[HN Gopher] Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us a Pioneer o...
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Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us a Pioneer of mRNA Vaccines
Author : dsr12
Score : 262 points
Date : 2021-02-13 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wbur.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wbur.org)
| auggierose wrote:
| 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.
| andi999 wrote:
| Well, top stars are obvious a couple of years in their career.
| Or do you think they are obvious from the beginning?
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| ta988 wrote:
| 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.
| thayne wrote:
| 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.
| de6u99er wrote:
| I got hired after helping an external consultant at my student
| job. I solved a task I was given one week time, within 2h by
| writing a simple scriot doing all the work. I only had to fix
| some few edge cases manually.
| gww wrote:
| It's a hard and frustrating career. I work on an academic lab
| but the chances of me having an independent research program
| are very low. However, everyone who wants something from you --
| especially your PI -- will string you along in the hope you
| will stick to your low paying job. I am trying to find a better
| job in industry but the jobs I see posted tend to be for data
| science (I am not a strong stats person) or too junior for my
| experiences.Finding the right fit is very hard when my contact
| network is limited to clinicians and academics that tend to
| have anti-industry sentiments.
| avereveard wrote:
| it's worse than that, especially at the beginning it is not
| your ability to receive grants that matters, but the ability to
| sycophant for the person that control the grant flows.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| twic wrote:
| Same. With a side of seeing senior scientists whose work was
| mediocre but who were well-connected surviving, while seeing
| senior scientists whose work was good failing to renew their
| grants.
| kaitai wrote:
| Yep, I finally landed my first grant as a co-PI two months
| after I left academia for corporate data sci. Amusingly, or
| whatever, of the three grants I had up for review as a co-PI or
| contributor, two finally got funded -- but I was gone.
| idrios wrote:
| Biomedical engineer with a 2.977GPA. Lots of extra curriculars,
| volunteered in labs, 160 credit hours of mostly STEM classes,
| lots of grad-level courses, relevant work experience, but GPA
| was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters and I didn't
| get into any of the grad programs I applied for.
|
| I ended up doing fine in software development though. Also, the
| Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight.
| Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are
| still ways to do research.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| It's unfortunate to see people disadvantaged by pursuing a
| truly difficult major.
|
| A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply
| took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because
| the courses were truly difficult.
|
| A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work
| through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with
| softer, more grade-inflated courses.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| > Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are
| still ways to do research.
|
| I am very interested in this concept. Are you thinking of any
| in particular? I really wish people invested in public spaces
| people could go do science, particularly chemistry.
| idrios wrote:
| I joined one called "BioCurious"[1] in the SF Bay area to
| work on a project making a fluorescence microscope. The
| project was advertised on Meetup.com which is how I found
| it, and there were other similar projects that met up
| weekly. If you paid a membership fee though you got 24/hr
| access so I met a person there outside of academia who was
| using the lab's resources to continue the neuroscience
| research he had done for his PhD.
|
| In the bay area I also know of CounterCulture [2] which
| I've only heard high praise of but I've never visited. I've
| since moved to Baltimore and found some places I wanted to
| check out but unfortunately because of Covid I've been
| stuck at home.
|
| [1] https://biocurious.org/ [2]
| https://www.counterculturelabs.org/
| gww wrote:
| If you haven't seen it Lior Pachter at CalTech has been
| sharing open source / 3d printable designs for lab
| equipment [1].
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/lpachter/status/1354955229532360707
| acomjean wrote:
| In Cambridge MA there is Bos Lab: (microbiology).
|
| https://www.boslab.org/
| slumdev wrote:
| > GPA was 0.023 too low to pass the automated filters
|
| Your application was most likely reviewed by real people, not
| just automated filters. People with GPAs below 3 do get into
| competitive grad programs (and med school). An upward trend
| is the key.
| huijzer wrote:
| Maybe indeed. Maybe not. It's probably more nuanced and
| random than that.
| lumost wrote:
| I'm sure this happens to some people with the right
| combination of luck, perseverance, and recommendations.
| It's probably far more likely at your current institution
| as you already have relationships with professors who sit
| on the admissions committee. Particularly if you are
| already productive in a lab and the principal researcher
| goes to bat for you.
|
| That doesn't change the OPs point that this is an uphill
| battle. If they didn't have the above, or they could only
| get into the right program then it still leaves them with
| better alternatives elsewhere. Harvard almost certainly
| filters all candidates with a GPA less than 3.0.
| Unfortunately academic grades have a poor correlation with
| future career or research performance.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| The grant system completely compromises most faculty'$ ability
| to do anything with their decades of training besides sell
| themselves. Especially young faculty during their most
| productive years. The only way to turn this around is to change
| the way we give credit for scientific achievements, and stop
| rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships. (Im ex faculty)
| timr wrote:
| > The grant system completely compromises most faculty'$
| ability to do anything with their decades of training besides
| sell themselves.
|
| I agree that the academic world is broken, but this narrative
| that success -- in any field -- isn't dependent on your
| ability to sell yourself is problematic.
|
| I left academia behind because I saw that it was a brutal,
| improbable grind, sure, but _mainly_ because I could see that
| the same skills needed for success as a professor had a much
| higher expected value elsewhere. In academia or otherwise,
| disproportionate success comes to those who combine ability
| with self-promotion. The people who put their heads down and
| focus on obscure problems will always be at the mercy of the
| winds.
| josephg wrote:
| > but this narrative that success -- in any field -- isn't
| dependent on your ability to sell yourself is problematic.
|
| Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at
| selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal
| for everyone if these people are blocked from making
| contributions to science.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Yes - the idea that everyone in science must be a
| fantastic Jack or Jill of all trades is absurd. There is
| no room for oddballs that are missing any of 20 subtle
| skills, including many social ones that should have
| little to do with research skill. Incentivizing teams to
| succeed instead of individuals is essential for reforming
| our current broken system.
| laretluval wrote:
| > stop rewarding "I wrote the grant" With authorships.
|
| How could this work? If you have more grant money you have
| more resources to write papers.
| alpineidyll3 wrote:
| Many faculty getting the most funding are never involved in
| writing the papers attributed to them. (Source: years spent
| at the top five universities and my own faculty experience)
|
| Would work simply: fund students directly. If faculty
| contribute training or ideas students can grant authorship.
| Faculty/postdocs still peer review papers.
| lumost wrote:
| I wonder how much of the rise of modern "pop-sci" as a genre
| in writing, film, and tv is due to the current academic
| incentives. If you're so good at selling yourself and field
| why not take the pitch directly to a paying audience rather
| than grant committees?
| SCUSKU wrote:
| While at first I balked at this idea, I suppose what you're
| proposing is crowdsourcing academic research funding.
| Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is how
| accountability can be managed. One of the major pitfalls of
| the crowdfunding model seems to be that the fundraisers can
| make like bandits with the money, with seemingly little
| recourse, or incentive for the crowd.
| jseliger wrote:
| I have met other casualties of this, and meeting them when I
| was teaching undergrads inspired me to write
| https://jakeseliger.com/2012/04/17/how-to-think-about-scienc...
| amelius wrote:
| I wonder when academia will be a thing of the past. These days,
| sadly, most research is performed in companies anyway.
| Ulrich2 wrote:
| > 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_Bio...
| cs702 wrote:
| _> 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 wrote:
| And might not even pay off at all. I think that is the real
| problem. There is tremendous risk involved in research.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| One thing I think about: How would American medical research be
| different under communism?
|
| Honestly, the early phases would be pretty much the same. There
| would be researchers who want grants to do experiments and to
| get the grants they would need to impress boards of their
| peers. So basically the system we have today.
| dantheman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| Give money to brilliant scientists with no strings attached.
|
| Let scientists among themselves figure out who is brilliant. If
| the system gets corrupted, a second group of scientists will
| emerge who claim to be the real deal. Let them battle it out
| and choose the smarter group for further funding.
|
| In other words, do it the way it was done before the influx of
| the administrative overhead.
| bernulli wrote:
| Given "Planck's Principle"of "Science progresses one funeral
| at a time", it does not seem that scientists within the
| system will be the best to figure out who should be favored
| over them.
|
| That second group cannot emerge if it does not have funding.
| Einstein was 'lucky' in that he had his job as a patent clerk
| that allowed him his theoretical studies until he finally
| found his way into an acedemic career.
| throwaw4ybio wrote:
| >If the system gets corrupted, a second group of scientists
| will emerge who claim to be the real deal. Let them battle it
| out and choose the smarter group for further funding.
|
| Would this involve an application? Perhaps a committee?
| IQunder130 wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder if the people making "why don't they
| just ... " type comments even bother to read what they have
| written.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Why doesn't someone just make a browser extension that
| forces you to read the contents of your comment before
| you submit it? Then we just bundle it in browsers.
|
| Edit: Hmm, seems I plagiarised https://xkcd.com/481/, but
| worse. I'm glad I rarely write the first thing that comes
| into my head.
| Skyy93 wrote:
| 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.
| trhway wrote:
| >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.
| SMAAART wrote:
| Great article.
| TheWaywardProf wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| But your idea that science is a company is a grossly
| inadequate metaphor. That's not what science is!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| So what would you compare it to then? The startup
| ecosystem?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Philosophical advancement of the human species
| capitol_ wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Guys, you dont get it. Science isn't government work. In
| fact, to the extent that it is bureaucracy work, it is doing
| fine. But it is so much bigger than that.
| bernulli wrote:
| I agree with 'courage', but the problem is that it all depends
| on the courage of the people with money rather than the courage
| of the researcher. Someone has to take the risk and hire you
| for a tenure track position, and someone has to choose you over
| someone else (from a better school? with a more en-vogue
| topic?) for giving out grant money. Ideally it should be a
| meritocracy, but how do you prove in advance what is good
| research? And I guess, then it often boils down to 'no one ever
| got fired for buying IBM'.
| kbelder wrote:
| Haven't seen anybody here criticize science... rather, they're
| upset about the deviation from science that modern academia
| represents.
| dstick wrote:
| What a heartwarming story. I hope Katalin gets to read it :)
| weinzierl wrote:
| This reminds me if the story of Biontech cofounder and CEO Ugur
| Sahin. Being an immigrant child in Germany his teacher would no
| recommend him for high school despite his good grades. Sahin said
| that he only ended up in high school because a neighbor of his
| intervened at the school.
| vinay427 wrote:
| 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/Dual_education_system
| sega_sai wrote:
| 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.
| atmosx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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. Kariko's.
| lrem wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gregors wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Put meaningful bounties on the things you want solved.
| bernulli wrote:
| The thing is that we often don't even know it. Einstein did
| not solve a pressing problem with his theories of relativity.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Most of the Nobel prizes are from some obscure unfunded idea.
| mRNA vaccines will win the Nobel prize too.
| ta988 wrote:
| Nobel prize, Noble prize is something else.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Thanks.
| dotdi wrote:
| 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.
| tobmlt wrote:
| 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.
| LeanderK wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > 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.
|
| You've described the indie games industry.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| 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/
|
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| 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.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| To reduce the focus of grant-funded labs on obtaining their
| next grant (i.e., ensuring their continued existence), funding
| organizations should deliberately force a soft cap on the
| number of research PIs. In the context of biomedical research,
| US universities have been on a hiring spree for the past 25
| years. The number of BME departments increased 150% from 1995
| to 2005. This expansion was partially funded by Whitaker
| Foundation money, which ended in 2006. Consequently, the NIH
| award rate for R01 grants, which are they main lab support
| mechanism, fell from 27% to ~ 15%. Naturally, funding a lab in
| a 15% award rate environment takes much more time (probably 3x
| more; it's nonlinear due to competition), to the detriment of
| time spent on research and training. This has a corrosive
| effect on every aspect of publicly-funded science.
|
| The NIH has strong leverage to correct this. Grant awards
| include both "direct" and "indirect" costs. Direct costs go to
| the applicant (PI). Indirect costs go to their /institution/
| (employer). Indirect costs are calculated relative to direct
| costs, generally 70% (so the total awarded sum is 170% of
| direct costs), but the rate is negotiated and institution-
| specific. The NIH could penalize institutions with too many
| soft money (grant-supported) positions by reducing those
| institutions' indirect cost rates, or even requiring
| institutional matching, until the number of grant-supported
| positions falls to a level at which they can place their main
| focus on doing the work they are nominally funded to do. This
| would reduce the number of publicly-funded scientists, but
| would let them act more like scientists and less like
| marketers.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > 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.
|
| There are limits to that logic though. For example, the
| business can spend billions on researching more addicting
| cigarettes or can direct money to drugs which merely manage the
| disease instead of curing it (as disease management makes you a
| customer for life).
| bosswipe wrote:
| Is there any evidence that public labs are producing less
| science than they have in the past?
| renewiltord wrote:
| I _know_ fraudulent science is performed in many university
| labs. If you read the papers you will see only what you think
| is science. But the results are falsified. The slides are
| fake. So maybe output is high but determining what is true
| output is hard.
|
| And nearly no one replicates. I'm sorry that I can't give you
| info. It's not useful to me or my family to prove this. But
| consider this a warning. If you move subtly enough you might
| be able to ask the right people without triggering the
| defensive walls.
|
| I know I sound like a crank, so I understand if your weight
| on this warning is not high. But it feels wrong to not warn.
| So I've done my duty to the extent I find comfortable.
|
| FWIW I believe in the scientific process, and I very much
| like the idea of long-term fundamental science. I'm not a
| Trumper, or an anti-science loon, or someone who rejects
| modern epistemology.
| tensor wrote:
| I've spent many years in the academic spaces, both in
| public genetics labs as well as in computer science
| departments. I've never encountered anything like what you
| claim, and no one I know in academia has either.
| Extraordinary claims like yours need proof, no one will or
| should take you at your word, especially when there is the
| weight of many others experiences that cut against your
| claims.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's okay. I understand why you need to apply a near
| zero multiplier on what I told you but I'm unwilling to
| get any family member blackballed over outing anyone.
|
| Your epistemological strategy is correct. And for all I
| know you are more correct. After all, given any random
| arrangement of points there will be clusters. And
| assuming you draw circles randomly, some circles will
| coincidentally appear full of points. But if the circle
| is the space of visibility of a sapient being, they will
| mistakenly determine that all of space is full of points
| simply based on their own circle.
|
| So just because my immediate circle has encountered this
| enough may not mean that this is common.
|
| Unfortunately, there is no true way for us to safely
| exchange information on this front for the positive case
| (there is fraud), only for the negative case (there is no
| fraud). So I guess we each act as if this circle is the
| entire plane and maybe the world will apply sufficient
| pressures to tease out who is right.
| leesalminen wrote:
| FWIW, I believe your anecdote. It doesn't mean it happens
| everywhere all the time. You're posting with your real
| name and I can't think of why you'd come to HN to lie
| about it. I value reading about personal experiences on
| HN.
| pvaldes wrote:
| > Extraordinary claims like yours need proof
|
| Scientific scam is well documented in fact. It seems that
| >1800 published articles were retracted in 2020 by
| scientific journals, including 72 related with covid so
| [1], maybe is not common, but yes, sometimes it happens.
| There is nothing extraordinary in that idea.
|
| [1] An example: 5G Technology and induction of
| coronavirus in skin cells. Biological Regulators &
| Homeostatic Agents. July 16, 2020. "showed evidence of
| substantial manipulation of the peer review"
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Lior Pachter is pretty good at calling balls and strikes
| on this sort of thing
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hey, sorry, I googled but he has a lot of work and I
| couldn't find where he talks about fraud (or lack
| thereof) in science. If you have a link handy would you
| mind sharing?
| tensor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| aaomidi wrote:
| People thinking in the same line of you is why I think
| China is going to be the global leader in scientific
| discovery in a decade.
|
| We've stagnated while they've organized their efforts for
| long term discovery and long term technical brilliance.
|
| I guess time will tell if public or private sector research
| is the best possible solution.
| garden_hermit wrote:
| I see no evidence that China has organized around long-
| term discovery or technical brilliance. They have many
| scientists, and relative advantages in certain fields,
| but their system of science still has major structure
| issues.
|
| For example, one aspect of Chinese science policy is
| paying scientists based on the impact factor of their
| published papers. This, however, has lead to a much
| larger issue of "salami-slicing"/"least-publishable unit"
| publications aimed at passing the minimum bar of a "good
| enough" journal rather than contributing to science.
| Another issue--these payouts are only given to certain
| authors of the paper, which can lead to issues and
| controversies over authorship position. These are issues
| in the U.S. and Europe, but less severe, and not
| incentivized with cash payments.
|
| China does not have some secret sauce that makes them
| better at discovery or technical brilliance. If anything
| their policies are organized towards maximizing prestige.
| Whether large-scale competence follows prestige, we will
| have to wait to see.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I know some folk that studied abroad in China as part of
| their US-based undergraduate program (US faculty teaching
| their courses in China), and they had a very stressful
| experience due to the seemingly widespread amount
| cheating by the Chinese students throwing off the grading
| curves. The university seemed to ignore it for political
| reasons.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I guess we'll see. It will be hard to tease out the
| effects of what is public funding vs what is due to other
| factors.
|
| I think that Chinese science will advance far more
| rapidly because the Western ethical schools have
| converged on the Do Nothing school of trolley problem
| solvers and rampant safetyism is ruining our ability to
| study immediately important dangers, that Western society
| is organizing towards protecting its power structures
| (overwhelmingly elderly over the young), and that the
| infantilization of Western populations leads to the
| inability to study interventions since no volunteer can
| be said to understand any risk.
|
| On the other hand, while Chinese R&D spending is hockey
| sticking (see _Red Moon Rising_ issue of _The Economist_
| for lots of info on this), I am 50-50 on whether they 'll
| manage to solve their fakery problem faster than ours.
| Theirs is far bigger but they know it is a problem and it
| is smaller than we think. Ours is smaller but we don't
| think it exists and it is bigger than our governments
| think.
|
| But pouring more money into a device that exists simply
| to extract money is clearly insufficient.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > 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
|
| A long time ago, I heard the opposite view. Researchers only
| establish tenure once they've spent a long time on a specific
| path, and empirically, later-career don't suddenly throw out
| their decades of commitment to one path to explore ground
| once they're protected by tenure. This rings pretty true to
| me, based on everything I know about the scientific
| establishment (and my model of human psychology). There's a
| reason "science advances one funeral at a time" is such an
| old saw.
| Fede_V wrote:
| The other problem with the tenure system is that professors -
| even the ones that want to try cutting edge research and have
| tenure - cannot risk the career of the PhD students in their
| lab on some very speculative and high risk research that
| might backfire terribly.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| There's this loop in medical education where people come into
| it with lofty goals, but are then hit with $240k of tuition
| (excluding living expenses). They then take out loans on
| that, and then have to pay them back. So, when people talk
| about cutting salaries, there are all these new doctors that
| are going 'wait a minute, by this point I'm $300k (just on
| postgraduate training) in the hole after 4-years of hellish
| training, and I have to pay that back.'
|
| If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of
| medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the
| door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take
| lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| That's been a question I have no answer to: What do we do with
| all these smart people?
|
| Currently most just go inside hierarchical workplaces where
| they have to learn to play office politics and carry out
| meaningless job functions in exchange for financial security.
|
| We don't have a Bell labs anymore, science is getting more
| expensive and most of the venture capital money goes to
| software rather than to the more capital-intensive lab
| equipment plus salaries.
|
| We as a society train all these phds that then leave their
| field of expertise because there's no opportunities. You can
| try your luck as an underpaid postdoc and hope that you get an
| amazing article on a high reputation journal and at the same
| time a faculty position has opened up (because the faculty
| died) for the particular niche field you are an expert in.
| That's a lot that's utterly outside of your control. So most
| just go into finance/consulting/tech and move on. All that
| training, for nothing.
| saboot wrote:
| We may not have a Bell Labs, but we have the entire complex
| of national laboratories which have pivoted from solely
| developing nuclear weapons towards more basic science.
|
| I work in them .. it's really strange how much of the public
| is unaware of all the work we do, thousands of PhDs are
| employed through them currently doing basic science funded by
| tax payers.
| bnralt wrote:
| It seems like this is exactly the kind of thing that a
| government is useful for. Why not have more publicly funded
| research institutions that employ them, and put them to work
| on useful research without having them worry about grant
| considerations, teaching classes, or the publishing
| treadmill?
| saboot wrote:
| We do ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and
| _...
| ghaff wrote:
| It sounds like you're replacing grant writing with a win
| the government research funding for life lottery which
| obviously an improvement. That said, there is some of that
| in the national labs although they need to worry about
| program funding like everywhere else. (Though military
| programs in particular are pretty secure.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Bell Labs was one organization. While it's always a big
| blurry how much pure research goes on at corporate research
| labs, I'm not sure there isn't as much research going on
| today than there ever was given all the money especially in
| software out there.
|
| Hard to measure as I say, but I think it was maybe the 80s
| going into the 90s that a lot of the old-style corporate
| research labs were going out of fashion and nothing had
| really come in to replace them.
| cal5k wrote:
| Maybe we don't need all those PhDs, and we should stop
| funnelling public money into producing an excess supply of
| them?
| alisonkisk wrote:
| What public money do you think is going toward producing
| PhDs? PhDs are funded by teaching and research work. They
| aren't paid to get the PhD.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| The _research_ part is often funded by public grant
| money.
|
| > _They aren 't paid to get the PhD._
|
| PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived
| from (often public) grant money.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| On of the effects of training too many PhDs is downward
| pressure on academics' salaries - i.e. the public gets
| their science results on the cheap.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| We do need the PhDs (or otherwise trained researchers).
| It's the universities that don't.
| itronitron wrote:
| I doubt that most researchers work in universities. Every large
| product company (food, pharma, automotive, gaming) has multiple
| research groups, and while they tend to be very small relative
| to the larger company they are probably much bigger than most
| academic departments.
| phobosanomaly wrote:
| Add to this that there is a _lot_ of research that goes into
| production processes.
|
| So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of
| non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make
| the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-
| effective, etc.
|
| It's all research, just not basic primary research.
| derangedHorse wrote:
| I'd say a better distinction is more important for the
| students. Teaching is a skill that the accumulation of
| knowledge doesn't inherently strengthen. Forcing researchers to
| teach against their will for professorship on the strict basis
| of knowledge typically causes the students to receive a lower
| quality education.
|
| If we're talking about bottlenecks, I'd say the number of
| topics that are ruined for potentially great researchers by
| horrible lecturers is a bigger problem.
|
| _Sidenote_ - Writing about this topic reminded me of the
| lengths Andrew Ng went through to achieve excellence in his
| role of being a professor in all aspects of the job (in this
| case what he went through to become a better teacher):
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140320175655-176238488-lear...
| selimnairb wrote:
| Part of the problem is that research positions tend to be for
| Ph.D. students and post-docs who cost less than permanent
| research scientists. This is good in the short term for the
| individual grant, but has the side effect that to continue
| research we have to produce more Ph.D.s than there are
| permanent fair-paying academic positions for.
| atemerev wrote:
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| Don't want to know what better discoveries than mRNA vaccines it
| DID actually cost us.
| suc_syn wrote:
| 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.
| tchalla wrote:
| 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
| yholio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not all medical research works exactly as described in the
| article. Reading between the lines, Dr. Kariko 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/
| diego_moita wrote:
| Dr. Katalin Kariko, 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.
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