24 ms·

Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

• sega_sai 6y ago
  I think it is a fair question how to organize science for best results (maximum productivity ?). I am no fan of pressure to apply for grants, which is particularly strong in the US. Also the amount of pressure/effort needed to get permanent/tenured position is very large. While this is clearly a big drain on people, and some people cannot handle it, either because they don't play the game well, or just live/work balance, or politics, but I think it certainly forces people to work more/harder. If we make things more relaxed, I'm sure that will make life easier for many scientists, but I would think the overall productivity will go down. I don't honestly know whether that's right path or not.
  • gregors 6y ago
    The quest for "maximum productivity" is the root cause for all of this. We need more artists and academics and less capitalists. Short-sighted thinking with profits being the end goal doesn't make for good science, good engineering or long term growth. The quest for productivity is a highly flawed path.
    • Frost1x 6y ago
      Productivity in this context is also defined by what makes the most wealthy and powerful more wealthy and powerful. The old argument is that capitalism as is aligns with the people so when it benefits you benefit. As businesses optimize out those pesky alignment costs with society, this becomes less true.
  • thisiszilff 6y ago
    I think the biggest question here is to what extent can productivity in basic research be quantified. Or, what are the value to failed experiments and explorations of "out there" ideas? Basic research is tricky because it is at the periphery of human knowledge, so getting our bearings there is difficult. The focus should, you are right, be on "overall productivity" and not on individual productivity, but the question is how do we make decisions about individuals based on overall productivity goals.
  • atmosx 6y ago
    Productivity is a metric and the moment you use for _whatever_ will be gamed. This is just the natural course of things. The main problem is that productivity, when it comes to research, is a lousy metric. Eventually productivity will be linked to "the market", because that's what matters right? Would Riemann frame that hypothesis had he been driven by "productivity" ? I wonder.
  • PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    I don't think it forces people to work harder, for me at least, it is a deterrent. As a master's student, I am not willing to get into the rat race that is academia with other people dictating what I should do research in because that is the current hot topic. I would rather work and do research in my own time on topics that I like at the pace that I dictate. I should note that I am able to follow that approach because my areas of interest do not require lab equipment besides a workstation and notepads to scribble things on, my research is in ML and it won't yield anything remotely as ground breaking as Dr. Karikó's.
  • lrem 6y ago
    Now, how would you tell if overall productivity went down? The problem at hand is that we measure "overall productivity" via the proxy of "the number of articles a panel of other scientists considered interesting enough". Everyone who has dipped a toe in academia can tell you how bad that is at even remotely correlating with producing actual value. But, the actual value of a piece of research often comes to light decades after it has been first published. Rutherford has been at it since 1911, but we only got first value out of his theory in 1940s. Man-millenia have been invested in the meantime. Would this be any better, if all of them had to spend half of their time working on securing funding?
  • ta988 6y ago
    The productivity going down is a good thing in my opinion, thats how you can free some effort so you can focus it on quality.
  • throwaway316943 6y ago
    Put meaningful bounties on the things you want solved.
    • bernulli 6y ago
      The thing is that we often don't even know it. Einstein did not solve a pressing problem with his theories of relativity.
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Well, it's no surprise that people optimize to the metric that's available, right? Private labs aim to make production things. Public labs aim to collect grants. The only real hope for modern science is a business with a long-term view. That's because that business is only rewarded if their thing works. If there was ever a time when public academics worked for science, it is no longer that today. Now it is occupied by grant vultures. This makes sense since we never rewarded science. We always rewarded a proxy. And in any sphere where you do that, eventually the proxy becomes the target as more sophisticated strategies evolve and each generation of participants gets better at optimizing against the proxy.
  • tensor 6y ago
    The follow on from this is rather more problematic. If you are prioritizing production things, then it means you'll severely limit the topics you explore. Anything that would take too long to get to market, or is too risky, or is too theoretical, will never be prioritized. This is the reason for the tenure system, to give true freedom to explore novel and future oriented work. Things that won't pay off for decades, if ever. Ironically, the grant system does cut against it, especially with some grants now looking for more near term impact. Also, publish or perish cuts against this, because it optimizes for quantity rather than quality. Similar to industry labs, risky work or things that will take too long to get to publication are now discouraged. Instead we have a plethora of weak, simple, and short publications, often duplicating previous work due to a lack of consistency in terminology.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      mRNA vaccines took ten years before they "made it" and they needed a black swan event to really take off. Moderna IPO'd eight years in. I think this is a false premise that we have. That there is any long-term science going on at all in government labs that wouldn't happen in private labs. It's conventional wisdom but not likely to be true. The market is very sophisticated now. There are players who make decisions outside of any human's life. There are instruments to insure against hundred year events, and it is possible to price both rare and far off successes. If you've peeked behind the curtain you know there's a lot of fake science there, including photoshoppery of microscope images that's now considered science. It's out there, I've seen it, I know it's real. Public labs have decoupled success from knowledge and, in doing so, many long-term fundamental science projects are now fake.
• tchalla 6y ago
  Here’s a prior article and HN thread on “Managing Academia” and it’s conclusion. > If a job is complex, multifaceted and involves subtle trade-offs, the best approach is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14021885
  • yholio 6y ago
    Please, that's such a copout. To "hire good people" you need to 1. attract and 2. identify them. If you don't create attractive conditions, good people will go elsewhere; if you do offer, say, financial incentives and personal prestige, bad people will flock too, so you need to identify good people. Further, the whole show is dynamic, good people can turn bad if wrong incentives exist, or you can lose them if more attractive alternatives present themselves. So it all becomes a process problem, how to select, retain and reward good people. Which is exactly the problem impact factors, grants, publication metrics etc. try to solve, in an objective and reproducible manner. You might have a better system and results, but it's relevant only if it's not based on you personal nose and intuition to "hire good people".
    • gww 6y ago
      This is particularly a problem for academic labs looking for bioinformatics specialists. Many of the bioinformatians I know with strong stats backgrounds have taken jobs at banks etc where the pay and benefits are significantly better. It's hard for academics to offer their staff something competitive to retain them. Moreover, people are realizing that so much of medical research is less about the patients and more about using their samples to get big papers with little impact on their prognosis
      • inciampati 6y ago
        The best strategy to hire and train good bioinformaticians is to let them live where they want and involve them in world-spanning virtual groups. Pay them as well as can be allowed, which is not so great in terms of their fair market value in other fields, but with life flexibility that gives intangible benefits that are awesome. It's been said that having time flexibility with one's work is the surest way to increase our happiness and lifespan. We need to move past the hierarchical model of staff/leadership to a fluid one in which everyone is respected and does the roles that they can and want to fill. This can happen in a distributed manner. Labs and groups which take a flexible attitude to these work relationships are and will be successful. Eventually it will catch on.
• auggierose 6y ago
  It's pretty easy to see who is a top star (because they have continuous highest-quality output), and who will never deliver anything worthwhile. The trouble is the continuum between those two extremes. This domain is dominated by politics, endless grant applications, bureaucracy. Nobody can really tell where you belong in this continuum, maybe not even you yourself. And I also don't believe that academia is the best place to pursue your ideas anymore, anyway.
  • ta988 6y ago
    Unfortunately for some fields it is difficult to do anything outside of a lab. And startups are not a good solution either with the incentive to make money fast that shift the incentives. I would be interested in knowing what other places you are thinking about.
    • auggierose 6y ago
      Yes. I don't have a good solution either. In the end you need to somehow get the money to do what you want to do. That may be within academia or not. In my case, I am just doing freelance jobs and reserving as much time as I manage to do the research I want to do. I don't need many resources, and being able to access sci-hub helps a lot.
  • andi999 6y ago
    Well, top stars are obvious a couple of years in their career. Or do you think they are obvious from the beginning?
    • auggierose 6y ago
      I am talking about the ones where it is obvious that they are or will be doing exceptional work. That can be 10 years into their career, or at year 0 of their career. When this is not obvious, which most of the time it isn't, that's where the tough to judge continuum lies.
  • glitchc 6y ago
    Define “highest-quality.” Is it publishing in the most prestigious journals? Obtaining the most prestigious grants? See what I did there? Ground-breaking research often doesn’t qualify for either because it’s too new and scientists on those committees don’t understand it.
• cs702 6y ago
  > universities ... expect faculty in the medical schools to pay their own way with either clinical work or external research funding. This puts tremendous financial pressure on eager young medical researchers, sometimes leading them not to the projects that are most needed or that they are most passionate about, but to the projects that will get them funding. Sometimes it feels as if the current system we have in the US is the worst ever devised for solving the "long-term research" problem --- that is, except for all the other systems that have been tried in the past. How do we, as a society, do better by scientists pursuing research that could take many years or decades to pay off?
  • cloogshicer 6y ago
    And might not even pay off at all. I think that is the real problem. There is tremendous risk involved in research.
  • dantheman 6y ago
    Have higher standards and fund less science? If you have a million dollars to spend, you'll be careful and pay attention; if you have a billion, you'll be looking at crude aggregate metrics.
    • ta988 6y ago
      If you fund less science, you will favor older researchers (that cost more) because they are the ones thay can produce more and have inertia from previous research project, and they know how to game the system. Thats a big issue with the NIH (in US) that they are trying desperately to solve. Unfortunately, they also often favor and give too much weight to old researchers in their grant panels and they tend to favor (not always consciously) people that think like them.
    • clairity 6y ago
      this is why we decentralize so that that billion can instead be a thousand millions, and we try a bunch of options in parallel rather than consolidating power in a flawed few, no matter how accomplished those few are (statistically, the consolidated few will always be relatively flawed to the parallel many).
• dstick 6y ago
  What a heartwarming story. I hope Katalin gets to read it :)
• sjg007 6y ago
  Most of the Nobel prizes are from some obscure unfunded idea. mRNA vaccines will win the Nobel prize too.
  • ta988 6y ago
    Nobel prize, Noble prize is something else.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      Thanks.
• thayne 6y ago
  I am a casualty of this. I was originally intending to follow an academic career, until I discovered that my career would be dependent on my ability to secure grants. Something that if I was not bad at (which I think is unlikely), would at least be extremely stressful for me. It isn't the only reason I decided to to switch to being a software engineer, but it is a major reason.
  • dekhn 6y ago
    Me too; I had my first NIH R01 turned down without a score and left for industry (which has allowed me to do more scientific work than academia ever did). I only realized later that most PIs don't get their first NIH R01 approved until ~10 years older than I was at the time. What's ridiculous is the amounts of these basic grants that beginning scientists are trying to get are tiny- basically 1 person-year salary.
    • ramraj07 6y ago
      So surprisingly, many of my friends got their first R01s approved in the last year or two. Some actually didn't even have a good publication record or pedigree or institutional position. One even got 3! But was told that the committees are being lenient with first time appplicants. Somehow that feels worse? Like a heroin dealer giving the first shot at a discount? Glad I got out. I'm still hell bent on finding a way to do research (garage lab? Startup?) But f*k academia and universities. No way in hell I'm going to tacitly condone their ways by being part of it whether I can be successful or not.
      • crawfordcomeaux 6y ago
        I'm working to create a community model with a communal research lab. It's meant to meet my needs as a researcher while also removing pressures/norms from capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. What do you want to research and what's in your way?
        • kayhi 6y ago
• diego_moita 6y ago
  Dr. Katalin Karikó, the scientist mentioned in the article, is now a senior vice-president at BioNTech, the German company that developed the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. She is also adjunct professor at the same University of Pennsylvania, where these events happened.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  When I hear a story like this, the first thing I want to know about is how the incentives are structured. The author makes a great point, which is that medical research is expected to pay its own way. So the next question I'm looking to answer is "Why is that?" What is it about the way we structure this research that made it make sense to U Penn to underfund mRNA research?
  • jpeloquin 6y ago
    Not all medical research works exactly as described in the article. Reading between the lines, Dr. Karikó had what's called a "research faculty" appointment, which basically means you don't need to teach but do need to pay your salary (and the salary of anyone employed in your lab) from grants. This is sometimes called a "soft money" position to reflect its precarious nature. This is in contrast to standing faculty, who are paid 9 months of their salary from the university operating budget, but must teach during those 9 months, leaving less time for research. The research faculty appointments exist because NIH grant money is plentiful, allowing more positions to exist than can be supported from the university operating budget alone. Essentially, researchers are permitted to bet their job on their ability to obtain grant money. Turn off the supply of grant money and the research faculty positions go away too. Most would not be replaced by standing faculty positions. The depressing reality is that it is mostly impossible to predict which basic research projects will prove to be essential in 25 years. I think people try anyway because basing funding awards / rejections on a nominally objective evaluation of project importance lends some emotional distance to the process. If hospitals were paid by patient outcome instead by procedure, it may create a financial incentive to use some of the organization's operating budget for applied research. But that wouldn't do much to help basic research with unclear future application such as the mRNA work. https://catalog.upenn.edu/faculty-handbook/ii/ii-b/ https://catalog.upenn.edu/faculty-handbook/ii/ii-b/
• Ulrich2 6y ago
  > 2015 I saw she had moved to the private sector Strange that the author does not mention she joined BioNTech: https://biontech.de/sites/default/files/2019-08/20140202_BioNTech_Katalin%20Kariko_ENG_final.pdf https://biontech.de/sites/default/files/2019-08/20140202_Bio...
• dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Wow, there is a lot of negativity towards science in this thread. Um, yeah, it could be better. But it's mostly a matter of personal courage. Of course institutional funding is not the best incentive for the best science. Good science comes from courageous individuals in courageous communities. Not financial incentives. Good science takes courage.
  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    We would rightfully mock a company that said that its turnover problem, its innovation problem, or its project failure problem was due to a lack of courage among its workers.
    • dr_dshiv 6y ago
      But your idea that science is a company is a grossly inadequate metaphor. That's not what science is!
      • MattGaiser 6y ago
        So what would you compare it to then? The startup ecosystem?
        • dr_dshiv 6y ago
          Philosophical advancement of the human species
          • MattGaiser 6y ago
            So how is that not important to de-risk?
  • capitol_ 6y ago
    This is a really horrible statement about why we don't pay scientist a fair wage for their work. I really hope that at some point in the future people stop internalize this sort of abuse regarding their careers.
• weinzierl 6y ago
  This reminds me if the story of Biontech cofounder and CEO Uğur Şahin. Being an immigrant child in Germany his teacher would no recommend him for high school despite his good grades. Şahin said that he only ended up in high school because a neighbor of his intervened at the school.
  • vinay427 6y ago
    For those who are unaware of the German system, "high school" here presumably means the "Gymnasium" or similar track that prepares students for higher education, as opposed to the vocational dual education track that includes vocational schooling and apprenticeships. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system
    • a_bonobo 6y ago
      Yes, you're right, the German system is a bit weird. In a nutshell: At the end of primary school your primary teacher recommends whether you should go to Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium. H. and R. ends after year 10 after which you're supposed to go to vocational school, but you can also switch to G if you're good enough. G ends after year 13 after which you can go to vocational school or university. H and R cannot go to university after year 10, they have to switch to G. The primary school teacher's recommendation is usually not binding but most people follow it. There's a lot of proven bias against children of immigrants. For example, often these kids' language skills in primary school are poor leading to generally poor grades, but that could be fixed with a bit of extra work. But the teachers often don't have time or patience for that, there's no extra money for additional private teaching, so off to Hauptschule or Realschule it is. Edit: A German-language paper comparing migration background, social standing of parents, and post-primary school recommendation is here: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/60033/1/717884732.pdf https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/60033/1/717884732.pd... In this data, the social standing/education of the parents has a big impact too, children of immigrant parents who went to higher education have an equally high recommendation to go to G., while kids of parents who had worse education do much worse in the post-primary school recommendations
• LeanderK 6y ago
  I have been thinking recently how to reform the science system here in germany, which is somewhat similar to the system in the US. What I think is impossible is to completely eliminate the grant chasing for the early career scientist. It's just that there's more supply than demand in a lot of sciences and not everyone can make it, if we try to give everyone a grant we end up with grants that are not really paying for anything. What I think would be an improvement would be a different system where there's a clear path from grant-based funding to a continuous stream of funding, with different funding levels, where one gets periodically reviewed and demoted/continued/raised, so your funding does not completely dry up after a few year (I imagined it like the sports leagues, where you play in different levels and depending on your performance you get relegated from the league) and you can really plan long-term. So one can continue the competitiveness and the role of funding bodies/institutions where the scientist work at while giving them the ability to plan long-term and maybe pursue more risky ideas. There will always be the ones that fall through the cracks. We somehow need to figure out who to give the money to and we will end up with someone who deserved but did not get the money. I don't know who reviews the grant in the US, but here at least with some funding bodies the scientist manage it themselves (dfg) and I don't think one can easily improve on it.
  • lumost 6y ago
    This is a common problem in many commodity markets. If creating new supply is inexpensive, and all market participants have functionally equivalent technology and operational expertise. New supply will always emerge to eat away any margin that a market participant may have. (Think Restaurants, farming, small-time delivery/construction, uber driving) If you follow this through to the extreme you end up with a vicious cycle of boom/bust where any demand opportunity that emerges is crushed under 10x the supply increase. The market becomes unstable as new participants have clean balance sheets and older participants go into debt that cannot be paid. Supply is only maintained through the addition of new market participants willing to lose their capital or burn their balance sheet on debt in a private parallel to the tragedy of the commons. One traditional solution that keeps these markets stable, and market participants from simply bankrupting every few years is to introduce an artificial supply cap. In construction, and small business markets this task is often performed by the zoning board, or a local licensing board. In the case of larger markets participants may form cartels such as in OPEC, Maple Syrup, or international shipping. In the case of science, the task of supply control traditional fell on admissions committees and the availability of permanent tenure tracked professorships. This mechanism broke down with the introduction of non-tenure track positions, and the external funding of grad-students. Universities now have every incentive to flood the market with vastly more scientists than can reasonably be funded - which combined with the inherent riskiness of scientific research means we have a combination of science "bankruptcies" and low-risk, low-quality academic research to show for it. I'd much rather see fewer tenured professors ridiculed for their oddball research than an army of post-docs and grad students performing meaningless research which is suitable for publishing.
• odyssey7 6y ago
  Is it counterproductive that we expect researchers to work in universities and become professors? It seems like there should be more outlets for the calling. Our universities are proving to be a bottleneck. I see how there is an often-natural relationship between cultivating knowledge and disseminating it to students. However, we need and have more prospective researchers than universities are willing or able to support.
  • ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    The issue is that there are too many barriers to commercialisation and the current stakeholders have too much power. The profitable fields like medicine strictly limit the number of people accepted (the official explanation is that there aren't enough residencies, the unspoken reason is that the American Medical Association wants to keep salaries up) and FDA drug approval laws err on the side of caution; better to have 10 people die due to disease and lack of access to treatments than to have one person die due to a faulty drug that the FDA let through. This attitude and approach means that the time to market is huge and highly resource intensive. The COVID vaccines were designed in less than a day. It took a year to reach market even under the ridiculously accelerated approval pace.
    • earhart 6y ago
      A close friend of mine made a career out of shepherding drugs through the FDA approval process. They’ve stated multiple times that in their professional experience, every single regulation is there because some asshat tried to cut corners so they could profit from snake oil. Additionally, the RNA vaccines were somewhat novel. In the future, maybe (hopefully!) we’ll be able to speed up the process, but for now, do you really want to give the entire population an experimental substance, with no tracking, with our woeful medical system, and see how it turns out, hoping to get lucky? Bearing in mind that the number of people you’d have to vaccinate for herd immunity is much larger than the number of people who’re likely to have a problem from Covid-19? I do grok that bureaucrats are incentivized to follow the precautionary principle, simply because people equate actions to responsibilities for outcomes and don’t tend to weight inaction so heavily. But overall, I’m really glad the FDA was so careful, and because of that care, I’ll happily get the shot once it’s available to low-risk people like myself; I’m very pro-vaccines, but even I wouldn’t have taken it a year ago.
• suc_syn 6y ago
  I am in the same position. First completely self driven research project end in two different academic spend about 80k each fighting over which of them controlled the IP (the decided to share it), and totally fail to commercialize it (the both kept asking me how to do it while I had zero financial incentive). Second after a successful grant funding project which I was told I could not PI because I had not yet completed my PhD, while I was the lead inventor and developer on for 2 years and getting zero naming on the publications. I left academic to make almost twice as much at a soul crushingly boring job. I really felt like I was working on something important but hated the grant funding cycles (I was told if I wanted one I would have to write it in my own time and could not ask for support), and was tired of seeing people up and down the ladder claim ownership of my ideas and work.
  • exporectomy 6y ago
    Maybe if someone's passionate enough they can fund their own science? Surely you could have earned 80k quickly enough in your private sector job. Similar to poets and artists who usually get paid nothing for a long time/ever. Oh, maybe I misread you. They spent 80k just on fighting for IP rights?
• trhway 6y ago
  >It is unbelievably, brutally difficult for all of the other non-science skills that are needed but not explicitly taught: writing grants (“grantsmanship”), getting invited to speak at conferences, building collaborative research relationships, having the political awareness to attract allies and mentors within a department or university who can help find support for you. it is the same everywhere - be it political/government system or who gets to be a big architect, director or VP in a tech company. An ounce of political savvy and BS skills beats a kilogram of technical skills and expertise.
• TheWaywardProf 6y ago
  I am in the middle of this right now; new professor at top-10 university in CS (with a PhD in biomedicine). Funding science is a frequently-debated topic and everyone is aware there is a problem, but one part is that in the US we have combined four different organizations: federally-funded scientific research organizations, post-highschool education, vocational training (doctors, lawyers), and professional sports. People think a LOT about the broken science incentives and write a lot about it, but progress is hard. On one hand, it's hard to facilitate what you can't measure, but many pushes towards scientific "metrics" feel a bit like trying to quantify artistic output: is the number of paintings/sculptures/etc the right thing to evaluate people on? What about popularity? What about popularity amongst art critics vs the general public? The more I think about it the more I think we need to explicitly recognize the need for a diversity of sources _and_ structures. For people who don't know, here's an outline of funding sources. The metrics will be in grad-student-years (think ~$70k) because overhead/indirect-costs/etc. vary wildly. Yes, most of these orgs (esp the NSF) just want to fund labor, and there's an expectation that a lot of it is "training" labor. - NSF: The big one for non-biomedical STEM, maybe $8B/yr. "normal" grants tend to be small, say 2 grad students for three years. But once you get the grant you can do whatever you want with it within reason. The grants are reviewed by "study sessions" where a team of your peers sit around and rank the grants. - NIH: Budget is $32B/yr (4x the NSF), and very clinically focused. The staple, the R01, funds ~4 PhD students for 5 years. These are very hard to get and generally go to more senior PIs. It's common for faculty to get their first R01 AFTER they have tenure (7-years into the job, say 40 years old). Once you get the grant you can do whatever you want with it within reason. But the bar for getting one often requires you to have "preliminary data" which is effectively 30% of what you were proposing anyway. As funding gets tighter and more people apply, orgs have responded by becoming more conservative, pushing these preliminary-data-expectations even higher. Note that the NIH is very aware of these problems, and is trying to address them, but the entire infrastructure is dedicated to effectively brutal stack-ranking. Every time they suggest things like "maybe famous professors shouldn't have more than 6 of these grants" there's a lot of community pushback. Maybe they're not wrong? Maybe it is better to give Ed Boyden or George Church effectively a blank check. - DOD (non-DARPA) : Various orgs like the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Research Labs, etc. fund a LOT of basic science. Each one has several long-standing "program managers" who are former scientists that have an agenda for the sorts of things they want to fund. A lot of this funding is dependent on how excited you can get the PM. Think of this like pitching an Angel investor. If you get in good with a PM they can fund you at a decent rate for a long time! - DARPA : I have a soft spot in my heart for DARPA because the model is so different from the other orgs. A DARPA Program Manager 1. can only work there for 4 years (to prevent personal relationships between PMs and "performers" getting too cosy" 2. Generally is in charge of one to three programs during the course of their tenure. A "program" is a very specific research thrust with a lot of money behind it ($20-80m). They are CONTRACTS, not grants, meaning that the PM expects you to actually hit deliverables AND they can yank the funding at anytime. But they have had some great hits and deep pockets. When I almost went to be a PM it was pitched as "like being CEO of your own science startup". I don't think that's quite right, but it's not totally wrong either. Other fun facts include it can take two years to get a program off the ground, meaning the PM that STARTS a program is probably not the one that finishes it, so three years into your project you suddenly have a new boss. - HHMI Investigators: The Howard Hughes Medical Institute is a MASSIVE philanthropic organization that funds biomedical research in the US. Two main mechanisms come to mind: HHMI Investigators, where they identify promising young scientists in academia and give them like $10m ($2m/5years? $1m/10 years? not sure the exact numbers) so they DONT HAVE TO CHASE GRANTS. Many HHMI investigators go on to win Nobel prizes and stuff, although the causal influence is murky (did the HHMI money let them do great work or is HHMI just good at picking winners?) - HHMI Janelia : Evidently HHMI had so much money that they opened a CAMPUS in the mid-2000s outside of DC where they have 40 labs. Each Janelia "group leader" gets up to 6 employees (mostly postdocs, staff, a few grad students) and effectively an unlimited budget BUT you are evaluated based on publications/resources used. That is, unlike at a university (where if you spend $10m to get one nature paper, it's great! you got a nature paper! And in fact the university _likes_ that you spent more money because they get a cut) Janelia cares about the resources. Also groups can't grow huge (because of headcount limit) so you're encouraged to invest in capital and tech over labor. The catch? NO TENURE. You're renewed every 5 years, and whole research programs are sunset over 15 year timespans (this is new). - National Labs: A lot of great science happens at national labs, but due to their legacy of nuclear stewardship they can be difficult places to do science (men with guns at the front of the complex!) Still if you're looking for a place to do mostly-science without chasing grants TOO much, and are willing to trade some autonomy to do good work, they seem like a reasonable place. They invest a lot in HPC as well if you're into that sort of thing. Not that much biomedicine though. I love that there are so many different options, but I still think it's bad that SO MUCH of it happens in straight-up university settings. As I said I'm a new professor and the overhead of teaching and grant writing, coupled with the pandemic, really have me down and brainstorming other options.
• k__ 6y ago
  Don't want to know what better discoveries than mRNA vaccines it DID actually cost us.
• SMAAART 6y ago
  Great article.
• tobmlt 6y ago
  I want to say something about how messed up this system is... I spent many years as a grad student in economics and especially engineering. Not sure what to say though, my trajectory was pretty non-standard. From where I sat, the academic path looked like a meat grinder, and Econ. and Eng. are easier to break into academia than, e.g. biology, I have no doubt. Aside, I’ve found my fill of god awful meat grinders in industry before and since, but I have no doubt the “existential career threat by default, high probability of failure no matter how good you are” methodology is the wrong way for civilization to progress.
• mathgladiator 6y ago
  As a math person and technical person, I find myself so glad that I stayed out of academics and dropped out of my masters program to start a company. This story is exceptionally inspiring because it speaks that we need people that are passionate to focus without worry of basics. We need true believers to throw their lives at a hard problem. The challenge is money. It is so easy to waste. It is so easy to squander on dead ends. This ease makes people conservative and less bold because we make it so hard to get. It's clear we don't have a good system. I had hopes that I could pursue my passions within big companies by climbing the ladder, and that hasn't worked out. Fortunately for myself, I can retire at any moment and throw my life at my silly programming language: http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/ Perhaps, there is wisdom in teaching finance to everyone such that people can focus on productive existing problems that yield fruit. This helps contextualize people towards present day concerns and the nature of problems. Then, if people leverage the beauty of wall st then more scientists can throw their lives towards good problems. I don't know, but I'm sure many of us wish we could align funding with passions without the need to build a company.
  • reasonabl_human 6y ago
    Curious to know more about your career journey, have you written about it somewhere before? Currently discerning career path and am sure to face a number of the decisions you’ve navigated successfully
    • mathgladiator 6y ago
      http://jeffrey.io/my-story.html http://jeffrey.io/my-story.html I intend to consolidate a lot of my writings at https://darklord.substack.com/ https://darklord.substack.com/
• Skyy93 6y ago
  Science these days has many problems and this is one of them. Securing grants to finance your further way is crucial. But mostly hard work is only appreciated if there are good, valid and reproducable results. I discovered another problem while wrting my master thesis and it's also pretty hard to determine good and valid results from papers. There are so many papers out there that are not reproducable especially in computer science. Or the paper is missing very important facts that would help you to reproduce results. I think there should be a system to remove or mark papers as non-reproducable to prevent wasted time.
• dotdi 6y ago
  I have a degree in Molecular Biology but I've switched careers very specifically because of what is described in this article: you roll a die, it shows the wrong number and now your whole career is in jeopardy. I just decided that it was not worth putting in years of 80 hour weeks into a system where at some point you can just "disappear" due to reasons very much out of your control. Just writing these paragraphs reminds me how f****** broken academia is.
• atemerev 6y ago
  Went from 15 years experience as a financial software engineer to a junior researcher position in the local university, while working towards a biomedical PhD. Was never happier.
• aaron695 6y ago
  > Our brutal science system Brutal or setup for lazy bureaucrats who don't want to work the brutal hours is takes to be an outstanding scientist?
• leoh 6y ago
  Avery Oswald died without winning the Nobel, in spite of proving that DNA is the hereditary material (it was thought that amino acids were at the time). Many held him back including his own supervisors. Science is sometimes shit.
  • 2sk21 6y ago
    Yes, this is a very sad story and here is a passage from Siddhartha Mukherjee's wonderful book "The Gene" ...Avery was still denied the Nobel Prize because Einar Hammarsten, the influential Swedish chemist, refused to believe that DNA could carry genetic material...
• letitgo12345 6y ago
  Flip side -- the pioneering research may not have been possible without govt funding of science through a grant based system. Imo the right conclusion here is to increase govt funding massively. Unclear to me how to not do it based on a grant system. Even in the industry you need to do project proposals to keep your team funded.
• whitymcwhite 6y ago
  Presumably it is a hard problem to identify good scientists. And many people want to make a career in academia, so the competition is "brutal".
• known 6y ago
  You should not go to medical school https://archive.is/2ABTX https://archive.is/2ABTX
• nexthash 6y ago
  The academic process at a research university from student to researcher to professor is cutthroat. There are so many obstacles in the way: classes designed to weed you out, GPA requirements, the grad school application process, financial instability as a PHD candidate, difficult job opportunities after the doctorate, fighting for funding and tenure, and more. Major reform is needed to progress science, because the current system is a failure pipeline that hurts both researchers and the university (which is shooting itself in the foot).
• count_chockula 6y ago
  Clickbait. All these normative comments sound similar. They don't call it work for nothing. Stellar scientists make breakthroughs regardless of obstacles. Just because you get a piled high and deep doesn't mean you are capable of breakthroughs. Not everyone is stellar.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  Unfortunately this isn't restricted to science. Just about any project that can't show metric X is increasing at the next quarterly/annual review is going to have some difficulty proceeding. Truly massive projects that can be measured in large fractions of a human lifespan are exceptionally rare.
  • eru 6y ago
    > Truly massive projects that can be measured in large fractions of a human lifespan are exceptionally rare. We still get massive projects, but they proceed like evolution: every step has to have a benefit. (Even if the part that step plays in the final product is not what gives it the immediate benefit.)
• dd_roger 6y ago
  This is probably going to be unpopular on this forum, but why is everyone assuming that having more researchers is desirable / needed in the first place? I think scientific research is completely bloated already and there's no need to provide work for even more researchers who will either (1) research an already popular subject where ever growing funding yields ever disminishing returns or (2) research an utterly futile subject that serves no purpose beside justifying the researcher's salary.