September 2022 Update from Good Science Project
Hello from the Good Science Project! Since the last newsletter, a lot has happened.
Our brilliant fellow Eric Gilliam has written two further installments on how the history of MIT provides a great example for how R&D in the US should look going forward. Part 2 is here, and Part 3 is here.
We published a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how much extra science the NIH could fund (for free!) if we could cut the administrative burden in half. It’s a lot—$2 billion a year. Extrapolate to other federal science funding agencies, and we’d be looking at several more billion in actual science per year. That’s what we’re giving up when we let scientists’ time be consumed with endless administrative requirements, even if those requirements are all well-intentioned. Time to take some action here.
We published an interview with Olivia Rissland, a biology professor and former Rhodes Scholar, with many insights on how NIH could be even more effective.
We published a piece with advice for new scientific funders, such as ARPA-H, ARIA (in the UK), the new NSF directorate, etc. The advice is simple: Find ways to vary what you do, and study the results. A simple idea, yet easy to overlook. Leaders at each of these new agencies loved this piece.
We published an interview with Mike Lewis, the director of the UK’s Invention for Innovation Program. He has been working on a “fast grants” initiative there, and we think that funding agencies should explore more opportunities to do likewise.
We published a piece on the false distinction between basic and applied research, with the hope of informing future work at ARPA-H.
In other news, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released guidance by which all federal science funding agencies must require that articles be publicly available for free immediately (the prior standard had been after one year). Moreover, it requires that researchers make data available immediately.
This is a great leap forward, and was widely hailed. Despite the self-interested caterwauling by the publishing sector, this idea has been many years in the making. Indeed, I attended multiple meetings at the White House in the prior administration about this issue. If not for Covid, there would have been an OSTP letter (or even an executive order) at that time.
At the same time, I’d add a cautionary note: Many scientific articles aren’t reproducible or high-quality, and making so much low-quality stuff immediately readable and accessible isn’t necessarily a good thing. We simultaneously need to spend much more time and money on improving scientific reproducibility and innovation. Then we’ll have more scientific articles that are actually worth reading immediately.
A final note: here are some excerpts from a 2014 interview with the great Sydney Brenner. Much to think about:
The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship. I think you can only foster that by having sort of deviant studies. That is, you go on and do something really different. Then I think you will be able to foster it.
But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow the straight and narrow. . . .
Even God wouldn’t get a grant today because somebody on the committee would say, oh those were very interesting experiments (creating the universe), but they’ve never been repeated. And then someone else would say, yes and he did it a long time ago, what’s he done recently? And a third would say, to top it all, he published it all in an un-refereed journal (the Bible). . . .
I have sometimes given a lecture in America called “The Casino Fund”. In the Casino Fund, every organisation that gives money to science gives 1% of that to the Casino Fund and writes it off. So now who runs the Casino Fund? You give it to me. You give it to people like me, to successful gamblers. People who have done all this who can have different ideas about projects and people, and you let us allocate it.
You should hear the uproar. No sooner did I sit down then all the business people stand up and say, how can we ensure payback on our investment? My answer was, okay make it 0.1%. But nobody wants to accept the risk. Of course we would love it if we were to put it to work. We’d love it for nothing. They won’t even allow 1%. And of course all the academics say we’ve got to have peer review. But I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean.
Or from another Brenner speech:
The idea was that everybody who gives money for research takes out 1% or 0.5% and puts it into the Casino Fund – and forgets about it. Who manages the Casino Fund? You give it to successful ‘gamblers’ – people like me [laughs] who can hand it out, and people who have a nose for people and projects. And this is with the full expectation that most of the money will ‘disappear’. But when you do this, all the people in the business will say: “Oh no, we can’t have that because how do we ensure payback?” So I said: “Let’s make it 0.1%.”
But even when I tell them to put 0.1% into this “Casino Fund”, they still would not. Even if they think this might lead to the most successful breakthroughs but yet they are not prepared to do it themselves, to put their money where their mouth is!
You can say to these investors – concentrate on the other 99% of the research funds and do not bother with the 1% in the Casino Fund. But then all the academics will say: “We must have peer review.”
Now, peer review is regression to the mean, and the mean is mediocre. If you have peer review alone, it means you are always going to select the conventional, middle of the road activities – you are thus not going to gamble on big ideas and big breakthroughs.
These days when people write a research grant, it has been said that half of their proposed research has already been done, so they somewhat know the answer already when they submit for a research grant application. That is how a lot of people escape the constraints of the grant funding system. But it is very hard on the younger researchers, because they do not have a reserve of data accumulated or capital which they can invest in future results, and so they would stand less chance of being successfully funded. But some of what is going on in this research grantsmanship is absolutely ridiculous.
Questions:
Could we move towards a science funding system that Sydney Brenner would find acceptable?
If not, why not?