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Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science
Bruce G Charlton writes "A new paper in Medical Hypotheses suggests that very big cash prizes could specifically be targeted to stimulate 'revolutionary' science.
Usually, prizes tend to stimulate 'applied' science — as in the most famous example of Harrison's improved clock solving the 'longitude' problem. But for prizes successfully to stimulate revolutionary science the prizes need to be:
1. Very large (and we are talking seven figure 'pop star' earnings, here) to compensate for the high risk of failure when tackling major scientific problems,
2. Awarded to scientists at a young enough age that it influences their behavior in (about) their mid-late twenties — when they are deciding on their career path, and:
3. Include objective and transparent scientometric criteria, to prevent the prize award process being corrupted by 'political' incentives.
Such mega-cash prizes, in sufficient numbers, might incentivize some of the very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term — but high-risk — career choices.
The real winner of this would be society as a whole; since ordinary science can successfully be done by second-raters — but only first-rate scientists can tackle the toughest scientific problems."
The prize system works fairly well for engineering because at the end you have the prize, a product you can sell, and a whole bunch of publicity. Corporations are interested in investing in that.
Science, particularly basic science, is different. Corporations are not nearly as interested in investing in something that won't develop into a product in the foreseeable future. For basic science you need money to replace the corporate sponsors: money up front. There are plenty of young scientists who will happily do great research, they just need some funding to get started. The granting agencies are the ones who have to be trained to take more (intelligent) risks.
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
It usually costs more to win such prizes than it's worth.
I think an important argument that can be made to support the 'cash prize theory' can be directly seen with the Netflix Prize project. For those unfamiliar, they are offering a $1,000,000 cash reward for the best third-party team/individual that can develop the best algorithm for predicting movie preferences for their users.
Of course, to a company like Netflix, this may be more of a cost/benefit issue as hiring a team of bright researchers still won't guarantee that even a million in R&D will lead to their objectives. But, what it does illustrate here is that there is quite a heavy incentive for other researchers to pool their resources and attack a problem together. If you've read the specs for the project (100 million ratings, 480,000 users, 18,000 movies), you'll see that this isn't just some standard run-of-the-mill data set. This is academic level huge and is obviously attracting some top talent.
The term 'revolutionary science' from the article is going to be one up for debate in terms of actual definition, but one can assume that it entails research on the edge of existing science. Anyone in the research field knows that the NSF provides a huge bulk of the research funds for universities and institutions, but much of that money is ear-marked to science buzz or politically intertwined subjects. Case in point, global warming is the big issue right now so solar cells are getting the funding. Nothing of course against solar cells, but if we are talking about funding for studying a high-risk or not-so-popular field like cold-fusion, then suddenly things dry up.
In short, smart people will often do things for free because they enjoy it. But perhaps, the really smart people are waiting to get paid.
Scientists are motivated by discovery. Fund their -projects- and they will happily work away. I don't believe it will be possible to keep such suggested prizes free from political correctness and Survivor-style political corruption. Who is a first-rater? Who is a second-rater? Edison was a failure. So was Einstein. Especially at the young ages described. One simply never knows who might discover something. DARPA and X-prizes are -far- more effective uses of the money, and models for applying the money.
If you wanted to provide multi-million dollar prizes for 20-something scientists working on revolutionary research, sign me up. I've obviously been under-paid. But if that money was really available, I would rather it be used to fund revolutionary research, not reward it. Prizes work in a corporate environment, where debt is acceptable. In academic and national lab research, you can't have debt; you can't fund research using loans or investments.
It is extraordinarily expensive to tackle the big problems, and the vast majority of scientists are not independently wealthy. Do they expect scientists to run up multi-million dollar personal debts on the off chance they get a prize? At my institution, we're trying to get a $20 million grant right now. That's not going to pad our pockets, but it will pay for lots of new equipment and materials. We need large amounts of money to do revolutionary research. Without funding, it doesn't matter it there's a prize out there, we simply can not do what we need to do.
Why would I, as a scientist, NOT work on the biggest problem I can find, award or no award? These guys suggest that the best scientists choose to work on lesser problems because of greater payoff. They say easier science leads to more papers, more citations and ultimately more peer-reviewed grant funding. They then suggest that we can use the same process to determine if revolutionary research has been done. So is the problem that grant giving institutions are not interested in hard research? That's not been my experience, but I'm in a different field than the authors.
I think they're complaining more about a culture specific to their specialty (medicine and biology) and less about the culture of science in general. A side effect of the doubling of biomedical research funding a decade ago is that a whole bunch of uncreative people were able to have success. Now that funding has decreased, those people (who perhaps should not be in leadership positions) are a drain on resources. Not having gone through recent turbulence in funding, other areas lack this problem.
This may work in disciplines where a singular achievement is key. So prizes for proving a math theorem that stood for a century are quite reasonable and are already done. They do not serve as incentives for scientific effort because the effort is prohibitive intellectually rather than financially. Putting up a prize is just a way of saying: this problem is really important. So if you've got a vision and lots of money but no mad intellectual skillz then by all means, put up a prize.
However this will not work for basic research in natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc). The reason is that there are no singular achievements. Experimental measurements are often not trusted until they are repeated by several groups and usually these other groups add key details to the original measurement. Likewise, theories are often explaining the same phenomena from different angles (schrodinger and heisenberg versions of quantum mechanics, Landau and BCS explanations of superconductivity, etc). So large prizes are only likely to sow discord in those communities not foster more productivity.
But in each case, you will need to have control of at least $100M to get the ideas to market.
A modern oil rig costs a billion dollars. $100M is certainly available as venture capital in various places in the US -- IF you have a real product to show. Which you don't. As can be easily seen in your next sentence:
(100 fold return of investment no problem - over 10 years).If you had ever talked to ONE venture capitalist in your life, you'd know that you don't have to show profit -- if you can break even in year three or four and show that there's a healthy growth potential under the hood, you can get VC money. If the $100M buys a $50M company and provides the operating capital for a couple years after which the company grows until it is a $250M company at year five then the VCer sells his share and has made his money back and then some; even if the company never actually shows a profit on the books.
That is the problem. The financial world wants a return next quarter, not in five years.If you had ever talked to ONE VCer in your whole life, you'd know that five years is the typical time span they operate on. Seven is stretching it, but if you can convince a VC firm of high likelihood of payoff in year seven, this kind of money is still available.
If you had any kind of product to bring to the market you'd have talked, at least talked to one, at least one VC firm at some point in your life, ever. Once. But of course like half of slashdot you have nothing whatsoever to offer -- you suffer from tertiary engineers syndrome and you will spend the rest of your life feeling smugly superior to those of us out here who are actually studying the fields in which we're actually making contributions to actual progress because of some imagined fantasy-progress you imagine being able to make.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Science has always been a collaborative grind, and is becoming more and more that. In the past, we had a bunch of geniuses that single-handedly took their fields forward, but even those weren't motivated by money to be made, and even they stood on the shoulders of giants... do you really think Newton or Darwin would have been "better" if there had been a huge prize waiting for them? I think not.
:-)
Even those who do get the new major insights in science just... get them -- after a lot of work of course. Sure they deserve accolades and recognition and even money, but I have this strange feeling that just making them win the lottery is somewhat oddly unfair towards those who partake in the noble pursuit but don't get similarly "blessed".
In the meantime, in order to actually have those flashes occurring in the heads of some young scientists, they need to eat. THAT lures people into science, not taking huge personal risks -- and the intense pressure that comes with it -- with their life. For example I quit thinking about staying in academia when I realized that I would perform poorly if my life really depended on getting great ideas from grant to grant. So science needs to be funded as a whole... you toss a whole lot of them at the wall and see which ones stick.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.