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Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-piles-of-cash-often-motivate-people dept.

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."

3 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Disagree by ceoyoyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Opertunity Cost? by DavidShor · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Perhaps it's not efficient, from a societal point of view, to have thousands of the most brilliant people in the world doing duplicate work? Consider how much better society would be if they were each individually working on something different.

    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?

  3. It usually costs more to win than it's worth by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It usually costs more to win such prizes than it's worth.

    • The Kremer Prize for human-powered flight, £50,000, was won by Paul MacReady in 1977. He lost money on the project.
    • The X-Prize (space) paid out $10 million, but cost $100 million to win.
    • The DARPA Grand Challenge paid out $2 million, but the major teams spent far more than that, if the work by corporate sponsors is included.