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.
Re:Support our scientists ! (Score:5, Interesting)
because the school systems are grinding the future brilliant, passionate creative scientists into drones.
I have two kids in public school, and I have seen no evidence at all that the schools discourage creativity. 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. In high school, they have the full range of science classes, and students are encouraged to do original research or development as an independent study project with a mentor recruited from a research center or tech corporation. Last year, several students from my daughter's school competed in the Intel Science Talent Search [intel.com]. The public schools seem to be doing a much better job than they did when I was a kid.
Is there a science deficit in creativity? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hollywood has turned against scientists again, and the anti-science hacks of antivax and climate change denial and creationism/intelligent design and alt-med are getting more and more air time.
Uneducated intuition and magical thinking seem to be the respected characteristics in pop fiction, and well respected heroes like Sagan and David Attenborough have given way to more niche respected heroes like Hawkings, Cox and Tyson.
Absolutely correct; but what's the reason? (Score:4, Interesting)
This may sound strange, but it is a lack of trust.
In the old days, which were not always good, a brilliant scientist/academician/professor would be granted tax payers' monies to pursue her dreams in science, at least as far as basic funding was concerned; that is not including expensive apparatuses.
But then we, in the academic world, allowed the bean counters to take over. And they started to ask for ROI, at least in the number of patents, marketability, etc. Additionally, short funding terms made it into our world. 2 years, 3 years. Where I work, the latter is already the exemption. Therefore, as written by Lefkowitz, yes, we have to have results before we can ask for funding. Not only because the sponsors want to be on the safe side (of getting a return), but also not to embarrass ourselves by not being able to come up with what was envisaged. In the place were I used to be, the latter would give you a blacklisting.
Or, the other way round, if the public is not willing to trust us, but wants us to produce off-the-shelf academic results (numbers of publications included; publications that might take away from our genuine research time), that's what the public gets.
I only wished that the public was cognizant of this interdependence.
Re:Well of course (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The Apollo program was successful because it had a clear goal (put a man on the moon, and return him safely to earth) and a hard deadline (before the decade is out). Modern scientists and engineers can do the same when given the same framework. The DARPA Grand Challenge [wikipedia.org] and the Ansari X Prize [wikipedia.org] are two examples where clear goals and hard deadlines in a competitive environment lead to rapid advances. Instead of doling out grants to people that write boring unambitious proposals, we should be setting bold and ambitious goals, and redirect the money to reward actual accomplishments. Pulling a string works a lot better than pushing it.
Tenure-hunting discourages risk (Score:2, Interesting)
In some areas, e.g. for SIGGRAPH, the review is double-blind; only the paper committee knows the identity of the authors so that they can assign reviews who do not have a conflict of interest. However, this only really works for areas that are being hotly pursued by many different research groups; diction (often researchers will have different terms for the same thing based on what research group they are in), writing style and illustrations will often give away at least one of the authors, if not the first author.