In certain fields such as music, sports, fashion, and beyond, NFTs have been a hot topic. Now, the University of California Berkeley is eyeing to fund research by way of two NFTs. At the heart of “biomedical breakthroughs,” NFTs have been a pillar of a variety of upcoming projects and firms. This news came on 28-May-2021. 

Splendid Minting- 

In a declaration on the UC Berkeley website today, the university shared that two Nobel-Prize winning developments will be up for bidding. The NFTs will involve internal forms and correspondence centered on research that led to two ground-breaking biomedical advances. 

Out of the two NFTs, captioned ‘The Fourth Pillar’, has been issued on Foundation and will be registered in a 24-hour auction as primary as Wednesday, June 2nd. The NFT denotes an invention about cancer immunotherapy established by UC Berkeley’s Jim Allison. Allison’s finding shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The term is driven from immunotherapy fetching the ‘fourth pillar of cancer therapy, together with radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy. 

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The second NFT, however, to be minted, will identify UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna for her 2020 Nobel in Chemistry. It was centered nearby CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The informational announcement has marked that the university will remain to hold the applicable patents surrounding the research. 

The proceeds from the Foundation auction will go near funding innovative research and education. It was with a share going precisely to UC Berkeley’s blockchain innovation hub and student group, ‘Blockchain at Berkeley’. The university has also been involved in blockchain through other means, such as the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator. 

The university will also take a share of the profits and assign them towards carbon offsets to remove the energy costs of minting the NFT. Though, to Lyons and the Berkeley team, there looks to be a bit of attraction in that sense; “people give us donations all the time because they care about the institution and the science, so here is a way for somebody to invest in the institution in a slightly different way”, Lyons said.