Is There a Creativity Deficit In Science? 203
nerdyalien writes with this story that explores the impact of reduced science funding on innovation in science. "There’s a current problem in biomedical research,” says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much."...There is no more important time for science to leverage its most creative minds in attempting to solve our global challenges. Although there have been massive increases in funding over the last few decades, the ideas and researchers that have been rewarded by the current peer-review system have tended to be safer, incremental, and established. If we want science to be its most innovative, it's not about finding brilliant, passionate creative scientists; it's about supporting the ones we already have.
Well of course (Score:5, Insightful)
We're well past the innovation of the late 20th century, and we're on our way to the navel-gazing imploding Roman Empire stage of our Western civilization.
More bureaucracy, more government, more universities, more requirements for simple jobs, more and more employees "required" for simple jobs, endless regulations and committees and civil servants and laws and rules and regulations...
If the Apollo program were announced today, in 9 years we'd still be arguing over the color of the rocket by PhDs in colorometry.
Support our scientists ! (Score:4, Insightful)
because the school systems are grinding the future brilliant, passionate creative scientists into drones.
If a Headline is a Question, The Answer is "No." (Score:2, Insightful)
I recall a significant amount of people arguing for more verifiable studies, tighter acceptance criteria, and more peer-review. That says anything but "let's research more crazy things." While it's true that some of the most valuable information comes from data points outside the currently sampled range, we have a great capability to model proposed mechanisms these days. How about generating some data using more modelling and simulation to explore proposed mechanisms before jumping into lab research to verify those models? There are plenty of things that can always be done besides arguing that the funding environment is simply too hostile to grants that are off the beaten path; when has someone not argued that this was the case?
Re:Not just a biomedical, but a general problem... (Score:2, Insightful)
Now the best way to resolve this is to increase basic research funding to college labs and lone researchers who go through a vetting process.
The problem with trying to do research in a University setting is that there is a strong tendency to rely on graduate students to do the lab work - rather than career scientists. This means that a typical tenured science professor graduates another new science PhD every couple years. So the tenured professor could easily graduate a dozen or so PhDs over their career before retiring to create one single solitary job opening for those dozen PhDs.
And that creates a problem in funding lone researchers. The number of people with science PhDs would would love to be paid to go off on their own and research a big question is orders of magnitude greater than the available funding. There's this huge pool of people who are all capable of major creative breakthroughs in science - but no way to know who is more or less likely to actually succeed if you fund them.
And in addition to this a certain percentage of the funding should be earmarked for experimental research that doesn't have any immediate payoff.
Of course, all other things being equal more funding is better. But when it comes to cutting edge outside-the-box scientific research I'd be in favor of keeping the government out of it almost entirely - don't make any attempt to judge the research itself.
Instead, what I would propose is part-time arrangement. Pay a scientist a decent salary, say, $75K/year, to do six months of work that requires specialized skill and creativity but is relatively well defined - giving lectures in science, DNA sequencing more diverse organisms, etc. Then for the other six months let the scientists work on whatever they want - without any restriction aside from subject/patient ethics. If the tax payers absolutely insisted, the scientists could be required to keep a basic accounting of their time to show that they were, in fact, doing something scientific with their time (wrote code for molecular dynamics simulation in morning, researched replica exchange algorithms in afternoon, etc.).
But the key point would be to not impose bureaucratic restrictions on the areas of science to be explored.
Re:It All Comes Down to FAT CATS (Score:4, Insightful)
Neither you nor the GP offer any evidence to back up your claims. I'm not interested in preparing a thesis about the correlation of political orientation and intelligence. I'll just offer this,
http://www.psychologytoday.com... [psychologytoday.com]
and share my own personal experience, which us that there are smart and dumb people across the political spectrum.
Science is unpredictable and unprofitable (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tenure-hunting discourages risk (Score:4, Insightful)
In my opinion the peer-review should be changed to a double-blind system: the reviewer should not see name and affiliation of the authors, and judge the work as it would grade an undergrad paper (i.e. harshly). Like this I believe the signal-to-noise ratio in journals would increase, and only good papers would get published.
Please no! The problem with this approach (and it's already happening) is that what will get published is boring papers that bring tiny improvements over the state of the art. They'll get accepted because the reviewers will find nothing wrong with the paper, not because there's much good in there. On the other hand, the really new and interesting stuff will inevitably be less rigorous and probably more controversial, so it's going to be rejected.
Personally, I'd rather have 5% great papers among 95% of crap, than 100% papers that are neither great, nor crap, but just uninteresting. Reviews need to move towards positive rating (how many thing are interesting), away from negative ratings (how many issues you find in the paper). But it's not happening any time soon and it's one of the reasons I've mostly stopped reviewing (too often overruled by the associate editor to be worth my time).
Re:Tenure-hunting discourages risk (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want to fix science.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that hard to see what you have to do. Provide a funding system that reflects how science actually works. Provide longer-term grants that are accepting of minor failures or changes in research direction. Cut down on the bureaucracy and the committees. Realize that not all research falls into the domain of 'big name' journals and instead focus on more realistic metrics of progress. Some funding agencies are already starting to move in this direction.
Non-risky science is a big problem, but there's an even bigger problem. You know how news outlets have a focus on churning out news that is sensationalist and overhyped to whore for views and attention? Well, sadly, it's starting to look like that in science. Nowadays the most 'successful' labs are the ones that hype their output the most and shout loudest over the din of everyone else. This is aided and encouraged by both grant agencies and 'big name' journals like Nature.
As a result, we now have an entire self-sustaining system for producing bullshit, where bullshit goes through the cycle of hype and publication, leading to grant money, leading to even more bullshit. Some of these big labs become black holes for funding, consuming millions upon millions and then ten years later everyone wonders why their miraculous cancer cure turned out to be a dud.
I don't know when it got this way, or if it's always been this way. Hell, I'm just a newcomer. But I have a hard time imagining that this system would produce people like Einstein or Crick. People like Fleischmann and Pons, more likely.
Re:Absolutely correct; but what's the reason? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing how far removed scientific publishing has become from its original purpose. The original purpose of publishing a paper was to disseminate your results to the world. It was basically an open letter to other scientists (that's why so many journals have 'Letters' in the journal name). In the age of the internet, this has become redundant; you can just as easily (actually, much much more easily) communicate your results by writing them up in your blog. Once you have built up enough reputation on your blog, you might get requests from other scientists to feature their work on your blog. Voila - peer review and reputation.
But now, publications are just indicators of penis size. The process of writing and peer review takes away valuable time from actual work. In the past 1-2 years I haven't done any more than a week or two of actual work; I've just been writing papers and talking to reviewers. I'm sure many other scientists are in the same boat. This is not the way it's supposed to be.
Re:Absolutely correct; but what's the reason? (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you qualified to make that determination? Have you read any of these papers beyond the sensationalized headline on some hideously inaccurate post on some web site? Is it possible that these "bizarre, esoteric" topics have more relevance to scientific inquiry than you think? Can you really look at one of these studies and say "well, no useful research here whatsoever"?
Congratulations, you're part of the problem. It seems that you expect all research funded in this way to have immediate, practical applications. Science does not work that way. All scientific research builds on the work that has gone before it; it's possible that studying the mating habits of gibbons will aid in finding a cure for cancer in some way. I think the point here is that the (relatively) uneducated people are making the decisions about what to fund and what not to fund, and it should be scientists who are in a position to know what the fuck they're talking about that should be making that call. Yes, sometimes these studies fail, and nothing is accomplished. Welcome to science, where failure is not only a fact of life, it's necessary for the process to succeed. Without the freedom to fail, we may as well just let the evangelists take over and abandon science altogether.
Re:Support our scientists ! (Score:4, Insightful)
In elementary school, my kids did an independent science fair project every year. They learned to do graphical programming in Scratch. The school had several teams that competed in robotic competitions.
FYI that's not a normal public school.
The problem with public education in the US is that it tends to be locally funded, so you get whatever your neighbors are willing to pay for. If you're into the "why should I have to pay money so that some poor kid in the local city can learn how to read" school of thought, you probably consider that a good thing. Likewise, if you live in the one progressive town in some red state then you probably appreciate not having to stock your science classroom with Bibles.
On the whole, though, I think it hurts us.
Innovation goes faster than ever (Score:5, Insightful)
It may look like scientists nowadays are less creative. I don't think it's the case, they just communicate more.
Research is always made in small steps. The thing is that now, with sites like arXiv and search engines, we see all these small steps instead of just the end result. It is probably why it looks more incremental.
Another factor is that we have pretty much nailed down most of the human scale phenomena. Science now needs to address high level of accuracy or work at the nano or cosmic scales. Our brains are not made to deal with this, as a result, a lot of rigor is required and most wonderfully creative ideas end up flat out wrong when compared to the actual data. Because of this, when someone comes up with a creative idea, we need to make sure that he is ready to deal with high precision observations.