9 ms·

A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money

226 points by Fede_V 9y ago

apsec112 9y ago
The current academic system is rigged to produce a continual "shortage" of funding and jobs, no matter what the nominal budget is. If an average lab has 3 professors and 15 grad students, and the average professor stays for 40 years while the average grad student stays for 4, then in equilibrium only 2% of grad students can become professors.
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  Back then, PhD graduates would be employed in industrial research labs, but with all the outsourcing that has gone on it's no surprise that the employment landscape looks as it does.
  - shoguning 9y ago
    I wouldn't say outsourcing, it's just there's less industrial research in basic science going on in terms of dollars spent: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7965967/corporate-research-basic-science https://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7965967/corporate-research-basi...
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    I used to work at HP Labs. Outsourcing really isn't a factor at all. The main problem is that the mothership's core business has suffered, and budgets and timelines have been cut. In addition, newer companies seem to just license/use the research that comes out of universities (which has the aforementioned labor model) than take on the responsibilities themselves. (at least that has been my impression, but happy to be shown the err in my beliefs)
    - HarryHirsch 9y ago
      In pharmaceutical companies much of the stuff that used to be done in-house (synthesis, early discovery &c) is now contracted out to contract research organizations, often overseas. The knowledge-broker model has become more common, work that used to be done by staff scientists is now done by students and postdocs, the risk has been shifted from the company to the employees, and that really has made labour conditions worse.
- kaosjester 9y ago
  Don't forget the part where those graduate students do some 80% of the work and make <20% of the income of their their supervisor (and, in many cases, <10% or none at all in several), and the university hosting the lab absorbs some 50% of all grants "off the top." A half-million dollar grant pays a single graduate student less than 20k/year for maybe 5 years, which, in the context of other companies that get these grants, is absurd. Independent research firms working from the same grants pay their employees competitive wages and still accomplish research. If these companies could issue Ph.D.s, academia would shrivel and die: imagine working at a company for 4 years, getting a salary 3-4x what a graduate school would offer, doing real work in a professional setting, doing enough research to write a dissertation, and receiving a degree. The entire incentive to attend a university would melt away.
  - cyht 9y ago
    They have this in some European countries like Denmark where it's called an "industrial PhD." However, they also compensate graduate students more fairly and seem to have more systematic and closer collaborations between academia and industry.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    Such an independent research firm could grant Ph.D.s. Getting a Ph.D. in US universities like where I went is primarily a matter of satisfying a committee of existing Ph.D.s that the student has done suitably creditable work. A firm with good researchers, whose newly minted students also did good work, would soon have the suitable reputation. And those letters after your name are only as valuable as the reputation of the institution.
    - gaius 9y ago
      A PhD from say Microsoft Research ought to be as good as any. Or back in the day, Bell Labs.
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      At least my university does offer such an option, it's not often used, but sometimes is - if you've done (and published!) an appropriate amount of research in the industry, then you can apply to the committee to defend a thesis and get the degree without doing a PhD program. You still need to write the thesis, though, and it's much easier to do it while being paid as a PhD student/researcher.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  Grad students were never intended to all become professors. Except perhaps in history
santaclaus 9y ago
This guy keeps it real as fuck. Love that he is rocking an Idiocracy hat during an interview.
- nether 9y ago
  He would not be a culture fit at any biotech startup, that's for sure. I love how at the end of the video, the Nobel laureate in medicine takes a long drag from a cigarette.
  - flachsechs 9y ago
    a lot of doctors and especially surgeons are closet smokers. bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.
    - sndean 9y ago
      > bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard. I initially found it surprising how many residency program directors tell interviewees that their programs don't allow illicit drug use. But yeah, extreme stress can lead to some bad habits, and it's apparently common enough to feel the need to remind candidates.
      - cperciva 9y ago
        When I arrived at Oxford University, the first thing they told us at the international student orientation session was "don't try to bribe the police officers". Things like this don't have to be very common to be worth pointing out.
        praneshp 9y ago
        Were there many folks from developing countries in the orientation? In my orientation (at an American university), there was a huge emphasis on "you might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously".
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
The title seems disingenuous. He didn't leave science because of a lack of funding, but because academic dysfunction caused the massive amount of funding to go to those who don't deserve it: > In a lengthy 2008 interview with the journal Current Biology, he brought up some serious issues with how research funding is allocated and how biases creep into scientific publications. He complained that some of the “stars” in science “have not really earned their status” yet they continued to receive massive amounts of funding. What should we do then, pile heaps of more money into academia? Sure, but also address the obvious dysfunction in a meaningful way, or else it's wasted.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Hate to tell him, but welcome to the real world. This is not a problem specific to academia! Stars not having really earned their status? This is true in all institutions, businesses, governments, schools, home owners associations, book clubs, sewing circles, etc. Any group of people where "resources" are allocated by a human, there will be people who earn their status and there will be people who instead focus on influencing the allocators. Strange to have to tell grown-ups this.
  - jknoepfler 9y ago
    I don't think Hall "needs to be told" anything. The people who lost out here aren't Hall and the academics who can't get funding. Hall is doing fine in the private sector. The people who lose in this situation are the public, who no longer own the research output, and who no longer benefit from the long-term gains made by primary research. We should create, for ourselves, a sustainable research economy. We've failed to do that. Are you suggesting it's impossible because you think "reality isn't fair" or "people suck"? I don't think the latter entails the former.
    - pdfernhout 9y ago
      From the conclusion of this 1994 paper: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
ggm 9y ago
The prize went to Roshbash. I knew a Rasbash at university. Doubtless different people, but is this name a shared root in some distant migration?
deleted 9y ago
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throw2016 9y ago
Some kind of academic independence like a free press is essential for a free society. Universities are often venues for dissent and perpetuation of ideas as they provide the context and space for contemplation, research and developing ideas. This role has heavily and quite consciously diminished since the 70s. We have already learnt a free press often does not function as we would imagine easily co-opted into furthering various agendas and established interests. With academia too engrossed in getting funding and a free press not really 'free' with their own funding constraints who plays the role of a watch guard and informed comment. If everyone is too busy trying just to survive a society in many ways ceases to be dynamic and loses its self awareness reduced to mere trading and consumption.
SubiculumCode 9y ago
And this funding model causes a lot of research money to actually be wasted...because conducting research to followup bad research is not efficient.
mcguire 9y ago
"He also said that these stars [that “have not really earned their status”] have boasted to him that they almost never send their articles to “anywhere but Nature, Cell, or Science“—among the three most prestigious science journals. “And they are nearly always published in one of those magazines—where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it’s not always so great,” he continued." I subscribed to Science for a while (the only benefit I can see of AAAS membership), and I was surprised by the work published there. I'm a computer jockey, and not into the biology that Science mostly publishes, but I had expected it to be major, ground-breaking papers. Instead, it seemed like the same kind of minimum publishable unit that goes on everywhere.
- Amygaz 9y ago
  It's mostly about clicks now! If they think your story or your PI's name will drive traffic then it gets accepted. There are still a few very well done top notch paper that gets there, and some other half-backed but very creative which have some merit to be there. But even these have the "driving ads" as their first criteria.
- evolve2017 9y ago
  I think it’s unfair to discounts papers in a foreign field to one’s own as ‘minimum publishable unit’ - often the novelty and importance of a finding requires some background, which the new, longer narrative abstracts in Science are trying to provide.
  - mcguire 9y ago
    True, I'm out on a limb here. But the "news" part of Science is very good, and has insightful coverage of science activities. In comparison with the rest of the magazine, the published research in Science was...meh.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- PurpleRamen 9y ago
  Science today is like playing an RPG. You constantly solve quest which other players have solved already before you. But because you need the XP, you need to do it to reach a higher level, to play in the good league where all the good stuff drops.
dang 9y ago
Url changed from https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left-science-because-he-ran-out-of-funding/ https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left..., which points to this.
- tdhoot 9y ago
  With respect, "points to this" is a little misleading. The original qz article had an interesting video (with reaction of winning the Nobel prize) of the laurete which the cell.com interview misses.
  - dang 9y ago
    I missed the video, and it was sort of a borderline call to begin with since the older article lacks the current context. So maybe I would have left it had I seen that. On the other hand, IIRC what they did with the text was flat-out blogspam, i.e. cribbed completely from the other source, and it kinda galls me to reward that.
etiam 9y ago
Reminds me of a rather heart-breaking interview with a man who should have been a laureate. (I wish I had saved this at the time, but now I'm unable to give a link to the video material) The Chemistry prize in 2008 was awarded for fluorescent proteins, which can be used to label interesting biological structures and functions. One of the laureates' guests at the ceremony was a former colleague, whom they were careful to point out had been absolutely critical for the discovery, implying that he should have been sharing the prize. A TV reporter caught this colleague for interview for a while during the festivities after the main banquet dinner, and found, in addition to congratulations to his friends and background on his contribution, a story of extreme academic pressure and not getting enough money to sustain himself and the research. To make ends meet, he left science and started driving long haul bus transports, and that's how he had earned his living ever since. He looked sad about it, but also resigned - claimed the pay is better and it's a lot less stressful. You got to pay the bills and at least it's some financial security. I found it a very moving story, and the reported seemed shaken at that point too. "But you were doing Nobel Prize quality research!" "Well. That makes me a very overqualified bus driver, doesn't it."
- DanielRibeiro 9y ago
  That's a great story! I found a book describing the story of Douglas Prasher in more detail: https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Nobel+Prize+%22fluorescent+proteins%22+%22overqualified%22+%22bus+driver%22&source=bl&ots=CCaThA-SKx&sig=b6u08w4aji0tDtS7Ntfr9osGlZI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN7umrk97WAhXO0J8KHbLpDsIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Nobel%20Prize%20%22fluorescent%20proteins%22%20%22overqualified%22%20%22bus%20driver%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=P... This is also told on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher On the bright side, it seems he returned to Scientific Research: In June 2010, Prasher was finally able to return to science, working for Streamline Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, and then from 2012 to 2015 in Tsien's lab at the University of California in San Diego
  - etiam 9y ago
    Thank you kindly. It's good to know his name again, and it's something of a relief to see that things seem to have shaped up for him since then. I wonder how he's doing after the passing of Roger Tsien.
hudibras 9y ago
That last paragraph is brutal.
jaclaz 9y ago
As a side note, there is another effect that we have to consider. If these brilliant scientists/professors are not (adequately) financed for their research, inevitably a large part of their time will be dedicated in looking for funds, detracting it from the time dedicated to the research itself. So, not only some research is not possible (or gives scarce results) because of the lack of funds, but the time spent in looking for other funds will reduce the research results in a perverse spiral. In a perfect world research institutions should be able to make their lead researchers "worry free" (about the funding and the other bureaucracy matters), as this condition is the one where creativity and productivity is at the top level. Since funds are obviously limited, maybe the issue is about starting too many researches (underfunding each of them) as opposed to choose a limited number of research projects and fully fund them. But if you use this approach, the issue becomes the war for being selected, the possible corruption (or simply bad judgement) of the selecting commission, etc. I guess noone has a proper solution to the issue.
- vacri 9y ago
  An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s. Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.
  - lotsofpulp 9y ago
    Given the current resources and constraints of the economic system, it might be accurate to state it as an "oversupply" of scientist. Given the sad state of actual science however, I think it's more useful to characterize it as an undersupply of resources and/or political and societal will to value science correctly. We need large scale studies validating and invalidating each other with publicly available data so they can be repeated, performed with different population groups, and we need negative results to be seen to be just as important as positive results are. And hopefully a better understanding from everyone in the world of what the process of science is and should be.
Razengan 9y ago
How come we have no international organization that does research for research's sake, and is jointly funded by multiple countries and private donations? Or is there one and I'm just not aware of it?
- jampekka 9y ago
  Like CERN?
- matt4077 9y ago
  CERN, ISS, the ITER, EMBL, ESA, and, of course, the International Potato Centre.
- OliverJones 9y ago
  Dr. Hall's short autobiography (the article linked here) shows one downside of research-only orgs: the superstar effect - the celebrity principal investigator effect. A prestigious research-only org can fall under the sway of a single ego, or a few egos. When that happens it can drive away real inquiry. Readers of HN are generally accustomed to a winner-take-all approach to life. That's also known as an inverse-power-law approach or a network-effect approach. It's what makes cities and social networks get big. Science policy well done struggles to counter this. It's smart to keep science real by spreading the financing and the expertise around. That being said, there are plenty of research orgs. The late lamented Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Max-Planck Institutes are just a few.
j7ake 9y ago
To add to these anecdotes, Ron Konopka (notably discovered the Period gene, which controls the period of circadian rhythms in Drosophila) was denied tenure and subsequently exited science. Read more on his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka He died in 2015, about 2 years before Hall, Rosbash, Young won the nobel prize for cloning the Period gene.
Nessuss 9y ago
I'm shocked there has been no mention of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. Terence Kealey makes a compelling argument that government funding more than crowds out private funding for Science. I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because 'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research surely has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely wrong historically.
galfarragem 9y ago
'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.' -- Albert Einstein
BrandoElFollito 9y ago
I left academia 20 years ago after completing my PhD (in physics). Getting the PhD was an awesome experience : intellectual effort, nice peers, teaching was great and the parties in the campus were memorable. One of the greatest periods in my life. By the end I started to feel two things which drove me away : the begging for money and the feudalism. I was payed peanuts (which was ok) and was not willing to spend a big part of my time looking after funding. I was a physicist, not a negotiator or economist. Then came the medieval feudalism where the mere fact that you had dr, or prof or whatever was supposed to make others kneel in front of you. I did not kneel, told a few professors (after they provoqued me for a long time) that their contribution to the school was useless (no science, no teaching, no anything, just sitting idle on their tenure) and inserted of telling me what I did not know (that they were super heroes of finding, or whatever), they told me that this is not a way to address a professor. I had a laugh and said good bye. I have a great job in industry, look at these years in awe but would not come back. At least until something changes towards meritocracy.

226 points by Fede_V 9y ago

The current academic system is rigged to produce a continual "shortage" of funding and jobs, no matter what the nominal budget is. If an average lab has 3 professors and 15 grad students, and the average professor stays for 40 years while the average grad student stays for 4, then in equilibrium only 2% of grad students can become professors.

HarryHirsch 9y ago
Back then, PhD graduates would be employed in industrial research labs, but with all the outsourcing that has gone on it's no surprise that the employment landscape looks as it does.
- shoguning 9y ago
  I wouldn't say outsourcing, it's just there's less industrial research in basic science going on in terms of dollars spent: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7965967/corporate-research-basic-science https://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7965967/corporate-research-basi...
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  I used to work at HP Labs. Outsourcing really isn't a factor at all. The main problem is that the mothership's core business has suffered, and budgets and timelines have been cut. In addition, newer companies seem to just license/use the research that comes out of universities (which has the aforementioned labor model) than take on the responsibilities themselves. (at least that has been my impression, but happy to be shown the err in my beliefs)
  - HarryHirsch 9y ago
    In pharmaceutical companies much of the stuff that used to be done in-house (synthesis, early discovery &c) is now contracted out to contract research organizations, often overseas. The knowledge-broker model has become more common, work that used to be done by staff scientists is now done by students and postdocs, the risk has been shifted from the company to the employees, and that really has made labour conditions worse.
kaosjester 9y ago
Don't forget the part where those graduate students do some 80% of the work and make <20% of the income of their their supervisor (and, in many cases, <10% or none at all in several), and the university hosting the lab absorbs some 50% of all grants "off the top." A half-million dollar grant pays a single graduate student less than 20k/year for maybe 5 years, which, in the context of other companies that get these grants, is absurd. Independent research firms working from the same grants pay their employees competitive wages and still accomplish research. If these companies could issue Ph.D.s, academia would shrivel and die: imagine working at a company for 4 years, getting a salary 3-4x what a graduate school would offer, doing real work in a professional setting, doing enough research to write a dissertation, and receiving a degree. The entire incentive to attend a university would melt away.
- cyht 9y ago
  They have this in some European countries like Denmark where it's called an "industrial PhD." However, they also compensate graduate students more fairly and seem to have more systematic and closer collaborations between academia and industry.
- mcguire 9y ago
  Such an independent research firm could grant Ph.D.s. Getting a Ph.D. in US universities like where I went is primarily a matter of satisfying a committee of existing Ph.D.s that the student has done suitably creditable work. A firm with good researchers, whose newly minted students also did good work, would soon have the suitable reputation. And those letters after your name are only as valuable as the reputation of the institution.
  - gaius 9y ago
    A PhD from say Microsoft Research ought to be as good as any. Or back in the day, Bell Labs.
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    At least my university does offer such an option, it's not often used, but sometimes is - if you've done (and published!) an appropriate amount of research in the industry, then you can apply to the committee to defend a thesis and get the degree without doing a PhD program. You still need to write the thesis, though, and it's much easier to do it while being paid as a PhD student/researcher.
sliverstorm 9y ago
Grad students were never intended to all become professors. Except perhaps in history

santaclaus 9y ago

This guy keeps it real as fuck. Love that he is rocking an Idiocracy hat during an interview.

nether 9y ago
He would not be a culture fit at any biotech startup, that's for sure. I love how at the end of the video, the Nobel laureate in medicine takes a long drag from a cigarette.
- flachsechs 9y ago
  a lot of doctors and especially surgeons are closet smokers. bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.
  - sndean 9y ago
    > bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard. I initially found it surprising how many residency program directors tell interviewees that their programs don't allow illicit drug use. But yeah, extreme stress can lead to some bad habits, and it's apparently common enough to feel the need to remind candidates.
    - cperciva 9y ago
      When I arrived at Oxford University, the first thing they told us at the international student orientation session was "don't try to bribe the police officers". Things like this don't have to be very common to be worth pointing out.
      - praneshp 9y ago
        Were there many folks from developing countries in the orientation? In my orientation (at an American university), there was a huge emphasis on "you might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously".

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

The title seems disingenuous. He didn't leave science because of a lack of funding, but because academic dysfunction caused the massive amount of funding to go to those who don't deserve it: > In a lengthy 2008 interview with the journal Current Biology, he brought up some serious issues with how research funding is allocated and how biases creep into scientific publications. He complained that some of the “stars” in science “have not really earned their status” yet they continued to receive massive amounts of funding. What should we do then, pile heaps of more money into academia? Sure, but also address the obvious dysfunction in a meaningful way, or else it's wasted.

ryandrake 9y ago
Hate to tell him, but welcome to the real world. This is not a problem specific to academia! Stars not having really earned their status? This is true in all institutions, businesses, governments, schools, home owners associations, book clubs, sewing circles, etc. Any group of people where "resources" are allocated by a human, there will be people who earn their status and there will be people who instead focus on influencing the allocators. Strange to have to tell grown-ups this.
- jknoepfler 9y ago
  I don't think Hall "needs to be told" anything. The people who lost out here aren't Hall and the academics who can't get funding. Hall is doing fine in the private sector. The people who lose in this situation are the public, who no longer own the research output, and who no longer benefit from the long-term gains made by primary research. We should create, for ourselves, a sustainable research economy. We've failed to do that. Are you suggesting it's impossible because you think "reality isn't fair" or "people suck"? I don't think the latter entails the former.
  - pdfernhout 9y ago
    From the conclusion of this 1994 paper: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."

ggm 9y ago

The prize went to Roshbash. I knew a Rasbash at university. Doubtless different people, but is this name a shared root in some distant migration?

deleted 9y ago

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throw2016 9y ago

Some kind of academic independence like a free press is essential for a free society. Universities are often venues for dissent and perpetuation of ideas as they provide the context and space for contemplation, research and developing ideas. This role has heavily and quite consciously diminished since the 70s. We have already learnt a free press often does not function as we would imagine easily co-opted into furthering various agendas and established interests. With academia too engrossed in getting funding and a free press not really 'free' with their own funding constraints who plays the role of a watch guard and informed comment. If everyone is too busy trying just to survive a society in many ways ceases to be dynamic and loses its self awareness reduced to mere trading and consumption.

SubiculumCode 9y ago

And this funding model causes a lot of research money to actually be wasted...because conducting research to followup bad research is not efficient.

mcguire 9y ago

"He also said that these stars [that “have not really earned their status”] have boasted to him that they almost never send their articles to “anywhere but Nature, Cell, or Science“—among the three most prestigious science journals. “And they are nearly always published in one of those magazines—where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it’s not always so great,” he continued." I subscribed to Science for a while (the only benefit I can see of AAAS membership), and I was surprised by the work published there. I'm a computer jockey, and not into the biology that Science mostly publishes, but I had expected it to be major, ground-breaking papers. Instead, it seemed like the same kind of minimum publishable unit that goes on everywhere.

Amygaz 9y ago
It's mostly about clicks now! If they think your story or your PI's name will drive traffic then it gets accepted. There are still a few very well done top notch paper that gets there, and some other half-backed but very creative which have some merit to be there. But even these have the "driving ads" as their first criteria.
evolve2017 9y ago
I think it’s unfair to discounts papers in a foreign field to one’s own as ‘minimum publishable unit’ - often the novelty and importance of a finding requires some background, which the new, longer narrative abstracts in Science are trying to provide.
- mcguire 9y ago
  True, I'm out on a limb here. But the "news" part of Science is very good, and has insightful coverage of science activities. In comparison with the rest of the magazine, the published research in Science was...meh.
deleted 9y ago
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PurpleRamen 9y ago
Science today is like playing an RPG. You constantly solve quest which other players have solved already before you. But because you need the XP, you need to do it to reach a higher level, to play in the good league where all the good stuff drops.

dang 9y ago

Url changed from https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left-science-because-he-ran-out-of-funding/ https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left..., which points to this.

tdhoot 9y ago
With respect, "points to this" is a little misleading. The original qz article had an interesting video (with reaction of winning the Nobel prize) of the laurete which the cell.com interview misses.
- dang 9y ago
  I missed the video, and it was sort of a borderline call to begin with since the older article lacks the current context. So maybe I would have left it had I seen that. On the other hand, IIRC what they did with the text was flat-out blogspam, i.e. cribbed completely from the other source, and it kinda galls me to reward that.

etiam 9y ago

Reminds me of a rather heart-breaking interview with a man who should have been a laureate. (I wish I had saved this at the time, but now I'm unable to give a link to the video material) The Chemistry prize in 2008 was awarded for fluorescent proteins, which can be used to label interesting biological structures and functions. One of the laureates' guests at the ceremony was a former colleague, whom they were careful to point out had been absolutely critical for the discovery, implying that he should have been sharing the prize. A TV reporter caught this colleague for interview for a while during the festivities after the main banquet dinner, and found, in addition to congratulations to his friends and background on his contribution, a story of extreme academic pressure and not getting enough money to sustain himself and the research. To make ends meet, he left science and started driving long haul bus transports, and that's how he had earned his living ever since. He looked sad about it, but also resigned - claimed the pay is better and it's a lot less stressful. You got to pay the bills and at least it's some financial security. I found it a very moving story, and the reported seemed shaken at that point too. "But you were doing Nobel Prize quality research!" "Well. That makes me a very overqualified bus driver, doesn't it."

DanielRibeiro 9y ago
That's a great story! I found a book describing the story of Douglas Prasher in more detail: https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Nobel+Prize+%22fluorescent+proteins%22+%22overqualified%22+%22bus+driver%22&source=bl&ots=CCaThA-SKx&sig=b6u08w4aji0tDtS7Ntfr9osGlZI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN7umrk97WAhXO0J8KHbLpDsIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Nobel%20Prize%20%22fluorescent%20proteins%22%20%22overqualified%22%20%22bus%20driver%22&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=P... This is also told on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher On the bright side, it seems he returned to Scientific Research: In June 2010, Prasher was finally able to return to science, working for Streamline Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, and then from 2012 to 2015 in Tsien's lab at the University of California in San Diego
- etiam 9y ago
  Thank you kindly. It's good to know his name again, and it's something of a relief to see that things seem to have shaped up for him since then. I wonder how he's doing after the passing of Roger Tsien.

hudibras 9y ago

That last paragraph is brutal.

jaclaz 9y ago

As a side note, there is another effect that we have to consider. If these brilliant scientists/professors are not (adequately) financed for their research, inevitably a large part of their time will be dedicated in looking for funds, detracting it from the time dedicated to the research itself. So, not only some research is not possible (or gives scarce results) because of the lack of funds, but the time spent in looking for other funds will reduce the research results in a perverse spiral. In a perfect world research institutions should be able to make their lead researchers "worry free" (about the funding and the other bureaucracy matters), as this condition is the one where creativity and productivity is at the top level. Since funds are obviously limited, maybe the issue is about starting too many researches (underfunding each of them) as opposed to choose a limited number of research projects and fully fund them. But if you use this approach, the issue becomes the war for being selected, the possible corruption (or simply bad judgement) of the selecting commission, etc. I guess noone has a proper solution to the issue.

vacri 9y ago
An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s. Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.
- lotsofpulp 9y ago
  Given the current resources and constraints of the economic system, it might be accurate to state it as an "oversupply" of scientist. Given the sad state of actual science however, I think it's more useful to characterize it as an undersupply of resources and/or political and societal will to value science correctly. We need large scale studies validating and invalidating each other with publicly available data so they can be repeated, performed with different population groups, and we need negative results to be seen to be just as important as positive results are. And hopefully a better understanding from everyone in the world of what the process of science is and should be.

Razengan 9y ago

How come we have no international organization that does research for research's sake, and is jointly funded by multiple countries and private donations? Or is there one and I'm just not aware of it?

jampekka 9y ago
Like CERN?
matt4077 9y ago
CERN, ISS, the ITER, EMBL, ESA, and, of course, the International Potato Centre.
OliverJones 9y ago
Dr. Hall's short autobiography (the article linked here) shows one downside of research-only orgs: the superstar effect - the celebrity principal investigator effect. A prestigious research-only org can fall under the sway of a single ego, or a few egos. When that happens it can drive away real inquiry. Readers of HN are generally accustomed to a winner-take-all approach to life. That's also known as an inverse-power-law approach or a network-effect approach. It's what makes cities and social networks get big. Science policy well done struggles to counter this. It's smart to keep science real by spreading the financing and the expertise around. That being said, there are plenty of research orgs. The late lamented Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Max-Planck Institutes are just a few.

j7ake 9y ago

To add to these anecdotes, Ron Konopka (notably discovered the Period gene, which controls the period of circadian rhythms in Drosophila) was denied tenure and subsequently exited science. Read more on his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka He died in 2015, about 2 years before Hall, Rosbash, Young won the nobel prize for cloning the Period gene.

Nessuss 9y ago

I'm shocked there has been no mention of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. Terence Kealey makes a compelling argument that government funding more than crowds out private funding for Science. I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because 'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research surely has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely wrong historically.

galfarragem 9y ago

'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.' -- Albert Einstein

BrandoElFollito 9y ago

I left academia 20 years ago after completing my PhD (in physics). Getting the PhD was an awesome experience : intellectual effort, nice peers, teaching was great and the parties in the campus were memorable. One of the greatest periods in my life. By the end I started to feel two things which drove me away : the begging for money and the feudalism. I was payed peanuts (which was ok) and was not willing to spend a big part of my time looking after funding. I was a physicist, not a negotiator or economist. Then came the medieval feudalism where the mere fact that you had dr, or prof or whatever was supposed to make others kneel in front of you. I did not kneel, told a few professors (after they provoqued me for a long time) that their contribution to the school was useless (no science, no teaching, no anything, just sitting idle on their tenure) and inserted of telling me what I did not know (that they were super heroes of finding, or whatever), they told me that this is not a way to address a professor. I had a laugh and said good bye. I have a great job in industry, look at these years in awe but would not come back. At least until something changes towards meritocracy.