This newsletter covers no fewer than four exciting metascience developments, with huge potential for improving science and medicine at NIH and elsewhere.
My view of the problem with targeted research funding is that it inevitably gets captured by existing interests. Without some outside force causing budgets to increase, they naturally decrease as political pressure leads to belt-tightening and civil servants are rewarded for "saving money" (an extremely shortsighted description, since research funding has one of the best long-term returns on investment) rather than enabling new ideas. Therefore, when the only increases are coming from targeted initiatives, PIs figure out how to rephrase their current research to match the targets. Basically, it's just a waste of everyone's time to do things this way. J. Storrs Hall's book "Where is My Flying Car?" discusses how this happened to the National Nanotechnology Initiative from 2000 (you'll notice that 25 years later, we still don't have nanotechnology), and the same thing is happening now for AI, quantum, etc.
The solution is simple: a dollar for dollar match between targeted funding and general unrestricted research funding. But simple doesn't mean easy: doing this would require discipline and consistency from both funding agencies and Congress, and those are not in abundant supply.
My view of the problem with targeted research funding is that it inevitably gets captured by existing interests. Without some outside force causing budgets to increase, they naturally decrease as political pressure leads to belt-tightening and civil servants are rewarded for "saving money" (an extremely shortsighted description, since research funding has one of the best long-term returns on investment) rather than enabling new ideas. Therefore, when the only increases are coming from targeted initiatives, PIs figure out how to rephrase their current research to match the targets. Basically, it's just a waste of everyone's time to do things this way. J. Storrs Hall's book "Where is My Flying Car?" discusses how this happened to the National Nanotechnology Initiative from 2000 (you'll notice that 25 years later, we still don't have nanotechnology), and the same thing is happening now for AI, quantum, etc.
The solution is simple: a dollar for dollar match between targeted funding and general unrestricted research funding. But simple doesn't mean easy: doing this would require discipline and consistency from both funding agencies and Congress, and those are not in abundant supply.