Money and science

To he that hath

America’s National Institutes of Health may not support the best researchers

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After reading this article, I have to concord that the author simply does not understand Science.

Science is not democracy and it is not economics. Science is about pushing the boundaries of human understanding. And that often means shattering the existing paradigm and building a new one in its place. Seminal papers either start out controversial as in they get attacked by people with a stake in the existing paradigm or they are left to gather dust on the shelves for years before being truly appreciated for what it is. Therefore the quality of a paper is subjective at the time of its inception and can only be accurately gauged retro-actively.

Reducing the quality of a paper to an index based on citations slows down scientific progress by promoting complacency. When the funding to each scientist correlates to the number of papers and the number of citations on each paper, each scientist will be incentivised to write incremental discoveries based on existing paradigm instead of truly revolutionary ones.

We as a society need to appreciate science as what it is. We should be funding science not because of some immediate benefit we might receive from it but as a mechanism to advance our perspective nations and our specie as a whole. Science is a series of trials and errors it is a whole bunch of small discoveries punctuation by a few really big ones. It is like solving a jigsaw puzzle only every time when we are about the complete the final piece the whole puzzle gets reshuffled and we are left to start again at a higher level. When these really big discoveries occur, we need to celebrate it as it signals our advancement as a civilization. We also need to celebrate the scientists that made it possible so that the brightest minds from the future generations will continue in their foot steps instead of selling derivatives to unsuspecting pension fund managers or get wasted on reality TV shows.

From a policy perspective, the bureaucrats need to understand the best way to direct scientists is the scientific community itself. Instead of giving external mandates which distort the allocation of talent, the government should allow grant competitions by institutions based on historic excellence and peer evaluation at an international level. Individuals who made significant discoveries should be promoted based on scientific excellence, managerial skills and acceptance of dissenting views. The goal of any policy initiative should place the rate of revolutionary advancements at higher importance than the rate of incremental advancements.


As an author of physics articles, I can only agree with the content of this article. I have often been the first author of a long string of wannabee "authors" for articles I had written alone about results and ideas I had come up with by myself. However this is the snag: to get published you need the authorisation + funding (around 2000$) from your boss, whatever the institution you are in. It would help if the journals stopped asking ridiculous fees for publishing articles and/or if researchers could get the fees covered automatically by their institution as long as their article is accepted. In one institution (the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland) abuse was so rampant, they actually had to put out a code of conduct saying you are not allowed to be an author if you had nothing to do with the article.
Wow. Now that's what I call a discovery.

Giant Tortoise iawmaij

Scientists are humans. There are no possible ways to change the peer review process that eliminates "human problems" (favouritism, corruption, bias) will be there. The goal is to manage the problem instead of trying to eliminate it.
A rather unusual cause of the peer review process that may not easily evident to outsider is time. Reviewing papers and research proposal take a lot of time, most people who are career scientists are already busy with their own work and also family that sometimes time to properly review good science is not there. So some apparent favouritism to persons belong to specific research groups is not necessary of wrong intent - it is simply the reviewer going to safer hands because there are limited time to critically review each single proposal and paper. Again, start rewarding scientists their time to do good peer reviews are not without pitfalls - in fact it opens a new possible corruption if money exchanges hand for doing peer review. Another way to manage the above problem is to have more collective calls for proposals and papers so comparisons between papers and proposals are easier (and that is already being done).
Really there are no simple way out of all of this. Things are NOT too broken right now, so one must be careful that the fixes won't make the situation worse.


I agree that the whole science industry is full of flaws and needs deep reforms that we will not see. But finding a magic parameter to evaluate the quality of the work is not possible. Giving money to those with the highest number of citations seems arbitrary and a popularity contest; capitalistic ideas applied to research money. I feel like it somehow resembles the ideas behind finance: invest money in finance and you will get a lot of money. Possibly, but it will be paper money, without anything real behind it. Just as you will get empty citations. They should think harder.


From my experience, when it comes to government scientific funding agencies, it's most important to remember that they are governmental, not scientific, and thus political. They tend to award researchers who, in their applications, propose flashy, "this will cure all cancer and save all starving children simultaneously!" type proposals, even if there is no realistic prospect of attaining it through their research. The rewards go to those scientists who can produce well written, exciting-sounding proposals plus have the right background. Scientists who produce more realistic proposals (based on scientific assessment) will have a tougher time because realistic is often boring.


NIH struggling to keep up? Who would've known? *snicker*

But seriously, kudos for them on seeing their problems and attempting to correct them to stretch out those dollars.

Always a supporter of basic science myself, and I fully realize a vast majority of it will be more or less wasted on projects that don't work out.

That is the nature of basic (and sometimes not so basic) science research. Everyone loves to talk about the successes, but the failures are just as important.


After 30 creativity becomes zero. This has been proved. After 30 you are dead as far as fundamental discoveries are concerned.
Hence for best results, investment should be on 20-30 year olds.
How do you separate the chaff from the grain?
Research should be done on how to isolate the best young ones.

Go Go

I know of a researcher who had a paper that was cited by three papers each with over 800 citations that were considered seminal in their field. The researcher in question, however, generally held unpopular positions and called a quack. With the passage of time lo and behold that researcher is looking more and more correct and was ahead of the field in no less than three separate issues. How would such a researcher have fared in this study?

There is great value in an alternative viewpoint, more so when the conventional viewpoint is yielding disappointing results. Perhaps benchmarks for success should be established and in areas which greatly underperform, an impetus to try other conceptual models should be built-in.

J. Kemp

NIH funding, if it were venture capital, would underperform even the not-very-impressive performance of American venture capital.


Because social networks, socially acceptable areas of spend, and socially dominant researchers develop and emerge in the NIH funding world, as do popular causes and pathways which, upon becoming "in vogue", will continue to pull funding in disturbing disproportion to their objective scientific merits. It's not so different from how the "in crowd" keeps getting invited to the more important social functions in town.

The biggest winners in venture capital in America have been shown to have produced their largest absolute returns from this combination of two ingredients:

- their smallest absolute investments, and
- their areas of deepest curiosity, inquiry and insight into new frontiers

America's NIH, invests in "fashion trends" in research, not in game-changing, disruptive opportunities. If anything, NIH funding assiduously avoids backing potentially "disruptive" endeavors which might offend the "established" funding recipients -- to the detriment of the NIH's outcomes and all Americans whose money is doled out by the NIH.

Connect The Dots

The three technology breakthroughs of the decade that made an economic impact are:
1. Fracking
2. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
3. Mobile Smart Phones/Mobile Computing/ Apps
Together their federal research budget was less than the AIDs vaccine trial which went nowhere.
Or consider Federal investment in Corn Ethanol or Switch Grass.
Or Federal investment in Fusion technology.
Or Federal investment in global warming mitigating technologies.
These were developed largely without government assistance such as UAV pioneer Abe Karem who built drones in his garage in Los Angeles which eventually lead to the Predator aircraft.
Fracking was pioneered by drilling firms in Texas.
Apple built the smart phone. IT started in a Silicon Valley garage with two guys named Steve.
It is very difficult to pick winners.
Las Vegas single number roulette is easier.
The government is too bureaucratic to be nimble.
Smart ideas more often come from single individuals tinkering in their garages.
Perhaps the National Science Foundation should invest in more garages.

LanceSmith in reply to Connect The Dots

Unfortunately, your making a classic blunder. You are looking at end or improved products/processes and believing they appeared out of thin air. Science doesn't work that way. Those three items were built on technologies that originally came out of government and government sponsored labs. After all, the communication protocols, processors, basic geology, etc...etc...etc. are all built on research that started in some sort of basic research lab. These ideas were then taken out of the lab, expanded upon, improved, etc. Very little if anything invented today grew in a vacuum.

"It is very difficult to pick winners."

I couldn't agree many VCs, angles, etc invested in companies and technologies that absolutely went no where? We often say that out of any 10 startups only one will be a big winner....two others might make you a little money...and the rest will die. And yet we investors still invest and take chances (as we should).

While you are correct that government does a bad job in picking ultimate winners, there are also many ways to measure what a "winner" really is. Very often in science we don't see a "product" for years if not decades....yet without the work we do today you would never see that product many years down the road! In science we must have the long view and not be so arrogant to believe that we already know everything.

Ultimately, this argument doesn't need to be either/ the end of the day BOTH public AND private investment are crucial for our advancement as a society. They both have a place when it comes to technological development and certainly basic research. To suggest otherwise is a pure ideological argument.


The payline (% of proposals funded) for new projects submitted by established investigators is down around 5 percentile at some NIH institutes (it used to be 20 or above). Assuming that ~20% of all projects are equally worthy of funding, it is apparent that niceties of grantsmanship, political factors and the prevalence of current fads, and not the best science, will determine who wins the NIH sweepstakes. It's also worth pointing out that the NIH raises the payline for social reasons, such as for projects that get undergraduates involved in research, a worthy goal, but not related to promoting the best science.

LanceSmith in reply to bozzi

There's a lot of truth to that. It is also disconcerting that very many of the scientists I work with every day are considering getting out of science because the terrible funding levels. When you join the terrible funding levels in the public sector and the absolute evisceration of science positions in the private sector (e.g. pharma), I weep for our future.

We are well on our way to having some of the best educated burger flippers and baristas on Earth! Talk about a waste of talent....


What about papers that are highly cited, but later disproven? Don't they show the researchers' self-promotional skills rather than acumen?

And wouldn't a better measure be who gets funding _before_ they publish a highly-cited paper, rather than who gets funding _after_ they publish a highly-cited paper? Any fool can assign funding on the basis of reputation, especially if we use citations as a proxy for reputation, but it would take real insight to decide what projects are likely to produce important research.

I should tend to think that such weaknesses call into question the whole competitive grants system in the first place. It seems designed to beggar most scientists, and starve most questions of funds.

Hindumuninc in reply to Shakesguy

Especially if those papers are only being cited by papers that are refuting them as wrong: "So-and-so says A, but our new research says B."
That guy who claimed vaccines cause autism probably got cited in a lot of papers as real scientists did research to discredit his fake study.


One thing I learned from reading hundreds of research paper is that they will always conclude more research is needed. Rarely do they offer a definitive conclusion

Dr Tutoricus

Referring to the point about how many published scientific papers turn out to be wrong, I note that this almost never happens in accounting research. The problem is neatly avoided by automatic disqualification of so-called "replication" studies from publication in the respectable accounting journals. Once in a while authors, prodded by journal editors, do retract their own papers, but that is a fairly rare event.


The greater similarity of successful proposals by study-section primary authors to the successful proposals of others could also suggest that participation in the review process gives those researchers a superior understanding of how to present their ideas in order to win over reviewers.


Scientists would tend to align and interact more with other scientists whose works they like and respect. The only way to reduce the emergence of a buddy network that precludes new talent from accessing funds, is to have a selection panel that is a deliberately spread choice of scientific philosophy on that subject.



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