5 ms·

The solutions to this problem are completely obvious, and right in front of everyone's faces. The problem is it doesn't fit people's ideology so they simply re

The solutions to this problem are completely obvious, and right in front of everyone's faces. The problem is it doesn't fit people's ideology so they simply refuse to see it. But anyway, the article states clearly that Kariko floundered for years until Drew Weissman working at the _privately_ funded University of Pennsylvania picked her up. You wouldn't have even needed to look up if the University of Pennsylvania was privately funded, because just about every important breakthrough in science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American university. There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together. It's right in front of everyone's faces, and no one is talking about it. It is seriously and elephant in the room. Then the article comes up with a "solution" like this >My answer? Bend over backward to fund a more diverse range of people and ideas, even deliberately including ideas that are currently perceived as unpopular, unworkable, obscure, and the like. After all, many scientific discoveries can be traced back to origins that didn’t seem promising Seriously, is this the best you can do? Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it.

mattkrause 5y ago
"Privately-funded" is not a particularly meaningful distinction when the NIH pays for the vast majority of academic biomedical research--including most of the researchers' salaries. (UCSD, Berkely, UMich, and University of Utah, among others, are research powerhouses too).
sdenton4 5y ago
"There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together." Messenger bias?
LeanderK 5y ago
> There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together. It's right in front of everyone's faces, and no one is talking about it. It is seriously and elephant in the room. this is just not true. They just hire the best of the best but if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research. And most of the time the basic breakthroughs came from universities you didn't think of or you didn't even know.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  >if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research This is simply untrue. When on deep-dives into any kind of research on sees an ocean full of universities polluting the sea with absolute crap. The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse. For example, I know researchers who simply will not bother to read anything written by anyone working for a Chinese university.
  - LeanderK 5y ago
    It's a bit like the glass half full/half empty, right? Nearly everything that's not crap is also published at a publicly funded university. Private universities also publish crap (including the famous MIT, I've read a disappointingly bad paper with an MIT first author last week). But this: > The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse is definitely untrue. You are thinking too much of hollywood-movies, this is not reality. Just think of ML and Deep Learning. The university of toronto is publicly funded, as is the technical university of Munich, where schmidhuber (and hochreiter) produced a lot of the groundbreaking research we are all relying on. Or the university of montreal with joshua bengio. And the technical university of munich is not even in the states! SHOCKING! No private universities to be seen anywhere.
bsmith89 5y ago
The outright falsehood of this statement: > just about every important breakthrough in science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American university. Really makes it difficult to take the rest of this comment seriously. In case the ways it is "not even wrong" need to be detailed: 1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded by public money doled out by the NIH, NSF, and other national organizations. The public/private status of the university has little bearing on that, as most university research funding comes through these agencies, with something like 50% generally going directly to the universities themselves. Research at "private" universities as it currently exists would not survive without this mechanism. > something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together 2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. How do you define breakthroughs? Press releases from university PR departments? Patents? Either way (or by some third—hopefully measurable—way that I'll allow you to define for us) I guarantee that you need to go much further down the list of private universities before you match the output of "all publicly funded universities around the world put together". I imagine that you have in mind important (and/or well publicized) advancements from MIT/Stanford/Harvard and are forgetting about the enormous amount of research output from public universities (which include but are not limited to Berkeley, CalTech, U of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, U of Texas, Ohio State, etc.) > Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it. 3. As you hardly cite any evidence for this, I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities). So my question to _you_ is whether this comment is motivated by a knee-jerk anti-government reaction, or if I'm entirely misunderstanding where you got these ideas?
- mrjangles 5y ago
  >1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded... At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too. These grants are usually very successful. This does not disprove my point in any way, in fact, it _is_ my point >2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. You have to understand that it is in the interest of the tens of thousands of people doing work doing non-sense research to pretend their research is important. Just because you hear about them telling you how important their worki is in the media, doesn't mean it is. Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced by just a hand full of people. I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable. >I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities). Yes, that is my point...? You are calling my comment a knee jerk reaction yet you have responded without seeming to understand any of it.
mattkrause 5y ago
I think this section is calling for a more diversified portfolio of ideas. There's certainly a lot of fad-chasing in biomedicine. There are strong incentives to flock to the latest technique (RNAi, optogenetics, single-cell-seq, organoids) or stick close to an established hypothesis (beta-amyloids for Alzheimer). It might better if there were some countervailing incentives to stick with older techniques, or break away from established dogma. For example, optogenetics has been a very powerful tool for understanding the brain, but it also means that we've moved away from many animal models in favor of mice, where the tools are most tractable. As a result, we know more about brains that are, in some ways, less relevant to human health. A-beta, on the other hand, has been an absolute tire-fire and the field should have shifted ages ago. The NIH tends not to 'steer' the field in particular directions, but they could. DARPA programs, for example, sometimes explicitly fund several competing ideas to see if a clear winner emerges. On top of all that, we should also be building a workforce of diverse researchers.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  I think my point is that private money already goes to diverse ideas. A system where the government will only provide money if there is already private money involved would work well. e.g., the government will match any private money 2 to 1. Then, for example, the government can take a cut of patents that result (to prevent grants simply subsidizing research that would have occurred anyway).
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily true. Industry is mostly interested in things that are almost ready to be translated into a product. Foundations can be very conservative (and the grant sizes are often much smaller). Anyway, mechanisms like what you're proposing do exist (MITACS in Canada, for example). However, the problem is the other end of the pipeline. How can you pitch investors on something that might not be a product for decades, if at all? Government R&D primes that pump.
sampo 5y ago
> something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs You are mistaking privately owned universities for privately funded. Scientists in privately owned American universities still mostly apply and receive funding from public (federally owned) funding agencies.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  Yes, yes! Your comment actually clarifies my point. I'm not saying money touched by the government gets evil magic attached to it that corrupts everything. I'm saying government money is allocated badly and corruptly by default. Except, America does a much better job, why? In America these privately owned universities use their own money to hire the best people. Private money does an infinitely better job of selecting the best people than government money. Then the government notes the historical success of these private institutions and sends funding their way, which the excellent individuals they chose can use to create excellent research. This system has made America produce orders of magnitude better science than the rest of the world put together. My point is that the question of how the government can best direct money has already been solved. Let the private sphere decide who is the best.

mattkrause 5y ago

"Privately-funded" is not a particularly meaningful distinction when the NIH pays for the vast majority of academic biomedical research--including most of the researchers' salaries. (UCSD, Berkely, UMich, and University of Utah, among others, are research powerhouses too).

sdenton4 5y ago

"There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together." Messenger bias?

LeanderK 5y ago

> There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together. It's right in front of everyone's faces, and no one is talking about it. It is seriously and elephant in the room. this is just not true. They just hire the best of the best but if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research. And most of the time the basic breakthroughs came from universities you didn't think of or you didn't even know.

mrjangles 5y ago
>if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research This is simply untrue. When on deep-dives into any kind of research on sees an ocean full of universities polluting the sea with absolute crap. The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse. For example, I know researchers who simply will not bother to read anything written by anyone working for a Chinese university.
- LeanderK 5y ago
  It's a bit like the glass half full/half empty, right? Nearly everything that's not crap is also published at a publicly funded university. Private universities also publish crap (including the famous MIT, I've read a disappointingly bad paper with an MIT first author last week). But this: > The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse is definitely untrue. You are thinking too much of hollywood-movies, this is not reality. Just think of ML and Deep Learning. The university of toronto is publicly funded, as is the technical university of Munich, where schmidhuber (and hochreiter) produced a lot of the groundbreaking research we are all relying on. Or the university of montreal with joshua bengio. And the technical university of munich is not even in the states! SHOCKING! No private universities to be seen anywhere.

bsmith89 5y ago

The outright falsehood of this statement: > just about every important breakthrough in science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American university. Really makes it difficult to take the rest of this comment seriously. In case the ways it is "not even wrong" need to be detailed: 1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded by public money doled out by the NIH, NSF, and other national organizations. The public/private status of the university has little bearing on that, as most university research funding comes through these agencies, with something like 50% generally going directly to the universities themselves. Research at "private" universities as it currently exists would not survive without this mechanism. > something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together 2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. How do you define breakthroughs? Press releases from university PR departments? Patents? Either way (or by some third—hopefully measurable—way that I'll allow you to define for us) I guarantee that you need to go much further down the list of private universities before you match the output of "all publicly funded universities around the world put together". I imagine that you have in mind important (and/or well publicized) advancements from MIT/Stanford/Harvard and are forgetting about the enormous amount of research output from public universities (which include but are not limited to Berkeley, CalTech, U of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, U of Texas, Ohio State, etc.) > Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it. 3. As you hardly cite any evidence for this, I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities). So my question to _you_ is whether this comment is motivated by a knee-jerk anti-government reaction, or if I'm entirely misunderstanding where you got these ideas?

mrjangles 5y ago
>1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded... At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too. These grants are usually very successful. This does not disprove my point in any way, in fact, it _is_ my point >2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. You have to understand that it is in the interest of the tens of thousands of people doing work doing non-sense research to pretend their research is important. Just because you hear about them telling you how important their worki is in the media, doesn't mean it is. Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced by just a hand full of people. I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable. >I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities). Yes, that is my point...? You are calling my comment a knee jerk reaction yet you have responded without seeming to understand any of it.

mattkrause 5y ago

I think this section is calling for a more diversified portfolio of ideas. There's certainly a lot of fad-chasing in biomedicine. There are strong incentives to flock to the latest technique (RNAi, optogenetics, single-cell-seq, organoids) or stick close to an established hypothesis (beta-amyloids for Alzheimer). It might better if there were some countervailing incentives to stick with older techniques, or break away from established dogma. For example, optogenetics has been a very powerful tool for understanding the brain, but it also means that we've moved away from many animal models in favor of mice, where the tools are most tractable. As a result, we know more about brains that are, in some ways, less relevant to human health. A-beta, on the other hand, has been an absolute tire-fire and the field should have shifted ages ago. The NIH tends not to 'steer' the field in particular directions, but they could. DARPA programs, for example, sometimes explicitly fund several competing ideas to see if a clear winner emerges. On top of all that, we should also be building a workforce of diverse researchers.

mrjangles 5y ago
I think my point is that private money already goes to diverse ideas. A system where the government will only provide money if there is already private money involved would work well. e.g., the government will match any private money 2 to 1. Then, for example, the government can take a cut of patents that result (to prevent grants simply subsidizing research that would have occurred anyway).
- mattkrause 5y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. Industry is mostly interested in things that are almost ready to be translated into a product. Foundations can be very conservative (and the grant sizes are often much smaller). Anyway, mechanisms like what you're proposing do exist (MITACS in Canada, for example). However, the problem is the other end of the pipeline. How can you pitch investors on something that might not be a product for decades, if at all? Government R&D primes that pump.

sampo 5y ago

> something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs You are mistaking privately owned universities for privately funded. Scientists in privately owned American universities still mostly apply and receive funding from public (federally owned) funding agencies.

mrjangles 5y ago
Yes, yes! Your comment actually clarifies my point. I'm not saying money touched by the government gets evil magic attached to it that corrupts everything. I'm saying government money is allocated badly and corruptly by default. Except, America does a much better job, why? In America these privately owned universities use their own money to hire the best people. Private money does an infinitely better job of selecting the best people than government money. Then the government notes the historical success of these private institutions and sends funding their way, which the excellent individuals they chose can use to create excellent research. This system has made America produce orders of magnitude better science than the rest of the world put together. My point is that the question of how the government can best direct money has already been solved. Let the private sphere decide who is the best.