8 ms·

Michael Nielsen » The mismeasurement of science

21 points by mblakele 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
crocowhile 16y ago
Funding in Science is becoming a huge huge problem, well beyond the criteria used to distribute money. We need a major revolution on how people actually work and think. At least in the biomedical field. There's a lot of talking about it, I wonder what we can do to act.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  Care to elaborate? I'm not very well aware of funding in the biomedical field... I will, however, say that all scientists that I know of spend a significant amount of time chasing grant money. A streamlined process would be very desirable.
  - crocowhile 16y ago
    The bottomline is that there is way more people to be funded than money, to the point that even a 2x or 4x increase in overall budget would not be enough. And a 2x increase is pretty much science fiction anyway. The lab structure has changed dramatically in the past 50 years: your average research lab is way bigger than it ever used to be and it's mainly composed of students and postdocs. The principal investigator would invest all of their time on a) writing grants proposal to get funded b) hire and coordinate lab members c) writing papers when it's time to. This leads to the following problems: a) it's difficult to identify intellectual contribution. Many times the postdocs and students are the ones who did the whole work, starting from having the initial idea to writing the paper. The PI may or may not help and at the end of the day will always get full credit. b) PI who are successful by this standard will keep in getting money to hire more/new people. c) with labs this size, there is no way everybody will get a job past the postdoc phase. In fact, only 1 in 10 postdocs can get a professorship nowadays, simply because there's too much demand and too little offer. This means that a lot of smart people simply will not be able to continue with their career and, as a corollary, that a lot of not-deserving PIs will still be able to thrive exploiting their students and postdocs. In shorts, there's little money and it's not allocated properly.

21 points by mblakele 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Funding in Science is becoming a huge huge problem, well beyond the criteria used to distribute money. We need a major revolution on how people actually work and think. At least in the biomedical field. There's a lot of talking about it, I wonder what we can do to act.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
Care to elaborate? I'm not very well aware of funding in the biomedical field... I will, however, say that all scientists that I know of spend a significant amount of time chasing grant money. A streamlined process would be very desirable.
- crocowhile 16y ago
  The bottomline is that there is way more people to be funded than money, to the point that even a 2x or 4x increase in overall budget would not be enough. And a 2x increase is pretty much science fiction anyway. The lab structure has changed dramatically in the past 50 years: your average research lab is way bigger than it ever used to be and it's mainly composed of students and postdocs. The principal investigator would invest all of their time on a) writing grants proposal to get funded b) hire and coordinate lab members c) writing papers when it's time to. This leads to the following problems: a) it's difficult to identify intellectual contribution. Many times the postdocs and students are the ones who did the whole work, starting from having the initial idea to writing the paper. The PI may or may not help and at the end of the day will always get full credit. b) PI who are successful by this standard will keep in getting money to hire more/new people. c) with labs this size, there is no way everybody will get a job past the postdoc phase. In fact, only 1 in 10 postdocs can get a professorship nowadays, simply because there's too much demand and too little offer. This means that a lot of smart people simply will not be able to continue with their career and, as a corollary, that a lot of not-deserving PIs will still be able to thrive exploiting their students and postdocs. In shorts, there's little money and it's not allocated properly.