MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines

Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world. This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.

"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."

Gatherers vs. Hunters

From TFS:

Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end.

I attended Harvard for Ph.D. work, and can say that there has been a feminization of science; which is characterized, above all, by a gatherer-mentality (quantity over quality).

My peers at MIT, I remember, were doing risky and testosterone-laden work; they are the hunters.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

I see they didn't offer too many Gender Studies classes at either university when you were there.

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And you seem to have taken no classes in dry humor. It's clearly tongue-in-cheek. What's worrisome is that no one else seems to have caught that.

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I didn't get that impression at all. It is not so obvious that it was tongue-in-cheek (if that is even that case). Why, then, should it be worrisome?

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It's not that we didn't catch it, it's just that we were unimpressed.

STB

Read his other posts

The man is clearly prone to gender essentialism, and is probably something like a "Men's Movement" member. He talks about the supposed bitterness of women raised by "castrai" - a code word for (presumably weak, pathetic) men who have failed to defend thei

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The man is clearly prone to gender essentialism, and is probably something like a "Men's Movement" member.

I think that saying someone is clearly prone to some behavior or another, based on their slashdot posts, is probably a hasty dia

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Just as difficult to be an IT professional and a male who cannot even make a joke involving women without four jumping down his throat for it.

And before you go off on another tirade... I worked in an office of ten where I was the only male for a year and h

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

And yet MIT scientists and Harvard scientists get laid just as seldom.

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A counter example is Harvard's failure to promote Mageret Geller.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/286/ 5443/1277?ck=nck [sciencemag.org]

True, astronomy does not come into the prize metric, but her work
on dark matter is revolutionary despite requiring a lot of

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

I'd say that given that these "studies" (I'm not sure how they count three of them) are basically counting Nobel prizes, the trend simply reflects changes in what wins Nobels. When the awards were dominated by traditional medicine and physiology, Harvard Med School owned them, and MIT and some of the other competitors mentioned don't even have med schools.

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I'd guess that part of the problem could be that the past success of Harvard is working against them. Harvard currently has more name recognition, and more of a perception of success, than any other university in the U.S., so it's bound to attract a lot of

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I thought Harvard was more of a law / business oriented place anyways?

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

It is law/business/medicine oriented in that it has famous and excellent schools in those fields. However it is also more science-oriented than most of the Ivy league. Harvard physics, for example, is substantially more well-regarded than, say, Yale physics.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

Larry Summers, is that you?

I disagree

I'm currently a (male) course 8 grad student at MIT, working in the Media Lab. My group is very much a counterexample to this theory. We're roughly 50% women, and we're doing bleeding edge stuff that will either fall on its face or change the world. One

Qualities

It's the old Yin/Yang thing. Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt. Using terms such as Yin and Yang, rather than feminine and masculine could reasonably be used to reference the qualities without r

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Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt.

Turns out you couldn't be more wrong. Much of what is male or female (hopefully you realize that these terms do not require quotes) is biological, not learned.

Abstraction

Once you break the stereotypes, you realise that much of what is "male" or "female" is learnt.

Then you have kids and you realize that most of it was inate after all.

Luckily this doesn't matter. The point of abstraction is that one can look to desirable qualities for (eg.) science without approaching with the same prejudice when faced with a specific man or woman. Those who have skills in the realm of the "wrong sex

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There is a whole lot of lore about this but I think you've missed the main theme. Hunters go on expeditions and by working in groups can handle big game like buffalo.

Gathers harvest non-agricultural materials, wild berries and bark fibers and such.

I

MIT is best at re-appropriation.

I remember an article in the NY Times about Tim Berners Lee:

Time Berner's Lee, a physicist at MIT who invented the world-wide-web ...

If you want to start a billion-dollar company

...go to MIT.

On the other hand, if you want to design a cannon that will destroy the moon, go to Caltech.

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On the other hand, if you want to design a cannon that will destroy the moon, go to Caltech.

Or just go to MIT and steal it from Caltech
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2006/mitcannon/ [mit.edu]

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As a Canadian going to a Canadian university, I demand to know which university this is that has dared offend the Gods of Guinness.

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Heh, UWer here too. Guess I'm not going to the Bomber next term.

Caltech

I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.

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It's somewhat easier to do well when funding is high. I wonder what the ratio of funding to Nobel Prizes is.

Carnegie Mellon gets ignored...

This "study" is at best a crude approximation, and even then it isn't complete in terms of data. They left off my school, for example. I'm sure some others probably got stiffed too. Of course, I don't think you can fit a reliable trend to three data points anyway -- especially for something highly time delayed such as Nobel prizes.

Carnegie Mellon University
1947-1966: 0
1967-1986: 3
1987-2006: 7

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I'd say it's even worse than that. The study concludes that the US is the only real contender in this race for Nobel Prizes. Of course, the only way that a nation even gets its institutes considered is by winning at least three Nobels in a given period(whi

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Well, last time i checked, the US has 300 million inhabitants, compared to the minuscule populations in many European countries that do first class research.

Yes, and the US has roughly two and a half times the land mass of Europe. Germany alone could

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That is an interesting question... is it true that Europe lags the US in science and if so, why?

I think the problem with socialism is not that scientists are unmotivated - I think they're motivated more by curiousity. But socialsim (or communism) may sl

A Blog

A blog? And I thought it was going to be a credible article.

Normalized by number of profs?

Is it really fair to compare, say, MIT and Caltech, given that the former has 1,554* faculty members and the latter has 300*? I'll grant that if you're trying to compare the amount of revolutionary work going on at a given school, the fact that one school is larger is a legitimate reason for them to do a larger amount of work. However, comparing the fraction of the school doing revolutionary work seems to be more useful when, for example, considering where to go for undergrad, grad, or postdoc, since it's more likely you'll get to work with one of those individuals conducting revolutionary work.

* Data from USNews Best Colleges 2007 listings for number of instructional faculty at both schools.

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Caltech is primarily a research institute, and the majority of PhD holding researchers do not teach.

If you include those associated with JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs), there are around 900 to 1,000 PhD's.

When I was an undergrad, there were fewer undergr

But...

In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science

But revolution is a theory, not a fact!

Er, wait...

Best website, as well

From my own personal and subjective experience, MIT has the best designed site from a usability perspective out of all the American university sites I have ever visited. I think it is seconded only by Berkeley.

A Study?

If this guy really wans to study something like this, he needs to sit down and read some friggin' articles and come up with a metric to say whether an article is revolutionary. For example, Field's medals only honor Mathematicians younger than 40, and are only awards to one person ever some odd years, so that if two "revolutionary" papers are written in the same period, one gets nothing. In general the sample size of this "study", namely thee dozen prestigious awards of the past decade or two, is laughably small, and the only real result of his work is the suggestion that their should be more awards like the Nobels. To say that any one university tops any other from the information presented is foolish at best.

One good reason why:

Remember MIT's announcement early in 2006 about working on supercapacitors based on carbon nanotubes? That new technology could go a LONG way in making power generation by wind turbines and solar panels much more viable, and could make it possible for a tr

Once an IITian wins a Nobel ...

Wait till one IITian win a Nobel. Then he/she will reveal the inner special secret hand shake to his classmates, and they will tell their juniors, and then the knowledge will spread and IITians will be winning the Nobels like gangbusters :-)

Lawrence Summers tried

Larry Summers proposed a new curriculum for Harvard undergraduates with at least one mandatory science course. They dont have to take even on e science or math course now. But I think that is on hold after his firing(*) (technically he was pushed aside to

US and the rest of the world

I thought this was kind of surprising, especially considering how often people tend to lament the state of US science:

In the past 20 years, the USA has sixteen institutions which have won three or more prizes, but elsewhere in the world (Table 3) only the

Nobel Prizes Are a Bad Metric

Prize awards are only as good as their award criteria. Nobel prizes aren't awarded according to an objective criterion so using them in a metric like this is hazardous to say the least. Worse, the Nobel prize committee is subject to no feedback controls.

awards?

It's very hard to use awards as a judge of the scientific worth of an institution. For example, my school (UCI) has three Nobels in the last 15 years or so, but none of them for research done at UCI.

If you're a good enough scientist to get a Nobel (or Fields, and so on...), then chances are at some point some big, well known, well paying school is going to recruit you. It doesn't take a Nobel prize for other scientists to recognize a great researcher, but recruiting someone who has already done their life's great work doesn't make you a great scientific institution.

No matter how much loyalty you may have to a particular place, there are perks at big private schools that state schools like Berkely and Michigan just can't offer. Some well known scientists stick around in smaller incubation schools, but many find that being a big fish in a little pond is just more work and doesn't pay as well.

If you're going to use awards to determine scientific worth, you need to look at where the research which won the prize was done. Of course, this would put my school off the list with a grand total of 0 Nobels. I'm sure other small universities would start moving up the list.

An open-ended question:

An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:

Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?

Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.

There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.

Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).

MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.

It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.

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The Euro is getting stronger, but birthrates in Europe are declining. I wonder if Europe can be the first empire (Yeah, I am using that term very broadly) to continue to advance with a negative birthrate. I think that you will see the nationalization of

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US higher education has some fantastic examples of greatness (MIT, Harvard, etc), but for every one of these there are hundreds of diploma mills, jock colleges, and party schools that basically teach networking skills and how to drink beer.

But, the much la

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MIT is relevant as long as it produces results. Just because MIT has more peers now, and other countries have a somewhat more open attitude towards scientific research does not invalidate the work they do. As far as Harvard vs MIT, Harvard's medical, law

Re:For how long?

> As far as Harvard vs MIT, Harvard's medical, law, and business schools are still highly prestigious. I don't know of anybody who went to MIT to study those fields, although I'm sure they offer them (at least undergrad level equivalents).

MIT's Sloan is the 4th ranked business school in the nation...

Re:For how long?

Err, there's a a whole school of humanities (alongside science, engineering and architecture; the departments are aggregated into schools). All MIT students take a bunch of humanities; it's just that MIT humanities majors also take Mechanics, E&M, diffeq, etc. After all, even unemployed English majors need might need to machine a replacement part for their car, you know!

Re:Let's ignore the elephant in the closet, shall

Definition of IQ: Something an IQ test measures!