
 
mdk777 said:
Thread on the reddit is highly redacted and locked now.
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Why we thought that moderation on the Reddit would differ from that in other similar locations ? The philosophy is the same. But here not the place to discuss, I guess.
 
Crosshairs said:
I cant speak for anyone else, but I personally dont care what he does.
I fold for my own reasons, and will continue folding until I no longer have a reason to ..the politics of it all mean nothing to me.
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Well, I find that people and things tend follow form. If you find someone lies consistently about small things, It is not long before you find they are fabricating or defrauding in a major way.
It would be great if you could trust that your donation is going to the better good, regardless of the administration of a charity...but that seldom is the case. Does it makes you feel good to donate to relief in Haiti, even when you find less than 5 cents on your dollar actually makes it to those in need? Not me. To be satisfied with my donation I need accountability and transparency. I need to see that things are actually going the way intended and described.
So to ChristianVirtual, does censorship matter? Yeah, it is really important if you want honest answers. If you constantly delete and crush questions, doesn't that indicate that you have something you want to avoid disclosing?

These two responses were deleted from Christian Virtual's post on the reddit:
1.

Well, I'm not saying it isn't a logical progression. Rather, I think it is an incompatible, mutually exclusive direction of emphasis. Take any cloud provider, there seems to be a new one announced every day. While FOLDING@HOME might be a logical donation to serve as a proof of concept...to demonstrate the processing power of your equipment...the logical emphasis is to find customers that will PAY for that processing power. Dr. Pande makes a good case for being a facilitator, an incubator for directing companies on how to best capitalize on the abundant cloud infrastructure. This is a fine emphasis for a venture capital firm. It is a logical progression of the work Dr. Pande has done in the past and his insights on how to leverage technology. However, it is the exact opposite of the pure research, collective DONOR driven non-profit distributed compute basis of FOLDING@HOME. There is nothing intrinsically unethical about either approach. However, they are in obvious conflict of interest of trying to pursue both at the same time.

2.

I still can see both approaches existing in parallel: donor-driven/financed basic research and credit-card driven research short before the formulation of a product and clinical trials.

Let me give a historical example. GM invested in mass transit. Now, buses and street cars should be able to augment each other. There is no reason both approaches to public transportation shouldn't be able to exist in parallel. However there are structural conflicts of interest. In one approach, the costs of infrastructure(rail) is born by the company that exists to profit. In the other, the public infrastructure is capitalized/used to make a private profit(bus sales...which do not pay for the road). Needless to say which model GM pushed harder to achieve. So again to be clear, I think on demand bus service today is a highly efficient and clear winner over billion dollar high speed rail boondoggles. However, whatever your opinion of the most cost effective mass transit system...today you would not allow GM to buy controlling interest in a public transit system. The conflict of private and public interest is just so obvious and proven by history.

Now, is there anything off topic or against the reddit rules in those responses?
I think they are balanced, actually assuming that Dr. Pande is acting in good faith, but pointing out that ultimately there is a conflict of interest.

So, my point is that if you(Dr. Pande) find this discussion, this public vetting of "politics" offensive...well, then I find real concern for how you are going to handle much more difficult moral conflicts.

For example:

I see that there is an opportunity to fast track research to my company that by-passes the standard clinical FDA process. I can see that a cure for disease X could be found in 3 years instead of 20...Millions could be saved from a painful disease. However, to pursue, I will need to pass along insider information...it is information that will be public in a few months(well, actually about 3 years after the publishing and peer review takes place) anyway...It will be freely available, and probably no one else will do anything with it anyway.

Now That is a difficult ethically problem !! The question I have is who do you trust to make it. If it is made in secret, if there is no public disclosure or debate, if there is not review or outside oversight...well, I guess we all know which way scales of justice are going to fall.
 
mdk777 said:
Well, I find that people and things tend follow form. If you find someone lies consistently about small things, It is not long before you find they are fabricating or defrauding in a major way.
It would be great if you could trust that your donation is going to the better good, regardless of the administration of a charity...but that seldom is the case. Does it makes you feel good to donate to relief in Haiti, even when you find less than 5 cents on your dollar actually makes it to those in need? Not me. To be satisfied with my donation I need accountability and transparency. I need to see that things are actually going the way intended and described.
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Well, I am a cynic, so I assume any money I donate will be wasted and or stolen by the operators of said charity. . I dont need to feel good for giving someone money, if I decide to donate, when I hand it over I assume its gone..what happens to it is meaningless to me.

Folding for me is no different..I'm not going to pretend I'm doing it for anyone other than me..so if my results make someone some money, I really dont care.

again, this is me, some others may feel differently.
 
Crosshairs said:
Folding for me is no different..I'm not going to pretend I'm doing it for anyone other than me
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But you do it because you have the presumption of some greater good...You would really do it if it turns out that you were bitcoin mining or breaking code for the NSA?

Just to be clear, there are "right answers" in my opinion.
Conflicts of interest are not new, and there are ways to deal with them.

Dr. Pande simply has chosen to pretend that he is somehow exempt.

His statement is nearly identical to the old "what is good for GM is good for America" tone death statement.

He could have said:

yes, there are of course many inherent potentials for conflict of interest and possible exploitation of insider information. In response, Stanford and the PG lab have established the following ethics review board to provide a firewall between my non-profit and for profit activities. My disclosures can be found listed here....the non profit statements and disclosures for PG lab to the IRS are found here...our review board statements and updates are found here...etc. etc. etc.

Of course, the simplest thing would be to turn over directorship of the project to someone who did not have the complex and extensive vertical integration chain of investments and obvious potential to exploit the position for personal profit.

But to say there isn't any reason to do either...well, that falls into your category of just not even making a pretense of caring about ethics.

If you don't care about right and wrong, truth and fraud...well, where does that end.??????
 
I went over the transcript quickly. If I understand correctly Dr. Pande is bringing the f@h knowledge "how to run cloud research" he acquired to commercial startups?
But not the actual research results?
 
He is bring all of his experience and knowledge to a venture capital fund to invest in biology cloud biology research. There is no ethical problem in moving from academia to the world of commercialism. However, they are different places. Patent law and proprietary process knowledge is a huge component of a companies assets, its value, its good will. Samsung and Apple routinely sue each other for billions of dollars, and contest in court for dozens of years.
There is no ethical problem of a drug company sponsoring university research, with a contractual understanding that they will own the proceeds, the Intellectual property that results.

The difficulty is when you claim that you can do both at the same time: You can have direct access to ongoing (donor funded and supposedly open source research) and yet not have it influence your investments in companies that exist only to find and patent products (from open source research)

I have investigated the companies and listed them.(No, Dr. Pande does not go into specifics in his presentation)

A new startup that received a $3.4 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz has developed a method of expediting the process using algorithms.

Palo Alto, CA-based TwoXAR is using computations that are intended to find “unanticipated associations” between drugs and diseases in early stage discovery, the company said in a statement. The company has developed what it says are proprietary algorithms, which are patent pending, to scour public and proprietary datasets that could potentially match drugs with diseases.

TwoXAR says that its platform, which it calls DUMA, can do more than assess data to generate a new drug candidate; it can assess the efficacy of an existing therapeutic, the company says on its website. The technology has been tested on more than 20 diseases to date, TwoXAR says.

“We are working to disrupt the economics of drug discovery and accelerate the delivery of more effective medicines to patients fighting rare and common illnesses,” said Andrew A. Radin, CEO and co-founder of the company.

The funding is being used to develop new and existing partnerships that focus on drug candidates for metabolic and neurological disease, as well as to make hires in its engineering and commercial teams, TwoXAR says. The company currently has seven employees. The investment was joined by the company’s existing investors, CLI Ventures and the Stanford-StartX Fund.

Andreessen Horowitz funded the seed round from a new $200 million bio fund it announced alongside the TwoXAR news. Vijay Pande, a professor of chemistry, computer science, and structural biology at Stanford, is joining the firm as a general partner dedicated to the fund.

TwoXAR was founded in 2014 by Radin—a Stanford grad who developed the algorithms and has been a chief technology officer in previous jobs—and another man with almost the exact same name: Andrew M. Radin, the chief business officer, who is a former venture capital and private equity investor.

The difficulty is when you claim that you can do both at the same time: You can have direct access to ongoing (donor funded and supposedly open source research) and yet not have it influence your investments in companies that exist only to find and patent products (from open source research)

making such a statement is absurd. It does not pass the smell test.
 
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mdk777 said:
But you do it because you have the presumption of some greater good...You would really do it if it turns out that you were bitcoin mining or breaking code for the NSA?

Just to be clear, there are "right answers" in my opinion.
Conflicts of interest are not new, and there are ways to deal with them.

Dr. Pande simply has chosen to pretend that he is somehow exempt.

His statement is nearly identical to the old "what is good for GM is good for America" tone death statement.

He could have said:

yes, there are of course many inherent potentials for conflict of interest and possible exploitation of insider information. In response, Stanford and the PG lab have established the following ethics review board to provide a firewall between my non-profit and for profit activities. My disclosures can be found listed here....the non profit statements and disclosures for PG lab to the IRS are found here...our review board statements and updates are found here...etc. etc. etc.

Of course, the simplest thing would be to turn over directorship of the project to someone who did not have the complex and extensive vertical integration chain of investments and obvious potential to exploit the position for personal profit.

But to say there isn't any reason to do either...well, that falls into your category of just not even making a pretense of caring about ethics.

If you don't care about right and wrong, truth and fraud...well, where does that end.??????
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I dont know how else to explain it..I dont care what he does with the research.


And because I dont care, you question my ethics?


Maybe you should explain why you felt the need to post this here after you hadn't posted in 2 years .
 
Crosshairs said:
And because I dont care, you question my ethics?
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not your ethics, but the logic of your statement.

nihilism just doesn't make sense to me in this context.

I'm not doubting your sincerity. It just doesn't make sense to do something and not care about it at the same time.

Just my opinion.

Regarding, my affiliation:

I had a great deal of respect and correspondence with some your team members over the years. (Tear, Grandpa, etc. etc.)

I hate to see theirs, and current donors contributions compromised.
After following what I once considered merely incompetent management, I now post because the line has been crossed to wholesale corruption of the founding principles.

I find ethics, reputation, following through on promises(whatever you want to call it) really, really matters in life. Good intentions, hope, promise....really are nothing but Disney fantasy without follow-through actions.

Again, just my experience.
 
Stanford was never going to cure anything with FAH. They were never doing to develop new drugs. We are just the super computer powering the growth of knowledge in the field of proteins. Knowledge that can be used by others to actually develop drugs and cure diseases. He can't abuse it as its there for all to use.

There is nothing to compromise. Let it go.
 
mmonnin said:
He can't abuse it as its there for all to use.
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The information never is there for all to use(in the sense of open from inception...the initial process is completely closed).
First it is reviewed by the researchers themselves.
They write papers publishing their interpretation of the results...this can take months to years.
Others only then have to opportunity to review and discuss, and then ask for access to the basic data...

this process has a timeline. this process has an accountability and possession chain...just like any provenance, or evidence handling procedure.

The history of basic research, the history of patent law, the history of honor attribution and doctoral thesis credit is littered with tens of thousands of cases where the process may be, and has been compromised.

Of course it can be compromised.

A great deal of the entire Chinese economy is currently built on stolen technology and "compromised" proprietary process knowledge (stolen corporate intellectual property and information)

If you think insider and fast track information is not used for personal gain, then you simply discount the entire insider trading laws enforced in the United States.

saying there is nothing to compromise is the same as saying the research has no value.

If this is the case, then you should simply not donate as it is a complete waste of electricity.

It is impossible to have it both ways. It is ether one, or the other.
 
In my opinion, this appears to be a conflict of interest on the part of the Panda.

Where I work we are counseled to avoid the "appearance" of conflicts and ethical violations in addition to actual conflicts and ethical violations.

Panda appears, to me at least, to have violated the rules when he has his paws in both worlds.
 
Well, I am really surprised that the other labs and researchers are not concerned.(publicly anyway...perhaps they have asked for his replacement in private)
There was a post asking if anyone had tax expertise, if there were any chance that the non-profit status of the project could be compromised?

This thread was almost immediately deleted from the reddit.

I'll tell you that my CFO is really obsessed with compliance in our self directed retirement plan.
She could care less if I break the rules and am fined or brought up on charges.( the not really caring about my individual actions that Crosshairs references)
She DOES care that the entire plan maintain its tax exempt status, that the investments of others are not jeopardized by the mistakes or intentional abuse by any individual member.

If I were an associate lab, doing pure research and dependent on NIH grants to continue my work, I would be very concerned to not have my status Compromised by the for profit actions of Dr. Pande.
 
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How naive does one have to be to not know that the people involved with this project would one day figure out a way to profit from their involvement with it?

Universities and the people who run them, professors and administrators alike, never do anything for "free". There is always a motivation for some form of compensation.
 
Sure:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

yet for some reason we still apply laws and codes of ethics....seems pointless I know.

But the choice is vigilance or anarchy(individual based corruption) or totalitarianism(state controlled corruption).

Are you advocating for anarchy? totalitarianism?

perhaps there is a middle ground where we hold people accountable to a code of ethics??

Lets not just throw up our hands in fatalistic nihilism.

too much to ask?
 
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The FF has no answer of where the donations come from.
They confirm that PG is under NDA .

Folding Forum • View topic - What Happened to 40 Petaflops?

The problem with this level of secrecy is that highlights how little accountability or transparency the project is willing to supply.
A full 30 PFLOPS of computing power is unaccountable from last year to now.

Now if over 60% of the entire project is "secret", how is anyone to verify that there was not a conflict of interest in the past, or may well be in the future?
Not even knowing the players makes it impossible to know.
There is no need to claim I am trying to manufacture a conspiracy theory. The facts are that we don't even have enough information to even start!!!
Things done completely in secret just don't even come close to meeting the standard of open source and non-profit.
Since it is completely secret, we just have no way to even guess if it is on the level.
 
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In a totally surprising way that thread got closed ... Have not seen that comming. :bag: :rolleyes::whistle:

:facepalm:

Update: should add a :rolleyes: or :whistle:
 
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ChristianVirtual said:
In a totally surprising way that thread got closed ... Have not seen that comming. :bag:

:facepalm:
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yeah both 7IM and Bruce were throwing out red herring. I pointed out that ps3 and bigadv had been discontinued long ago(was not allowed to post). Long term trends and excuses had nothing to do with 30 PFOPS dropping over the last six months. They knew full well the answer. They just wanted to dance around it with credible deniability.

So yeah, I was not surprised.

They do not like answering questions that have implications.

7IM posted on EVGA that is was impossible for there to be any conflict.

I walked him through a dozen direct quotes from Dr. Pande that contradicted every word of his post.

TLDR

They know the conflicts, they know the problems. They simply don't want it to be public knowledge.
Hence, locking threads (soon to be deleted you can be assured) is the only logical response.

PS, I'm sure in their defensive paranoia, they assumed I started the thread...;)
I didn't. They just don't understand that covering up these issues simply hurts the credibility of the project and drives donors away much, much more effectively than any supposed trolling on my part.
 
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Added some thinking on the related Reddit posting, let see how long that stay uncensored /unanswered.
 
Great post and very reasonable.

I know you have always wanted to stay positive and supportive.

However, here is something you have to ask yourself.

When you look at this chart and see 2/22/2014 at 17,590
and then 4/11/2014 at 44,848

Folding@Home Non-Official Statistics

What do you conclude?

Obviously, Dr. Pande knowingly confabulated the two sources. This was not accidental. The choice of reporting cores and cpu rather than running clients is a similar conscious effort at obfuscation.

For the last three years, they have know precisely the amount of large institutional/corporate donation.

I doubt very much that 30 PFLOPS of data is mixed into the general servers. There would be no point and no efficiency.
Those projects had their own dedicated servers and their own dedicated clients, and most likely dedicated internet trunk connection.

So, Bruce saying there would be no way to separate is absurd. They were certainly separate streams in origin and only added together afterwards for publishing/propaganda purpose.
 
Of course they know; data crunching and "interpretation" is their daily job.
 
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BOINC combined - Detailed stats | BOINCstats/BAM!

It is also common knowledge that computer contributions are down across all distributed computing projects, not just Folding@home. Here are two articles about that...
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Perhaps 7im should spend some more time outside of FAH before he puts things to text. You can check a lot of projects out. Donors "might" be down or the addition of new donors "might" be down. But, over all "active" hosts across the BOINC spectrum suggests it is increasing. Some projects may have flatlined for quite some time, but we all know as new hosts are brought in, they typically replace older models. Thus tomorrow's hosts will be more powerful than today's. So, even if the hosts that are "active" stay the same, the processing power is still growing. The great part about the BOINC stats sites is that you can typically get these breakdowns.
 
Well Christian...now we know. Not 17 PFLOPS....actually 87

So only a 5x reporting error.

Oh well, completely ignored your post and simply repeated captain obvious: Anonymous donors ask to be anonymous.

Really? You think?

Didn't see anyone ask that question.
 
Ops, looks like a little rounding error ;)

I think they really need to rework the stats fundamentally. Will it happen ?? Not so sure. At least not in an transparent way.
 
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