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IMHO, ARPA-H and other new agencies need to change how funding is allocated. Right now, in experimental sciences, lots of professors from prominent universitie
by nextos 4y ago
IMHO, ARPA-H and other new agencies need to change how funding is allocated.
Right now, in experimental sciences, lots of professors from prominent universities have a monopolistic attitude towards research. They have just become middlemen. They manage large groups, have become completely detached from technical things and use their position to secure most funds in the field and also veto others from publishing or getting funded. This is a recipe for disaster, stagnation and fiascos as we can see e.g. in the field of Alzheimer's disease.
Innovative laboratories like LMB Cambridge or Cold Spring Harbor, where a great deal of work was done during the golden age of molecular biology, were at odds with this approach. All funding was internal, and the number of people managed by senior researchers was capped to a single digit.
In short, we need funding policies that weed out scammers and promote good technical work. ARPA for example is quite aware of this problem, and IMHO has much better policies than, say, the European Research Council (ERC). ERC is quite infamous as they don't even bother about withdrawing funds from laboratories that are known to have manipulated research results and had to retract their publications (produced using ERC's funding!). https://retractionwatch.com https://retractionwatch.com and https://forbetterscience.com https://forbetterscience.com are full of these stories.
- N1H1L 4y agoI am at a US national lab, and for a lot of our history, we operated that way, too, where much of our money was fundamentally internal. There was a scientific track and management (money-bringing track). No salary or title differences. But, for the last decade, DOE has been obsessed with productivity metrics such as dollars per paper. These metrics do not make much sense from an NL perspective because the goals of such an institution are different. One reason for this productivity obsession that many old-timers suspect is that many grant and performance reviews are done by established university professors. As you accurately describe, for such a group of rent-seekers, everything is a nail for which they have an h-index hammer.
- nextos 4y agoSadly, I think you are right, and actually rent seeking is the best term to describe the general attitude of many established university professors.
- mach1ne 4y agoYes, I too happen to know some research groups which are organized rather bluntly as not much more than citation factories for the researchers who are pulling in all the funding. Papers produced within the group are cross-cited with the express purpose in mind, and the 'middlemen' get their names in the papers without having anything to do with the actual research. They have amazing impact metrics, as can be expected.
- cameldrv 4y agoWhen you say LMB Cambridge or CSH were "self funded", where was the money coming from?
- nextos 4y agoI said funding was internal. This meant the director secured generous funding for the whole institute from the usual sources. Individual researchers were not allowed to spend their time writing grant applications, everything was provided by the institute with the core funding I mentioned above. I think this is quite important as, in modern Academia, most professors spend the majority of their time bidding and lobbing for grant money.
- cameldrv 4y agoOk yes, this makes perfect sense. I've observed the same thing in academia. For the professors I've seen, even when they're not bidding and lobbying for grant money, they're often doing research that is not necessarily what they really want to do or that they could make the greatest scientific impact doing. Instead, they often contort their research to make it at least appear that they are advancing the scientific agenda of their funder.