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."

Comments

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

A lottery for people who ARE good at math!

Re:Finally!

[fastest fascist]

And the real losers, presumably, would be the scientists who took the gamble and failed.

Re:Finally!

[jshackney]

Such is the reality of life anywhere.

Re:Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, trying is a valid and valuable effort, even if you're not the best, the first, the greatest, but to realize that, you have to have evolved into a social being. It is not only immoral but also deeply uneconomic to make gigantic rewards dependent on chance, as is the case whenever the winner is only marginally better than the closest competitors, but only he is rewarded. The idea behind giving people more money when they achieve great things is twofold: Attract more people, thus increasing the chances that one of them succeeds, and giving the money to those who are more likely to succeed again. Our culture is increasingly focussed on the first aspect and these lotteries make us lose sight of the fact that "the winner takes it all", especially in rare but grand competitions, fails to distribute money to people who might also likely succeed in the future, if they had the resources. In the end these schemes have too many negative effects: A few people amass riches by chance, money is diverted from research into consumption (personal jumbo jets, houses everywhere, etc), and the majority of people become discouraged because the correlation between merit and success is too low when being second gets you nothing.

Don't discount older people

[davidwr]

Restricting mega-prizes to the young may eliminate groundbreaking work by mid-career and early-second-career scientists.

Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.

Re:Don't discount older people

[plopez]

Seriously, this is blatant ageism. You never know who will solve the problems at hand. Also, what they are speaking of sounds like 'big science' (i.e. seven figure prizes). Wouldn't older and more experienced scientists be better at organizing larger projects? Wouldn't they have the experience needed to mentor younger scientists, opening up a pipeline for the next generation?

Bad idea. It should be open to any and all.

Re:Don't discount older people

[Opportunist]

But it would sure open a market for young scientists. Imagine an ad akin to "Wanted: Young scientist, doesn't need to know jack but must be under 25 so we can cash in. Job perks include having a great invention named after you, since you'll officially be the one who discovered it".

Re:Don't discount older people

[ShakaUVM]

Worse, as the summary says: "...very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term -- but high-risk -- career choices"

And they'll do this only by awarding the mega-prize to people who make the breakthrough.

It's like expecting smart people to want to play the lottery. It's smart people don't base a career on a 0.1% chance of making $1M, with a 99.9% chance of $0. They might do it if it's easy enough to do in their garage on their free time (i.e., the lottery ticket is free), but it's too risky to expect smart people that understand math to enter as a career field.

On the contrary, just expanding NSF funding for researchers in the specific direction, with smaller prizes for specific endeavors, is probably the best way to go. I might not have ever left college (I was a researcher for years) if the pay was good and I had an interesting task to solve.

Re:Don't discount older people

[Original Replica]

Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.

When you are speaking of making a major contribution to the world, it's true. If you are over 30 and you aren't a shining star in your field, you never will be. Pascal wrote "Pascal's Theorem" at 16. Ben Franklin was writing noted newspaper articles at 15. Louise Braille invented writing for the blind at age 15. Alexander Graham Bell was working with mechanical speech at age 16. Westinghouse was 19 when he patented a rotary steam engine. Farnsworth had the first steps towards a working television built and working at age 19. Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 21. Einstien wrote "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields" at 15.

So in the realm of groundbreaking works: If you are over 30 and no breakthroughs has surfaced so far then likely they never will.

Re:Don't discount older people

[Oktober Sunset]

On the other hand, I doubt many young people would be inspired to go into a career in scientific research by the thought of winning vast wealth and fame at the age of 75.

Re:Don't discount older people

[Bowling Moses]

Yeah it's ageism. Regardless of that fact, it's also targeting the wrong age group. There are awards in science for "young investigators" to recognize achievement (ie provide funding) and also to recognize that a scientist who's been in the field for 20-40 years has a name and a better chance at getting the increasingly scarce funding. So I guess in limited forms ageism might not necessarily be a bad thing. However, those "young investigator" awards are for people who are typically 10 years older than what this prize is for. That's what I really don't get. A scientist in their mid 20's is a junior to mid-level Ph.D. student. One in their late 20's might have just got their Ph.D. You only have some control over your career at this very early stage. You decide broadly what area of research you want to work in and what lab to join (if you're extremely good it'll be entirely up to you). After that, you might have the pick of a small number of projects. Very few grad students are advanced enough to introduce a project of their own to a lab and a negligible number of them will actually get permission from their advisor. Someone who has a Ph.D. already but wants to broaden their range of expertise will join another scientist's lab in a related field and will usually introduce new techniques and projects to that lab. Without being able to read the /.'d article it seems like they should be targeting the late 20's to mid-30's scientists. Even then, a more appropriate award might be at most low six figures. Managing a seven-figure grant is a major chore and it would be expected to run a whole lab for several years.

Re:Don't discount older people

[DerekLyons]

So in the realm of groundbreaking works: If you are over 30 and no breakthroughs has surfaced so far then likely they never will.

Of course, that's based on the unsupported assumption that science is only valuable when it's "ground breaking".

Re:Don't discount older people

[Vornzog]

Restricting mega-prizes to the young may eliminate groundbreaking work by mid-career and early-second-career scientists.

Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.

I don't think this point can be over emphasized enough in this discussion.

The author is aiming this prize at me. I went to college on a academic full ride, cranked through a PhD in chemistry in 4 years on a hot project that got national media attention, and am currently trying to figure out what my career is going to be. I'm 27, which is extremely young for a PhD.

I am the wrong person to aim this at. You want to throw money at someone, you need to be targeting my PhD adviser. She has connections that I can't dream of, a funding rate that is basically unheard of, deserves a big chunk of credit for my success, has published major work in two very different fields, and, most importantly, she's currently in the prime of her career - age 45. She has now left the university and started a company - it's the only way for her career to continue to move forward with the grant situation as bad as it is right at the moment.

It takes a very long time to establish yourself as a superstar in the world of science. Nobody does it by age 30. The best of the best, with all of the breaks going their way, might do it by 35 - with the caveat that they have to specialize to such an extent that they can't even consider going after a big prize like this unless it is perfectly suited to their field. And unless you are already a on the path to becoming a superstar, you won't get a sniff of big money like we are discussing here.

Better yet - don't throw that money at anyone at all. Inevitably, some of it would stick, but far more resources would be wasted competing for it.

I'm rocking the boat in a localized fashion right now. I'm making a name for myself by being the programming/database guy in a room full of biologists. I'm don't have to the smartest guy in the room - I have access to an entirely different set of tools than anyone else does, and I can communicate with the biologists in ways that a normal programmer would never be able to, allowing me to make a huge impact fresh off of my PhD.

If you really want see progress made, without the high risk/high reward gambles, look to make progress in the gaps between fields. Engineers collaborating with traditional academic scientists. PhDs in two major fields, instead of just one. Collaborative projects between industry and government, academia and industry. Corporate think tanks like we used to have - really good R&D in industry is hard to come by these days, but many of our best advancements in the last 50 years came from these sorts of institutions. Improved math/comp sci training for scientists and engineers (I don't care how much you had, more would probably have done you good). A major, national-involvement project to tackle, on par with putting a man on the moon - real renewable energy looks like a good candidate right now.

This is the future of America, and most of the rest of the first world. We have outsourced our blue-collar jobs, the white-collar jobs are slowly going international, and our high standard of living looks unattractive when someone in India will do your job for half the cost, even if they only do it half as well.

The way forward is to move faster, drive innovation, reward the people that are superstars (regardless of age) with incentive packages that make them want to work harder. America has had this sort of system in place a few times before in history, and we have attracted the best and the brightest, both domestic and foreign, to get involved and make huge strides in many fields. Progress is made on the margins - any attempt to maintain the status quo or fund a regression to the mean kills us slowly. Throwing big money at science keeps mediocre talent in, wasting resources, when they should throw in the towel and move on to

Re:Don't discount older people

[morcego]

Seriously, this is blatant ageism.

More than that. It is plain stupidity. If someone is to receive the prize during their mid/late-twenties, and these are long term projects, what are we talking about here ? 18yo scientist ? They might be brilliant, but serious lack experience. Also, we have to consider the "productive" life of a scientist (I know, the expression sucks), which usually goes all the way to the late-sixties (or even more).

On the other hand, I agree the prize should be given in a relatively short time. How much time does it take to get a Nobel ? 10-15 years ?

Disagree

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:Disagree

[ceoyoyo]

As a young scientist myself, there's no way I'm going to do research for ten years (in between shifts at McDonalds) to MAYBE win a big prize sometime in the future. I'll go work on applied stuff for industry long before that.

The preliminary data thing is a catch 22 that I've already gotten caught in. In order to have a shot at a grant you've got to have data showing your technique works. But in order to get that data you pretty much have to perfect your technique. But if your technique already works, why do you need funding to develop it?

Opertunity Cost?

[DavidShor]

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?

A pile of hoopla

[sam_handelman]

Firstly, science is a gradual process. The "great man" theory of scientific progress has no more merit than the "great man" theory of history. It is in fact *not* true that those who make the very most important discoveries are better than other scientists (The fools! They mocked my research!), and their advances, even when seemingly revolutionary, are predicated on the gradual accumulation of knowledge through careful, thoughtful and reproducible work. This does not mean that all scientists are equally competent, or that financial or political concerns do not sometimes promote inferior scientists.

  Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.

  Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.

Re:A pile of hoopla

[Metasquares]

The alternative is that we all patent our basic discoveries and prevent anyone else from building upon or using them without paying a fee. I don't really like that alternative. You couldn't have built things like the web on that sort of model; too many inventions are involved and too many people would be seeking remuneration for them.

Re:A pile of hoopla

[John Newman]

Now if we only had grant funding..

Exactly. The standard NIH R01 investigator grant, which supports most successful mid-career biomedical scientists, pays around $100-250,000 per year for four years, renewable with reasonable progress. This is enough to support the investigator (at an academic's salary), lab space (universities generally take 50% of the top), and anywhere from 1-4 employees, depending on the location (yes, grad students and postdocs make that little money). These are the grants that get science done in the US. No scientist in their right mind would choose a chance at a multi-million dollar prize over an R01. What we need aren't risky one-off million-dollar prizes, it's more of these secure, renewable million-dollar-over-several-years grants. Unfortunately, as often commented today, R01 funding is falling rapidly as the NIH budget is frozen, costs continue to inflate, and the NIH has reasonably focused on preserving its seed corn - young investigator and training grants.

Re:A pile of hoopla

[bit01]

or more precisely, the spending of the money of others

Fruitcakes like you really need to grow up.

Your taxes being spent on something you don't like is much the same as you being a minority shareholder in a company and the majority shareholders deciding to take the company in a direction you don't like.

Except in the case of a democratic government it's one man, one vote, not one dollar, one vote.

In both cases you can try to get sufficient votes to change the direction of the organization. In both cases you can sell out and leave. In both cases you can adjust your shareholding by voting for tax increases/decreases or buying/selling your shares. In both cases you can vote for changes in the structure and rules of the organization.

The anti-tax fixation that many people have just shows they're shallow thinkers. Many people think that government and taxes are sometimes a more efficient way of solving some country-wide problems. In particular, one-man, one-vote is very important to limit the excessive dominance of the rich, even if it can lead to sub-Pareto optimal outcomes.

It's no panacea but in the real world neither is any other form of social organization.

---

WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.

Clay not enough?

[Coryoth]

Well the Clay Mathematics Institute is currently offering seven figure sums for seven different math problems. I can't say that much of a dent has been made on most of those problems. In fact the only solved problem had the solver (Perelman) turn down the cash. Perhaps $1 million isn't enough -- compared to the prize for solving the longitude problem, adjusted for inflation, it's pretty small. Perhaps we should be talking about 8 figure sums? If we can pay an actor $20 million dollars to appear in a film, is it really that bad to pay a researcher (or team of researchers) $20 million for solving the Hodge conjecture, or proving P!=NP?

For people bad at math...

[isdnip]

This is a really stupid proposal. It is like the lottery, which promises big payoffs but is really a tax on people who are bad at math. Most people lose. If there were mega-prizes for science, then people would have to decide whether to go for the big prize, knowing that there's a >99% chance of getting zilch, or doing something more likely to pay the bills. Do we want to turn science, normally a cooperative exercise, into a casino game?

On the other hand this idea will go over well among the flat earth crowd. They don't do science, but they think high-stakes prizes are the only way to get out of the trailer park.

It usually costs more to win than it's worth

[Animats]

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.

Netflix $1,000,000 Prize as Case Study

[seattle-pk]

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.

Bad idea, misunderstands scientists

[Iowan41]

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.

Completely and Utterly Wrong

[bperkins]

Do we need to raise the stakes any higher in the pursuit of basic science?

What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.

If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform

The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.

The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.

There already is such a price.

[dovgr]

It is called the Nobel price. It is as easy as that. Do some revolutionary science and win a non-neglectable cash price. According to wikipedia last years price was about 1,500,000 USD.

that's not how it works...

[Goldsmith]

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.

Why would someone intelligent work on this?

[Rakishi]

I once read that the richest people aren't the most intelligent, intelligent people simply don't find the risks needed to become so rich worth it. On average they'd come out worse off and they're intelligent enough that their normal average is still very well off.

I find it absurd that anyone really intelligent would depend on essentially a lottery for anything. It's absurd because 99% of the time you will simply be wasting your time and could make a lot more money by doing something else.

Logically the prizes would be pointless like they are now, a company is formed and it's engineers are paid by sponsors/rich people. It's essentially like venture capitalists, they take on the risk and get a decent large chunk of the payoff.

IAAS

[Compuser]

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.

Re:Overkill

[Iron Condor]

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.

Such a stupid system...

[CptPicard]

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. :-)