The New York Times has a long, important article about the influence of the rich on the conduct of science.
Here’s the pull quote:
“For better or worse,” said Steven A. Edwards, a policy analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shaped less by national priorities or by peer-review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money.”
Among other things, the article links the somewhat surprising decision of the American government to create the BRAIN Initiative to the interests of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who created the Allen Institute out of his own personal interest in neuroscience. It also points out that there is a lot of interest by the super-rich in, wait for it, curing cancer and other diseases.
I can’t help but think about filmmaker Jim Cameron going to the deepest point in the ocean. Cameron was able to do it because he had a lot of money, so he went instead of working scientists. Are we moving back to a time when only the rich get to be scientists? I hope not.
A super quick reaction is that this is another reason why I think science crowdfunding is important. When lots of people can pool their resources to support research projects, it could be a democratizing counter to single rich people setting the research agenda.
This morning, I got a survey from the Chronicle of Higher Education about flat research funding.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is working on an article about how cuts in federal support for scientific research are affecting university labs. We are asking principal investigators like you to tell us if budget pressures have influenced the kinds of research you do, how your lab is staffed, and how you advise young scientists.
Actually, there are no questions about that last one in the survey I got. This is interesting, because I think it’s critical. There is this big drumbeat from people not in science (politicians, administrators) to get people into STEM degrees, but we don’t necessarily know what scientists tell students.
Here’s what I wrote in the freeform section in reply to the question, “Please describe any specific problems or challenges that have stemmed from flat or declining financing for research.”
I’ve been criticized for saying that I have not had serious problems from flat or declining funding.
Flat and declining funding has not affected me because I have never had much funding. I have been largely overlooked by funding agencies. I realized years ago that if I was to have a productive scholarly career, I was going to have to find ways to produce papers without grants.
Consequently, the research I do is cheap, and my lab can run on minimal funding. I’ve also successfully experimented with crowdfunding.
Some other researchers have been critical when I say things like this, because they see it as undermining the cause for federal research funding. This is like worrying about the blood loss from a mosquito bite in a patient with gunshot wound through major arteries.
The survey is anonymous, but I’m not one to lose a few paragraphs of potential blog material. ;)
Photo by James Jordan on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
The symposium, co-organized with Kelly Weinersmith, will take place at the next SICB meeting in Austin this January.
But wait! There’s more!
We are also holding an associated workshop, “Parasites and links to host phenotype.”We want to help share skills between parasitologists, neurobiologists, ethologists, ecologists, each of whom have skills relevant to understanding how parasite manipulate host behaviour. We will be getting some help from the American Society of Parasitologists with this.
This SICB meeting is shaping up to be great, so don’t miss it!
“What’s good for us us is good for society as a whole. So you should fund us. If there’s no funding for us, there will be doom! DOOM, I tell you!”
Hm, there’s an argument that I don’t think politicians will have heard, other than always.
But that seems to be where arguments over American science funding are stopping these days. Honestly, this is an improvement, given that we finally seem to be reaching the point where scientists are realizing that writing more and better grants faster is not going to be the solution to their woes. As Mike the Mad Biologist noted:
Rather than viewing (funding) as a problem requiring political mobilization, the gradual nature of the crisis has led to scientists to run that much faster, write even more grants, and view failures as personal failures, not systemic ones.
So scientists are starting to warn people about how bad sequestration is for science. People are sending this message that the U.S. is hurting this generation of scientists, long-term research projects, drive talent away, cause brain drain...
But...
Politicians are used to people walking in with hat in hand, claiming that what Group X does benefits the common good. They are used prognostications of doom. Much more serious
ones. Predictions don’t get much more dire than climate change, which
has produced almost zero political action in the United States. And the
political climate is not friendly to spending right now.
But there are not many suggestions that I have seen from out in the scientific community besides “Bring back the money.” Fred Grinnell deserves some credit for trying to start a conversation about how the scientific community should be pushing for structural changes in funding. Among his suggestions are proportional funding instead of “first past the post, all or none,” not funding salaries, and looking at “bang for the buck.”
The party may be over. Asking for things to go back to how they were seems based more in wishful thinking than anything else.
Although (Niedernhofer) is continuing her ageing research with her three postdocs, she has a new standard question she asks before hiring them: will they consider only academic research as a job? “I can’t guarantee that they will get that,” she says, “and I don’t want to be the one to break their hearts.”
There is just so many presumptions built into that statement.
First, there’s the presumption that academia is the One True Career Path. There’s the implication that anything else is a failure. Why else would it be viewed as “heartbreaking” to not get an academic job?
Second, there’s the presumption that somehow, having trouble getting an academic career is a new thing, when the stats have shown for years that most people who get doctoral degrees don’t go into academia. Academia is the “alternative career,” and has been for a long time. This situation didn’t start with sequestration, and won’t end if every federal science funding agency got a 10% budget increase. It won’t end if every federal science funding agency had its budget double.
It’s always good to ask people you’re hiring about their career aspirations. But if this is a good question today, it would have been even better if people had started asking it ten years ago or more.
Additional, 13 September 2013: See Scicurious’s take on the pressures of “academia or bust.”
Everyone agrees that peer-reviewed assessment of scientific articles is important. But sometimes it seems that everyone wants it to be somebody else’s problem.
Readers – many scientists, journalists, tenure committees – want it to be the journals’ problem.
Editors want it to be the reviewers’ problem.
Funding agencies want it to be the panels’ problem.
Administrators want it to be the external reviewers’ problem.
Reviewers complain about being inundated with review requests and want it to be other reviewers’ problem.
Almetrics people want it to be the cloud’s problem.
And not just somebody else’s problem, but it has to be the right somebody else. Witness the harumphing and frowning and kvetching about “appropriate channels” when papers get criticized on the blogosphere.
Base load or baseline power comes up in most discussions about energy and energy policy. The baseline is the amount of power that must be available at any and all times. You need something that can generate power constantly.
The argument from base load power is typically used to argue that we must pursue nuclear power and not renewables like wind and solar. Wind and sun are not constant, so therefore not dependable enough for base load power generation.
But base load power generation has problems. They put lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (e.g. coal), or depend on unevenly distributed resources that are difficult to transport and require expensive initial outlays (e.g., nuclear). And despite these problems, we can’t seem to get off these, particularly fossil fuels. So we get projects like the Keystone XL pipeline project and mountaintop removal mining.
I get a very similar vibe when I hear a lot of people talking about crowdfunding. There are a lot of concerns about whether crowdfunding science is “sustainable” (which obviously has a very different meaning than in energy). It is the same argument as base load power: people want there to be some stable funding that they can always count on.
For science in the United States and many other countries, the base load funding has been from federal government agencies. But like energy, base load funding has problems. Getting money is time consuming. Worse, it’s arguably falling below the minimum to keep things running efficiently. And sometimes it feels like everyone will just keep trying to work the same system instead of trying to establish any new ones.
In energy, many conclude that regardless of how you deal with the base load problem, there needs to be a portfolio of energy options. No, wind can’t do it alone... but in some places, maybe it can do a lot. In some places, solar might make more sense, in other places, geothermal may be an option. And they may all have to be built in concert with nuclear or something that can address the base load.
We should view crowdfunding in science like we do wind power in energy. It’s one part of a range of options for funding science. It won’t work equally well for every lab. But it shouldn’t be denigrated because of that. Because it won’t work for everything does not mean it won’t work for anything.
It is true that we still need to see more examples of projects brought to fruition because of crowdfunding. These things take time. But Alex Warneke will be presenting a poster with this on it:
It’s a good start.
P.S.— I started writing this post before I learned of a crowdfunded science project that raised one million dollars.
Additional: #SciFund has now racked up its first peer-reviewed paper! This is a huge milestone. I can’t wait to see more crowdfunded research hitting the journal pages.
After a morning of debating the potential of crowdfunding on Twitter, and trying to write a tough post about being left behind and reinvention, this talk just brought so much clarity.
“Is this sustainable? What about donor fatigue? What about people not funding the Very Important Research?” I’ve answered a lot of those kinds of questions, but Amanda’s talk reminded me, powerfully, that those are just... details. I should be crowdfunding, for the same reason I blog: to share.
Thank you, Amanda, for the reminder of our mission as I look forward to the next round of #SciFund.
Earlier, Science magazine asked, “How will #sequestration affect you?” In response, I tweeted this picture:
And I said:
I’ve had to build research program without regular funding. #sciquester makes little difference to me.
Yes, it’s glib and impolitic. The scientific community wants everyone to present a united front on research funding. Yes, sequestration cannot be good for the scientific enterprise in the United States.
The question was about how the sequester would affect me personally, but some reactions from people who wanted to talk more about the prospects for sequestration and research generally. Indeed, a lot of the reactions being compiled at the Science Now website here are comments about general policy decision, and not reactions from individual researchers about how they personally will be affected.
But... damn it, I’m so tired. I am so tired of being marginalized in these conversations. I am so tired of the theme of “imminent crisis.” I am so tired of the lack of awareness that a lot of scientists got left behind by the funding agencies long ago.
I look around my department, where nobody regularly gets the stand alone research grants that are the bread and butter at a lot of places. It’s certainly not for lack of trying, but there’s history and infrastructure issues that are hard to beat. We have been mostly running on training grants (because we have a lot of Hispanic students). We’re doing research, and I’m proud that we’ve kept the wheels turning without the sort of federal research grants that has so many of my peers in a panic over losing.
Personally, if you’d asked me when I started this job if I thought that I’d be able to get grants for my research, I’d have said, “I think it’ll take me a few tries, but I think I can do it.” Well, that hasn’t happened. So I’ve had to re-invent myself, my expectations, everything, from almost the ground up. It’s been a decade-long battle to redefine myself as a scientist. I’m still not done.
But, to paraphrase Gunny Highway (Clint Eastwood) in Heartbreak Ridge:
Reinventing yourself professionally is long, and hard, and it sucks. So if you’re worried about the effects of sequestration on your lab... you might want to start that project now.
Additional: It was pointed out to me on Twitter that some of the undergraduate training grants I mention are supported by federal funds. Yes, and they could well be affected by sequestration. The point I was fumbling to make was that in our department, we developed ways to support research that didn’t revolve around individual research grants. Those individual research grants are, as far as I have seen, seen as much more desirable than undergraduate training grants at a lot of universities.
For example, when I had one undergraduate training grant, I went to a meeting of PIs holding those grants in biology. Several people from major research universities griped that their faculty didn’t want to participate in those program unless there was summer salary for the faculty. Contrast that to my experience, which is that we want those training grants badly, because they truly allow us and our students to get stuff done.
Just another example of different perspectives. Which one gets heard more often in these sorts of discussions?
(By the way, the line in the picture was a reference...)
Among young people, science is cool again. Science was cool after Sputnik a whole generation-and-a-half ago, maybe that's two generations by now ago. But we are again at a time where there are TV shows, at least in the United States, which hinge on the scientists figuring things out, the profile of the nerdy intellectual, whether male or female, is often the one in these stories that saves the day. The sad part would be if this resurgence of interest in science among young people coincides with an age of austerity where we’re not able to give them the career opportunities to let their creativity come into play and make these important new discoveries.
Press is right to be concerned. He was speaking at his society’s recent annual meeting in Boston. As it happens, in conversation with individuals who went to Boston to that meeting, the lessons they learned from being at the meeting were:
Do not, under any circumstances, do a Ph.D.
Nobody in the grad school or post-doc stage is happy with their supervisor.
To add one more anecdote, I’ve seen another student who got involved in research early in her undergraduate career... and is already prepared to get out. This is someone who is super excited, superb in the lab, loves the research. She is getting rewarded by being worked like a dog (because she’s good at what she does). She’s seeing up close the stress of labs chasing biomedical research funding.
I see all the effort that is going into telling students, “Go into STEM!” Yeah. The brightest and most engaged students are going to be the one who figure out how much craziness and stress is going into chasing money to keep labs afloat. And they’ll leave.
First, last Friday, I was at a meeting of coordinators for our university’s graduate programs. Our vice-president for academic affairs was talking about the university’s plans to expand their graduate offerings. Why do we want more graduate programs, particularly doctoral programs?
He said, roughly, “We’ve managed to get some funding from agencies like NIH and the NSF. But there’s a lot of programs that we don’t qualify for because we don’t have doctoral programs.” (That’s not a direct quote, but I remember him specifically mentioning those two agencies.)
Second, a few weeks ago, I was in discussion with someone who was in charge of a a fairly new Ph.D. program in biology (not medical biology). He said that they were going to conduct searches for four new faculty members... whose main responsibility would be to write successful grant proposals to support their doctoral students.
It’s been rare to see such naked admissions that institutions see graduate students and faculty as cash cows.
At the program level, this could well be one reason why we have an over-supply of Ph.D.s in the job market now.
The latter might bother me even more. To hear that indicates to me
that those poor souls are going to be evaluated for tenure just on
whether they can raise money. That is not supposed to be what academia
is about. Students, if you wonder why your professor is an incoherent
teacher... this may be why. In a situation like that, why would you
invest any time more than the bare minimum needed?
If you’re an advanced graduate student or post-doc, you might not want to fret about landing that glamour mag publication as much as you should be writing grant proposals at every opportunity. Federal agencies, state agencies, scientific societies.
Additional: I like this translation of academic speak by Dr. 24 Hours:
“Establish an Independant Research Program” = Get Grant Money or You're Fired.
Why aren’t scientists rewarded for outreach? As Scicurious and Kate Clancey’s posts yesterday.point out, academics are pushed hard to do research, and are frantically busy people as a result. But why are they pushed so hard to do research in particular?
To answer that, we have to examine some deeply embedded structures.
Probably many people who have a passing familiarity with science or universities know that in the United States, much research is supported by grants from the federal government. What is less well known is this aspect of grants that are variously called “overhead” or “indirect costs (IDC).”
If I write a grant, I estimate how much the research project will cost me and write up a budget. I put in salary for students, costs of supplies, travel, and maybe some money to pay publication charges when the work is done.
I get a total. A nice, even, $50,000, say. Then, the university takes that total and adds overhead costs to it. Suddenly, the cost goes from $50,000 to $75,000 or even more. Typically, the bigger and swankier the university, the bigger the proportion of overhead.
Overhead is supposed to ensure that the institution supplies the researcher basic infrastructure. The phrase I’ve sometimes heard is that overhead helps to ensure the university “keeps the lights on.”
I do not know how or when the practice of including overhead in grants began. But I think it’s had some bad effects, which were probably not intended.
Overhead changes the dynamic in play for research tremendously. Because it gives institutions a particular kind of financial stake in research outcomes, and that twists the focus away from productivity towards profitability.
Let’s say you have two researchers. Both are publishing papers at the same rate. One person does mostly expensive bench research, the other is more a theoretician. Overhead makes it almost inevitable that the first person will be more valued because they bring in more dollars to the university, regardless of the relative amount or quality of the scholarship.
Overhead may be the root cause of the relentless push from university administration for their faculty, particularly new faculty in the tenure process, to do almost nothing but research.
Overhead distorts the way administrators measure research success: not by papers, or citations, or any other sort of measure, but by dollars. I’ve read more than once that some universities are outsourcing their tenure decisions to grant agencies. Didn’t get a grant? You’re fired. (Never mind that the proportion of grants getting funded at most agencies is at all-time low.) This can trump being a productive researcher by any other measure, like publishing papers. That pushes teaching off the radar, and outreach even further away.
Overhead creates perverse disincentives for particular kinds of funding. When we did a Google Plus hangout on crowdfunding last week, we talked for just a few second about how universities were not likely to support crowdfunding because they don’t get a big cut of the money raised. So you have this weird situation that institutions can be actively discouraging their faculty from pursuing money to do research – in a time when everyone is gasping for ways to support research – because the university wants money.
Now, I am sympathetic to the institutions and administrators. Finances are bad for a lot of universities. Pushing faculty as hard as you possibly can to get grants that bring in money is entirely rational, particularly given declining support, particularly public universities.
Overhead solves some problems, but has created others. And it’s so deeply embedded into the current granting structure in the United States that it’s hard to envision how it could be extricated or reformed. But it does not have to be that way. In Canada, it used to be that every nickel of a research grant went to the researcher (not sure if that’s still true). This was possible because there was greater provincial support to the universities.
It’s not surprising that others think I should have posted:
Posts about this are on Oikos Blog and Culture of Science. Jamie Vernon started an interesting exchange earlier today on Twitter on this subject. Over the month, I plan to try to develop a sort of science crowdfunding manifesto to address some of the issues others are concerned about.
It occurred to me that the Oikos Blog post was responding to what I said in just that one single blog post. But I realized that I’ve been slowly developing arguments for crowdfunding for years. Eventually, I want to write a longer and more cohesive argument, but for now, here is a short summary of some main points that I’ve been writing about over the last five (!) years, with links to my older posts.
My arguments are these.
Scientific funding in many nations have become extremely dependent on external funding, mainly federal governments. Competition for these grants have gotten ferocious.
We have to face the very real possibility that rates of federal funding are never going to go back up; at least, not by the amount scientists think would be sustainable.
Even if industry still had skin in the game (not as much as they used to), there are legitimate concerns with industry funding of science. The track record of dealing with conflicts of interest arising from industry money are... not good.
Given those conditions, those who have been successful at establishing research (the tier one research universities) are going to fight like hell to make sure they continue to get most of that money.
Consequently, there could be a Balkanization of research, with certain kinds of institutions and research being disparaged as “low quality,” which effectively squeezes them out of the picture and prevents them from making scholarly contributions.
There’s a lot of damn good science that is cheap and possible right now. It doesn’t need new theories, conceptual breakthrough, or new technologies. It just needs “boots on the ground” and a little money to grease the wheels.
That’s it! I need MY OWN Science Benefactor/Sponsor/Sugar Daddy what have you. There are sciencey things I must do & see but I needz $$$
It struck me that so many scientists are still in the place artists were. We’re waiting to be chosen. Waiting to be given permission. Working and working and working in the hope of being given a shot at the big time by someone else with more money, power, and influence.
Traditionally, this has been the way science got done. Originally, men of letters sought out patrons. In the Victoria era, science was the domain of the wealthy. As science became professionalized in the last century, grant agencies became talent scouts, trying to guess who would be successful in the future.
It doesn’t always have to be that way now.
It’s just matter of time before some researcher breaks through with a massive science crowdfunding project. It probably won’t be me, but that doesn’t matter. We saw a hint of it in Round 1 of SciFund, with the success of the “Killer Ks”, Kristina Killgrove and Kelly Weinersmith. Looking at the SciFund projects in both rounds, it seems there is a niche for projects that would be difficult to get running through more traditional funding mechanisms, but that might be able to thrive on crowdfunding. For example, Matt Shipman provides a great example of how hard it is to get funding to do research on bed bugs.
Those are reasons why I’m more pleased than ever that SciFund is back. It’s hosted once again by the fine folks at RocketHub, and there are a whole mess of projects for you to support!
My own project is Beach of the Goliath Crabs, which you can read about here.
For Google Plus users, I’ll have a hangout about this project on Wednesday, 2 May at 3:00 pm Central time (4:00 pm Eastern, 1:00 pm Pacific). You can find my G+ profile here.
The future of science is starting now. Be part of something great.
Earlier this week, I wrote about an article that claimed it’s too difficult to be a non-conforming researcher with new ideas because funding agencies are too conservative. I was gobsmacked that the author seemed to pick a case of HIV denial as an example of an “out of the box” idea that was worthy of pursuing rather than dismissing. This is doubly surprising when you consider that HIV research gives such a great example of the power of incremental research.
There is no cure for AIDS.
There is no vaccine for HIV.
But treatment has improved significantly.
I remember when nobody knew about AIDS. When I was in grad school, CBC Vancouver made the Dr. Peter Diaries, a series of documentaries of a physician who had AIDS. I remember how you could see his condition deteriorating as the diary progressed.
I’m sure that people in the HIV field (which I am not) can point to important papers in the development of those treatments. But from my point of view as an outsider, the overall pattern is one of a lot of researchers making many contributions. And it’s extraordinary to think that we’ve gone from a standing start to understanding and some degree of management in only part of an adult’s lifetime.
Naysayers are free to argue, of course, alternative histories where we gave money to non-conforming scientists with more daring ideas, and we’d have a cure, a vaccine, unlimited rice pudding, et cetera, et cetera. But this is speculative historical fiction, like, “What if Hitler won World War II?” It’s a fun hypothetical conversation, but it isn’t evidence.
It’s too hard to do groundbreaking science. Nicholson, who self identifies as a student (though what level is not clear), argues in forthcoming paper in BioEssays that the reason it’s hard to do original science is all because of how science is funded.
As it stands, our current system may work well in weeding out technically flawed proposals and advancing incremental work, yet truly novel ideas will rarely be funded or even tolerated.
This is not a particularly new insight. I’ve written about it from time to time; see here. I think we disagree on the value of incremental work, though. I think most scientific progress comes from incremental work, while Nicholson seems to think we get progress from “out of the box” thinking. Nicholson asks:
If, historically, most new ideas in science have been considered heretical by experts, does it make sense to rely upon experts to judge and fund new ideas?
It is true that some now accepted ideas in science were disputed at first, but Nicholson does not seem to consider that not every “novel idea” is ultimately vindicated. Case in point:
The emphasis on being liked by the scientific community as a prerequisite to survive as a practicing scientist subsequently limits critical exchange in science. This is the case with Peter Duesberg who went from a prestigious 7-year outstanding investigator grant from the NIH to grant-less ever since because he questioned the role of oncogenes in cancer and the role of HIV in AIDS.
You’re going to use HIV denial to build your case? Seriously? In a spectacular “own goal,” Nicholson inadvertently demonstrates exactly why funding agencies are conservative: because there are some people out there who have ideas that are just wrong. There are ideas that are not worth pursuing.
And I did a double take when I read this in the acknowledgements:
I thank Peter Duesberg (UC Berkeley) for useful comments and suggestions(.)
It might not be best form to use someone who gave you feedback on an article as an example of someone who’s been treated unfairly. This is in an article that complains about how “who you know” is contaminating science.
Nicholson says:
The novelty of an idea can be measured by how many ideas and people it contradicts.
Alas, the insanity of an idea can be measured in precisely the same way.
At the end of the article, Nicholson proposes a couple of ways out of dealing with fuddy-duddy old boys’s network of granting agencies. One is to incorporate more non-scientists into the review process. I might argue that we’ve seen some of the outcomes of non-scientists getting involved in the scientific process whenever we hear about politicians ragging on certain projects as “wasteful.”
Another solution, Nicholson argues, is crowdfunding. Having been involved in a crowdfunding project (SciFund), I’ve heard concerns that cranks will use crowdfunding to get money for their goofy projects. I think that crowdfunded research projects should have some form of peer review to keep out the crazies.
Reference
Nicholson J. 2012. Collegiality and careerism trump critical questions and bold new ideas: A student's perspective and solution. BioEssays: in press. DOI: 10.1002/bies.201200001
At some point during Science Online 12, Maggie Koerth-Baker (in middle of picture) asked,
Do you think the public communication conflicts have to do with older scientists vs. younger scientists?
Ah yes, the old joke: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Let’s play a game. Think about some aspect of the way science is conducted know that you think needs reform: valuing outreach to the community (as in Maggie’s question above), promoting open access, not paying so much attention to journal impact factor. I bet that for each of those, someone who has written:
“Things will change as the new generation of scientists comes in.”
Try this: any time you see a statement about the culture of science where someone invokes age, replace “age” with “money.” When you hear people talk about “senior scientists,” replace it with “funded scientists.” * To be even more precise, “institutions with funded scientists.”
Institutions value money, and they value it in a way that is amplified and greater than the way individuals in that institution value money. Some institutions have gotten good at extracting money from research. The greater the money prospects, the more stultified and problematic the reward system becomes.
I’ve certainly seen a shift at my own institution. When I interviewed here, I was told by one administrator, “It’s not publish or perish here.” That was just at the start of a push to get more research here. As we have grown our research program, events were held to recognize people who publish in tier one journals and bring in more than a million dollars in grant money. I’m starting to hear things like, “We need to start paying attention to the impact factor of journals where people publish.”
Even when I hear administrators talk about “getting kids excited about science,” sometimes it feels like there’s a subtext of, “so they will be tuition paying students at our university in a few years.”
When you talk about how to changing academic and scientific culture, you’re talking about how to break the allure of money at the institutional level, rather than dealing with individual people who are recalcitrant.
With funding flat for the foreseeable future, it may be that the scientific reward scheme will change if the prospects for money become less predictable. Unfortunately, I think it more likely that there will be a greater push to adopt a dubious reward system that focuses on getting money, creating more prejudices against public science communication rather than less.
* Obviously, age and funding are correlated. In the United States, the average age of getting a research grant has been going up. I think it’s now somewhere in the 40s in many federal agencies.
Photo by _ColinS_ on Flickr; used under a Creative Commons license.
A recurring point I make here is that while everyone love a breakthrough and wants “transformative research,” the reality is that most science is slow, small, increments.
So I’m pleased that someone who built the team that built the Jeopardy! winning computer Watson said this (emphasis added):
(T)he scientists would have to reject an ego-driven perspective and embrace the distributed intelligence that the project demanded. Some were still looking for that silver bullet that they might find all by themselves. But that represented the antithesis of how we would ultimately succeed. We learned to depend on a philosophy that embraced multiple tracks, each contributing relatively small increments to the success of the project. ...
In the end, the hero was the team, not any individual member or algorithm. Eventually, everyone came to appreciate that. Well into the throes of the project, one researcher commented, “Compared to the way we work now, it’s like we were standing still before.”
Grad school committees outsource a lot of their admission decisions to the GRE, although GRE scores are not precise measures of student potential.
Search committees outsource a lot of their decisions to the editorial boards of Science and Nature and Cell, although glamour mag publications are not precise measures of faculty prospects.
Tenure committees outsource a lot of their decisions to federal grant agencies and, increasingly, to external reviewers. But with funding rates so low, there is a huge amount of luck in getting an external grant.
We use these metrics not because they are precise (though we pretend they are) but because they are expedient. They let admissions committees, search committees, and tenure committees be lazy and make decisions without the hard work of reading deeply into the narrative provided by the applicants. They are convenient ways to cut stacks of applications. The let committees kick the can of responsibility down the road.
Given the numbers of files that committees are often supposed to read, it’s understandable that people want shortcuts. But don't mistake a shortcut for a precise and meaningful assessment.
It is a shame there aren’t more scientific problems that can be solved with pen, paper and a patent clerk’s pay packet.
The “patent clerk’s pay” is a reference to Albert Einstein’s day job when he was young. It sounds so modest. But is it?
I went to Salary.com and looked for “patent clerk.” It didn’t offer any information for that job title, so I went with the patent-related jobs.
The American national median salaries for patent attorneys start at $80,040 for Patent attorney I (entry level, needing 0-1 years experience), and go to $207,858 for a top patent attorney. But lawyers tend to have high salaries, and Einstein was not a lawyer.
Patent agents have an average salary of $74,5000, according to this page. It notes that patent agents have a higher average salary than scientist or engineer. Salary.com gave $83,850 for Patent agent II, but listed no other job levels.
Most of these wages are more than I’m making now as a mid-career, tenured professor. The low end for patent examiners is just slightly lower than my starting salary as an assistant professor was (not adjusting for inflation). Holding out the prospect of stable salaries at a patent clerk’s wages could be a step up for a lot of up and coming scientists.
The broader point here is that we forget how much scientific discovery is simply a question of work force.
We often think that the biggest expense in science is equipment and supplies and machines that go “Ping!” The biggest expense in grants I’ve reviewed and written is for salaries, mostly for students.
We often think that the limiting factors to doing science are intellectual or technological. There are many unsolved scientific problems that we know how to answer. We aren’t waiting for any conceptual breakthroughs or new technologies. We’re waiting for people. We need “hands at the bench” to put in the time to collect the data.
The instabilities of salary is a major limiting factor for science and is probably a big reason a lot of them get out of science: they don’t see a way to pay the bills. Creating permanent, stable positions for scientists would release a lot of scientific research.
Even if it was “just” the salary of a patent clerk.
