9 ms·

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab

by tuxxy 6y ago

Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? My partner is a molecular biologist and she can't collaborate with anyone outside of her lab because of the fear that they collaborators will take their research before they get a chance to publish it. It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for these groups to compete when they could collaborate.

FeistyOtter 6y ago
Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.
- orbifold 6y ago
  Exactly, it encourages mafia like structures. It matters a ton who you know and who your PI was as a Postdoc and PhD.
- detaro 6y ago
  Not just funding, also jobs for the members of your lab etc
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? Someone really needs to change the game! A better functioning science would be a huge boost for humanity as a whole. I don't expect government to change how it operates, but maybe some billionaires can build alternative institutions.
  - natechols 6y ago
    People have been trying for well over a century now to form alternative institutions (including governments) based entirely on human cooperation rather than competition. The results have typically been less than impressive so far. Keep in mind that part of the reason our modern concept of "intellectual property" exists is to encourage people to share their discoveries instead of keeping them secret - that's how deeply ingrained in human nature this behavior is.
  - jackcosgrove 6y ago
    You would either need to be able to measure discipline-wide or sub-disclipline-wide performance, or measure unpublished collaborations between researchers. For the first case, if molecular biologists make a lot of progress, then the molecular biology budget gets increased. Likewise if a discipline stagnates, its budget would be cut. This is probably how it already works to an extent. You still have the problem of a finite budget being shared between disciplines. I think it's better to measure, and reward, collaboration directly rather than turn the gross knob of aggregate funding. First steps towards this would include publishing negative results, just so there's a data point. Then we reward such results insofar as they contribute to positive results (measured via citations maybe). Obviously positive results would be rewarded much more than negative results, but we shouldn't discount the efforts of the many researchers who diligently find dead ends and tell others to avoid them.
- teorema 6y ago
  It's not just the research though, it's the credit. Here we are discussing a Nobel Prize awarded to what seems to be consensually agreed is a subset of deserving contributors, in part because of flaws in the review process? Discussion of credit for CRISPR goes back years. The first controversy began with patents. It's been obvious to anyone following this that credit for it is difficult to attribute. Everyone agrees CRISPR is in need of recognition, and yet the major systems for doing so are still based on an erroneous "lone genius" paradigm (with modifications).
legulere 6y ago
Because you can’t loose much but gain much with such behavior.
Upvoter33 6y ago
It actually relates to many things, but mostly it's because all the matters is getting credit for an idea. Realize that the process is basically to create something and then write about it to advance knowledge, thus sharing it with all. What's left at the end of that process is to recognize those who have done a lot of positive sharing. Those who are so recognized get the best jobs, the most funding, the best students, etc. As such, if an idea slips out of your lab and into some other lab, you might not get credit, and hence, all the craziness. It's one of those cases where it's not a great system, but it's also hard to figure out a better one.
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  On the other hand, physics seems to not have this issue. Experimentalists working on topics related to CERN publish jointly (with like 500 co-authors) and theoreticians regularly post pre-prints under review on arXiv. They are a much smaller community though.
  - evgen 6y ago
    This is a consequence of the required resources for the experiments. If it takes a ten billion dollar piece of equipment to produce your results then chances are you are going to be one little cog in a very big machine. There are not papers with 500 co-authors in any other field or even in sub-fields of particle physics that do not require massive accelerators to achieve results.
  - inciampati 6y ago
    There are many large-scale projects in biology that benefit from open collaboration. In general, these require lots of work and produce useful resources used by a whole field. Insights that could revolutionize a field can sometimes be described in a sentence or two, and reproduced in a few days or weeks, so scientists are more uneasy sharing them.
ricksunny 6y ago
This is a phenomenon that I've only just come to know since tiptoeing into the biotech space only half a year ago. Coming to recognise how poorly academics collaborate and the incentives underlying that has been one of my most saddening and de-motivating realisations since entering the space.
julienchastang 6y ago
"The Double Helix" by Watson delves into the highly competitive nature of this level of research. It is a candid and entertaining portrayal.
natechols 6y ago
1) Because human beings aggressively pursue their self-interest, which extends to getting new credit for scientific discoveries. 2) Because scientific discovery often requires multiple competing approaches (because you don't know which one will work in advance), and top-down control tends to discourage that. 3) Because biomedical discovery is not an inherently directed process most of the time, and top-down control would risk missing out on important discoveries that only happened because we gave individual scientists the freedom to work on whatever they wanted (like bacterial immune systems). Complaining about this state of affairs is like complaining that housecats aren't vegetarians yet. We have a new genetic manipulation technology that has already revolutionized molecular biology just a few years after it was discovered, and is already being investigated in clinical trials. Anyone who looks at this and says "you're doing it wrong" has a vastly distorted idea of what is actually possible in biomedical science, or any other line of work that requires actual humans to carry it out.
- lvs 6y ago
  No, while those things are factors, the core problem arises from the structure of the funding and career advancement system. These are systems we've constructed, not aspects of human nature. It's sink-or-swim, and even those swimming are only barely doing so.
  - natechols 6y ago
    You are assuming that the construction of the system has nothing to do with human nature in the first place. I think there are a lot of godawful perverse incentives embedded in our current system, and I suspect we could come up with a much better system if we started over from scratch, but I am extremely skeptical that an ideal system would be any less dependent on competition. And in the current context, the burden is on those who say we should redesign the system to prove that their hypothetical ideal system will perform better in practice than the one that turns out all of these CRISPR-related discoveries at a furious pace.
    - lvs 6y ago
nextos 6y ago
Well, and what about Francis Mojica who discovered CRISPR in bacteria?! He certainly deserved at least 1/3 of the award.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
l33tman 6y ago
This effect even exists within the same lab (been there, seen it). It's a horrible environment.
leftyted 6y ago
> Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? All human achievement is fundamentally agonistic. The really bewildering thing is how so many people who clawed their way to the top apparently forgot about the competition it took to get there.
rcpt 6y ago
Not very much money (read: almost 0). If you get scooped you might be out of a job. "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
bootcampwhere 6y ago
I did my phd I crispr. Because science is broken. When I was doing my.phd I worked on a project for a year and a half only for my professor to tell me that our collaborator was going to "take it over". I lost all my work and had to "give" the project to a student in his lab. They made some deal. It is sick, academic research is broken.
greenduck 6y ago
Maybe it's field specific. In my subfield of physics, I've collaborated with three other groups across the US without any fear of people running off with our work.

by tuxxy 6y ago

FeistyOtter 6y ago

Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? A government sets a budget for research, so the more and the better papers the other lab publishes, the more funding they get and less funding YOUR lab gets.

orbifold 6y ago
Exactly, it encourages mafia like structures. It matters a ton who you know and who your PI was as a Postdoc and PhD.
detaro 6y ago
Not just funding, also jobs for the members of your lab etc
BurningFrog 6y ago
> Isn't it because right now research is basically a zero sum game? Someone really needs to change the game! A better functioning science would be a huge boost for humanity as a whole. I don't expect government to change how it operates, but maybe some billionaires can build alternative institutions.
- natechols 6y ago
  People have been trying for well over a century now to form alternative institutions (including governments) based entirely on human cooperation rather than competition. The results have typically been less than impressive so far. Keep in mind that part of the reason our modern concept of "intellectual property" exists is to encourage people to share their discoveries instead of keeping them secret - that's how deeply ingrained in human nature this behavior is.
- jackcosgrove 6y ago
  You would either need to be able to measure discipline-wide or sub-disclipline-wide performance, or measure unpublished collaborations between researchers. For the first case, if molecular biologists make a lot of progress, then the molecular biology budget gets increased. Likewise if a discipline stagnates, its budget would be cut. This is probably how it already works to an extent. You still have the problem of a finite budget being shared between disciplines. I think it's better to measure, and reward, collaboration directly rather than turn the gross knob of aggregate funding. First steps towards this would include publishing negative results, just so there's a data point. Then we reward such results insofar as they contribute to positive results (measured via citations maybe). Obviously positive results would be rewarded much more than negative results, but we shouldn't discount the efforts of the many researchers who diligently find dead ends and tell others to avoid them.
teorema 6y ago
It's not just the research though, it's the credit. Here we are discussing a Nobel Prize awarded to what seems to be consensually agreed is a subset of deserving contributors, in part because of flaws in the review process? Discussion of credit for CRISPR goes back years. The first controversy began with patents. It's been obvious to anyone following this that credit for it is difficult to attribute. Everyone agrees CRISPR is in need of recognition, and yet the major systems for doing so are still based on an erroneous "lone genius" paradigm (with modifications).

legulere 6y ago

Because you can’t loose much but gain much with such behavior.

Upvoter33 6y ago

It actually relates to many things, but mostly it's because all the matters is getting credit for an idea. Realize that the process is basically to create something and then write about it to advance knowledge, thus sharing it with all. What's left at the end of that process is to recognize those who have done a lot of positive sharing. Those who are so recognized get the best jobs, the most funding, the best students, etc. As such, if an idea slips out of your lab and into some other lab, you might not get credit, and hence, all the craziness. It's one of those cases where it's not a great system, but it's also hard to figure out a better one.

hatmatrix 6y ago
On the other hand, physics seems to not have this issue. Experimentalists working on topics related to CERN publish jointly (with like 500 co-authors) and theoreticians regularly post pre-prints under review on arXiv. They are a much smaller community though.
- evgen 6y ago
  This is a consequence of the required resources for the experiments. If it takes a ten billion dollar piece of equipment to produce your results then chances are you are going to be one little cog in a very big machine. There are not papers with 500 co-authors in any other field or even in sub-fields of particle physics that do not require massive accelerators to achieve results.
- inciampati 6y ago
  There are many large-scale projects in biology that benefit from open collaboration. In general, these require lots of work and produce useful resources used by a whole field. Insights that could revolutionize a field can sometimes be described in a sentence or two, and reproduced in a few days or weeks, so scientists are more uneasy sharing them.

ricksunny 6y ago

This is a phenomenon that I've only just come to know since tiptoeing into the biotech space only half a year ago. Coming to recognise how poorly academics collaborate and the incentives underlying that has been one of my most saddening and de-motivating realisations since entering the space.

julienchastang 6y ago

"The Double Helix" by Watson delves into the highly competitive nature of this level of research. It is a candid and entertaining portrayal.

natechols 6y ago

1) Because human beings aggressively pursue their self-interest, which extends to getting new credit for scientific discoveries. 2) Because scientific discovery often requires multiple competing approaches (because you don't know which one will work in advance), and top-down control tends to discourage that. 3) Because biomedical discovery is not an inherently directed process most of the time, and top-down control would risk missing out on important discoveries that only happened because we gave individual scientists the freedom to work on whatever they wanted (like bacterial immune systems). Complaining about this state of affairs is like complaining that housecats aren't vegetarians yet. We have a new genetic manipulation technology that has already revolutionized molecular biology just a few years after it was discovered, and is already being investigated in clinical trials. Anyone who looks at this and says "you're doing it wrong" has a vastly distorted idea of what is actually possible in biomedical science, or any other line of work that requires actual humans to carry it out.

lvs 6y ago
No, while those things are factors, the core problem arises from the structure of the funding and career advancement system. These are systems we've constructed, not aspects of human nature. It's sink-or-swim, and even those swimming are only barely doing so.
- natechols 6y ago
  You are assuming that the construction of the system has nothing to do with human nature in the first place. I think there are a lot of godawful perverse incentives embedded in our current system, and I suspect we could come up with a much better system if we started over from scratch, but I am extremely skeptical that an ideal system would be any less dependent on competition. And in the current context, the burden is on those who say we should redesign the system to prove that their hypothetical ideal system will perform better in practice than the one that turns out all of these CRISPR-related discoveries at a furious pace.
  - lvs 6y ago

nextos 6y ago

Well, and what about Francis Mojica who discovered CRISPR in bacteria?! He certainly deserved at least 1/3 of the award.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

l33tman 6y ago

This effect even exists within the same lab (been there, seen it). It's a horrible environment.

leftyted 6y ago

> Why is academia (at least in the physical sciences) so competitive? All human achievement is fundamentally agonistic. The really bewildering thing is how so many people who clawed their way to the top apparently forgot about the competition it took to get there.

rcpt 6y ago

Not very much money (read: almost 0). If you get scooped you might be out of a job. "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

bootcampwhere 6y ago

I did my phd I crispr. Because science is broken. When I was doing my.phd I worked on a project for a year and a half only for my professor to tell me that our collaborator was going to "take it over". I lost all my work and had to "give" the project to a student in his lab. They made some deal. It is sick, academic research is broken.

greenduck 6y ago

Maybe it's field specific. In my subfield of physics, I've collaborated with three other groups across the US without any fear of people running off with our work.