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You're acting like progress in science is inevitable just by sheer effort alone. If impractical efforts are self-funded I have no problem with them, but when t

You're acting like progress in science is inevitable just by sheer effort alone. If impractical efforts are self-funded I have no problem with them, but when they are sponsored by the taxpayer coffers I balk a little bit. Henry Markram's Human Brain Project is one effort where the technology clearly isn't there and EU money could be better spent on experiments using less sexy/flashy, but better established methods. This is not progress- this is regression.

dnautics 9y ago
Yes! A great contrapositive example is Peter Mitchell who believed so hard in the chemiosmotic effect and couldn't find public funding because nobody else could bring themselves to believe it. He had to find independent funding to start a lab and proved it using decidedly non-sexy/flashy methods. Eventually won a very well-deserved nobel prize.
skosuri 9y ago
When George and Robi Mitra were working on polony sequencing [1], it seemed like a ridiculous idea that would never work or scale. I'm glad NIH and DOE weren't as shortsighted as me at the time. The efforts here and by others in the lab over the next decade set the stage for the next-generation sequencing revolution. [1] https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/27/24/e34/2902337/In-situ-localized-amplification-and-contact https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/27/24/e34/2902337/In-si...
- neuromantik8086 9y ago
  To be fair, J. Craig Venter's use of shotgun sequencing was poo-pooed by the NIH, which provides another example where the maverick had merit. It's kind of a difficult position to be in as a funding agency- you want to fund all of the cool things, but you need to balance that with practicality, which leads to risk aversion. It'd be quite a different world if our federal budget were a bit different and everyone were awash with cash. :)
  - dnautics 9y ago
    Actually Craig didn't think it would work either (he's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen), and it was ham smith that convinced him that they should do it. Ham smith is legitimately smart. On one project he wrote a Fortran program to find promoter regions... This was in the 2010s.

dnautics 9y ago

Yes! A great contrapositive example is Peter Mitchell who believed so hard in the chemiosmotic effect and couldn't find public funding because nobody else could bring themselves to believe it. He had to find independent funding to start a lab and proved it using decidedly non-sexy/flashy methods. Eventually won a very well-deserved nobel prize.

skosuri 9y ago

When George and Robi Mitra were working on polony sequencing [1], it seemed like a ridiculous idea that would never work or scale. I'm glad NIH and DOE weren't as shortsighted as me at the time. The efforts here and by others in the lab over the next decade set the stage for the next-generation sequencing revolution. [1] https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/27/24/e34/2902337/In-situ-localized-amplification-and-contact https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/27/24/e34/2902337/In-si...

neuromantik8086 9y ago
To be fair, J. Craig Venter's use of shotgun sequencing was poo-pooed by the NIH, which provides another example where the maverick had merit. It's kind of a difficult position to be in as a funding agency- you want to fund all of the cool things, but you need to balance that with practicality, which leads to risk aversion. It'd be quite a different world if our federal budget were a bit different and everyone were awash with cash. :)
- dnautics 9y ago
  Actually Craig didn't think it would work either (he's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen), and it was ham smith that convinced him that they should do it. Ham smith is legitimately smart. On one project he wrote a Fortran program to find promoter regions... This was in the 2010s.