Slashdot Mirror
When Scientists Give Up
New submitter ferespo sends a report from All Things Considered about the struggle for scientific funding in today's political and economic environment. "Federal funding for biomedical research has declined by more than 20 percent in the past decade. There are far more scientists competing for grants than there is money to support them." It's a tough situation for new scientists trying to set up labs. In addition to all of the scientific work they do, it's essentially a full-time job in addition to that to maintain funding. The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table. The consequences of this are two-fold: not only are we giving up on the types of research that led to so many of today's marvels, but many promising young scientists are giving up on the field altogether.
Just find a way to link global warming to your thesis
Try the "not immediately useful" sciences, like astronomy, which are shedding researchers like crazy as the NSF / what-have-you cuts their budgets and increase "proposal pressure". Just talking to a PhD will reveal two hard truths about being a scientist: you will never be rich and you will never have job security. It takes a special kind of crazy to be a scientist these days.
I'm sure Chinese Firms would love to have scientists educated at the top US Universities conducting research for them. America is fast becoming a Design and Services Economy, best to leave the real innovation to China and others.
We need more privately funded research, like we had in the days of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. These days people expect Uncle Sugar will give them funding for every stupid project they come up with, and frankly people are fed up with hearing all the ridiculous things people are spending government money on.
But, but, but, the free market will solve this problem right? It solves everything!
Spot on. No funding = no tenure = bye-bye faculty position and no more lab. Very proud of the papers we put out and the 3 PhD students and 1 MS student that graduated before the end though. We had just uncovered a possible mechanism for how an actin-binding protein could be involved in invadopodia formation and cancer metastasis (cancer cells escaping their initial tumor).
The schools are greedy. They love cheap grad students. But a field can only grow so much. They need to stop using cheap grad students and start hiring more expensive research staff and professors. If the scientists changed the way they used the funding, this wouldn't be an issue.
So we've peaked as a species. How is that news?
Stop the presses, we need to run this new story!
We're at a point where there's nothing going for scientists. They have to fight, all simultaneously:
-for funding in a very crowded market
-Politicians trying to control the results of what they do, to the point where the scientific integrity is at risk
-Govt's muzzling you because they don't want pesky things like facts to get in the way of their ideology
-Idiot reporters who completely, constantly, and continually misrepresent your research (should it make the presses)
-umpteen bajillion quacks who don't know their ass from their mouth, yet somehow manage to convince people that they are right and that actual experts are wrong (ie: Jenny McCarthy, or whoever FoodBabe is)
Doing scientific research is hard enough as it is, without having to deal with the current environment of anti-intellectualism.
I'm honestly surprised that scientists arn't yet being marched into concentration camps at gunpoint.
Isn't this the way of government? Stagnation. Bureaucracy. Status quo. And when the cuts come, the boring, who are no threat to the entrenched power, are spared while the mavericks that might shake things up are pushed out.
Governments and their operatives oppose change so that they might continue to enjoy their life of lethargy without challenge.
The inherent open-mindedness of the science has always been a threat to the establishment.
...but it also puts more and more pressure on principal investigators to color their conclusions in the direction of whatever is currently trendy in the eyes of the grant reviewers in that field in order to get future grants. It's not good.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
As a physicist, I am facing a similar situation. Program managers are now telling young faculty that there will be no new grants. It is a really scary and trying time.
Not just research... EVERYTHING is totally risk averse. This is why every new song sounds and looks the same. Why we keep getting remakes, reboots, and blatent copies of the same old story over and over in the movies. There is a "patch" for this with the indie film community and the indie music scene. An indie research community would be cool, but they keep arresting people trying to do basic chemistry at home. http://io9.com/5119166/teen-wi...
The lack of Leadership, and I mean true forward looking people who take risks to move the Nation forward are no where to be found. The mantra of becoming rich is gospel and quick monetization, quarterly Wall Street figures reign supreme.
The Leaders of the past few generations, those who would see a public interest and use the immense power and resources of the Government to enable it, are long gone.
So the question isn't really one of giving up... the question is one of choice and priority. If you have no vision and no real sense of purpose beyond enriching yourself when you occupy a position of influence, then the rot will spread and not just Scientists but many others will wither away as well.
We can spend on un-ending and meaningless Wars, enriching the military-industrial-political complex through war mongering, developing our sense of uber individuality where our selfish needs are supreme above any common good or we can choose to go after bettering the lives of our fellow humans by challenging ourselves to bigger better goals and being a good/reasonable neighbor.
You have a multi-billion-dollar-sales patented drug? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund NIH grants. Or make your own equivalent grants to truly independant researchers.
Enter into a licensing deal on a drug patent? Chip in 0.5% of the revenue to fund grants.
Talking the faith healing, Armageddon is coming, the only way to be right with the lawd is to put yer moneh in da box-ah variety. Then use all the money raised for scientific research.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
So instead of doing academic research, why not start a company? Plenty of these guys perceive research as:
1) Write proposal to government
2) Get funding
3) do research
4) publish paper
And you're done. But published papers don't result in new therapeutic products that save lives, or new medical devices that help people with their problems. Instead, why not take one of these new advances and develop a product? There are plenty of business guys with decent morals (despite what Slashdot thinks) that can do the day to day of running the business side, help raise money, apply for SBIRs, talk to investors etc., while these guys develop their research into a new medical treatment. The FDA is tough but not impossible, and with the right planning and the right approach is entirely workable. Even if you don't want to go that route, you can always set up a company as an SBIR shop, which has worked many times. If the company fails, well you're not much worse off in today's government grant environment, and if it succeeds you get a product out, save lives, then sell the company to a bigger medical company and make enough money to fund your own research.
disclaimer: I am a medical device entrepreneur.
Clearly, we need to encourage more young people to go into STEM fields. Until then, more H1-Bs for the best and brightest biomed workers.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
The obvious solution is to return to traditional methods: establish an independent income, then take up scientific research as a hobby.
Historically, our most notable scientists were working at day jobs or otherwise independently wealthy, and did amazing research on their own as a hobby. Some devoted entire wings of their house towards scientific research, amassing a collection of equipment (or specimens) over decades.
Henry Cavendish, of the Cavendish experiment, is one such example. The experiment was so delicate that air currents would affect the measurements, so Cavendish set up the experiment in a shed on his property and measured the results from a distance, using a telescope.
There used to be a term "Gentleman Scientist" for this, but it might more accurately be called "self-funded research".
Consider Paul Stamets as a modern example. With only an honorary doctorate, he is co-author on many papers and has proposed several medications, including treatments for cancer.
I could also nominate Robert Murray Smith to the position. His YouTube Videos are as good as many published Chemistry papers.
The benefits are obvious: You get to work on whatever you think is interesting (or fruitful), you can set your own pace, and you can draw your own line between supporting your dreams and your lifestyle: If you have a family emergency, you can pause your research and spend more money on personal welfare. It also forces you to come up with more efficient (read: less expensive) ways to work.
There's a wealth of useful equipment on eBay and other places, big expensive equipment is not out of the reach of the dedicated researcher. Ben Krasnow has three (I think) electron microscopes. I personally own a UV/VIS spectrophotometer. a microgram scale, and a Weston cell.
The idea that "research can only be done at the behest of government" or "is only associated with university" is a modern fiction. Government would *like* you to believe that everything depends on their whim and largesse, but it's not the only, nor even the best way.
Build a lab and start tinkering, or join a hackerspace. Lots of people do it. Lots of good science is done this way.
I was in the process of working on a grant application to NIH in the not-too-distant past, and learned from it that I really, really don't like writing grant applications. Indeed to the point where I have decided to pursue other avenues for employment. I know I'm not alone in this, either.
The process is complicated, but for good reason. I would argue though that "risk averse" is not necessarily the true problem. The bigger problem is the fact that the funding agencies need to evaluate a very large number of applications in very little time. This means that they need a way to evalue the applications as quickly as possible, which generally requires evaluating most applications by their accompanying parts before looking at the meat (specific aims) of the grant application.
Hence the scientific merit or novelty of the proposal might never factor in to the funding, as it may never be evaluated.
I wish there was a better way for them to do this, but nobody has found one so far.
They could always become a Node.JS programmer. It takes a rocket scientist to figure out that sh7t.
It seems that to promote research at Universities, Congress decided to give the University the royalty rights to things developed with government dollars. Indeed, that has made some universities richer, and has no doubt improved the situation with respect to investment in facilities, etc. at the university.
However, the university is under no particular obligation to get any particular royalty rate, so it can be quite low (to the uni, it's all sort of "found money" anyway).
And, on any government funded research, the government retains a royalty free license to use it for government purposes. So, if the government decided, for instance, to provide some miracle drug free of charge to everyone, then the university wouldn't be getting any royalties.
The reviewers who decide which projects receive funding are risk-averse to the point where innovative research is all but off the table.
One of my all-time favorite quotes:
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough." -- Alan Kay
Ezekiel 23:20
There are methods to acquire funding other than getting government money. If you dont need too much cash, try to start a kickstarter and get people to send you money through that. If you need a lot of cash, try to find a venture capitalist to fund you or even bring a company public and sell shares for cash. The latter has been done before and a good example of that would be Kraig Biocraft Laboratories (Symbol: KBLB) which sells shares if its company to generate cash to fund reserchers and purchase equipment to make genetically altered silkworms infused with spider DNA so that they can produce spider silk. If they can reach commercialization, then it will revolutionize the fabric and textile industry by making a low cost, soft, elastic thread that is stronger than steel while at the same time, making anyone who invested in them very rich.
It is also the mechanism whereby it is distributed that is the problem. We get grants for a few years at a time for discrete projects. When one of these grants is not renewed, a lab can basically collapse and then shut down completely. This prevents long term thinking and taking the risk on something that won't fit in that 2-5 year window and on that specific project. The NIGMS at NIH is trying out a new way to provide more stable funding in exchange for less overall funding for some labs. Think of it as funding people rather than projects (http://watersheding.wordpress.com/72314-mira-mira-on-the-wall-whos-the-fairest-grant-funding-system-of-all/). I think it is a good start.
These days people expect Uncle Sugar will give them funding for every stupid project they come up with
It's a reasonable assumption when you consider things like this http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Not so sure, I agree with that conclusion.
Giving up on doing research in the US - sure.
Giving up on the field when other countries are glad to fund you - seems like more people are considering doing research in other countries.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I listened to this on the radio, and they left some bits out.
Apparently Bill Clinton and GW Bush substantially increased funding ironically. The lab community were foolish, took all that money and used it to build new labs... they assumed the funding would continue indefinitely and they were wrong. Now all those new labs are floundering looking for funds. It's not that funding has dropped from historic levels... it's that there was a massive increase in the late 90s early 2000's that didn't continue.
But we lack the balls to tax the rich so the money is in foreign banks growing moss.
And yet you only need to research nanotechonlogy. It's the panacea.
it is like duh: each scientist can train 2 or 3 a year; the result is some hyper exponential increase in teh number of scientists
each scientist is ~ 150,000 a year or more, fully loaded, salary, equip, supplies, etc
you don't need a PhD in math to see that this is malthusianism in action
back in the clinton era, the same thing was happening, way more people then money, and the science establishment got congress to roughly double the NIH budget
result ?
universitys built huge new buildings, greatly increased their staff, and in 15 years we were back were we started
The problem is that we don't have enough people graduating with STEM degrees. All the smart people people at Fox news know this.
Your comments got me thinking -- if people want to treat 'intellectual property' as 'property', then shouldn't it be subject to property taxes?
Of course, the problem with both of our ideas is that the companies would do exactly what they've been doing with their logos -- spin off a company in another country, give the IP to that company, and then rent the use of the IP back to the original company. (thereby reducing the profits of the main company, reducing their tax burden ... and the spin-off is in a low tax country, so it's almost pure profit over there).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
They are crying about funding in real dollars. Please cry to the Fed about that. In addition, plugging numbers from their own publications into online CPI calculators shows they are overstating the case (Shocking!)
I would easily believe that the report cost $6k. Let's say that the person writing the report is making $60k/year. That's, in rough numbers, about $1k/week. At most companies, fringe benefits, vacation, holidays, FICA, and the like would add about 50%. That's before you add anything for office space, computers, secretary, administrative services, etc. Where I work, a mid-level engineer (salary in 80-100k/yr range) costs about $300k/year by the time you add *everything* in. We're not particularly inefficient, nor are we lean and mean.
So, let's say that our report writer costs, all in, about $200k/yr, or $4k/week.
I can easily imagine it taking a couple weeks to generate almost any report. You have to gather some information, put it into a decent form, send it around for a review, etc.
There's going to be a LOT of posts about politics here. Mine will be no different. oh look, the first post is about global warming. "Just link your thesis to Global Warming, and you won't have a problem."
Except that's the complete opposite of what the article is saying...
We need good science. I'm very annoyed that we are subsidizing profitable industries while NOT funding important science work. You all should be too. What happened to us? What happened to America? When did we become so.... Stupid? When did we change from people that valued knowledge and learning to a people that put quotes around "scientists" all the time?
I'm guessing it happened right around the time that the messages that educated people were telling us became harmful to the messages that industry wanted us to hear. Why can people not see that?
Some great science can be done on very low budgets, even by high school students. However, Space X was not and never could be the product of a high school science fair. Nor could the Human Genome project.
Remove public funding, and science will indeed to back to hobbyist, 18th Century style....where the only people who can afford to do expensive science are the idle rich. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not trade thousands of universities and colleges doing science involving millions of students and faculty for a few hundred Bill Gates dabbling in their backyard.
Clearly we need more government oversight, regulation, and involvement. THAT will increase the amount of innovation and success in science.
I propose society could benefit significantly if we reversed the work-life-retirement model so during the most productive years (18-45) of the human brain the citizens are educated and engaged in activities including research which interests them with society picking up the tab, and during the declining mental acuity years (46-90) the citizens engage in traditional work roles and activities until death. In other words we eliminate the social security funding situation by eliminating retirement unless the person has the financial resources to sustain themselves and potentially their family. Youth unemployment would be eliminated as well by encouraging everyone between 18 and 45 years of age to participate in life-long learning and whatever activity they are truly passionate about or curious to explore as the case may be. Hopefully, the majority would choose to partake of activities leading to a better world in their youth while during the second stage they would work to sustain themselves and pay income tax to support those in the first stage of the work-life-retirement continuum. Why spend billions of dollars each year on the aged when society is better served by investing in people during their productive years?
I have always laughed when I see someone doing fundamental research and saying that it could help defeat bombs, or something else that DHS would love. The mental twists and turns that somehow connect something fundamental to something very practical although worthless.
So I have a simple idea, half the DHS budget and hand it to fundamental research. Also play a random game where projects are ordered by what seems to be some sort of worthiness. Then use that as a weighted order to select random projects. This would generally avoid the scummiest of fraudulent projects but then occasionally find the gem in the rough that goes against conventional thinking.
I was going to post "quite a lot of admin in there" but you really put it better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US of A has too much debt (and contingent liabilities). Perhaps another country is willing to pick up the tab?
227-3517
Part of what drives scientists away is that all of these grant proposals are a huge time sink. It takes a very large percentage of time just to write enough proposals to keep funding coming in that actually doing the science becomes secondary.
Stop and think about what sort of scientists you get if the top priority is writing grant proposals and churning out incremental paper after incremental paper. On of my engineering profs fell into this category, it was year after year of publishing correlation "papers" between weather data and recorded satellite signal strength. He lacked in almost all forms of creativity, and was not an inspiration for students, but climbed up to department head on the back of all that publishing (and on the backs of a few perpetual grad students who actually did the work).
I have a lot to say about your point. I heard this piece too. The big picture problem (and totally missed in the NPR report) is that when the USA decided to double down on Biomedical Research in the late 90's a lot of very important people made bold promises for advancements in the biggies Cancer, Altzheimers, Schizophrenia etc. The Pharmaceutical companies were flush with capital and everybody partied like it was 1999. Grad students, I'll take a dozen! No two dozen! Here's what happened. If you notice a lot of major Pharmaceutical companies have gone bye-bye or been absorbed into Pfizer. You may also notice recent news that, say, flagship Scripps Institute is in trouble, seeking a merger. This despite a champagne soaked licensing alliance with said Pfizer struck in the late 00's. Again the problem is that paradigm shifting profitable biomedical advances are totally totally rare. So while it is definitely true that the Pharmaceutical Industry is absolutely reliant on the government research, as a generator of big cash they themselves have been hurting (and have been cutting their own research budgets.)
Way to cherry pick the data. Bush was responsible for the biggest increase in federal R&D funding for science in 30 years (the biggest increase prior to that was under the elder Bush). The vast majority of that increase was for biomedical research. So it's not at all surprising their funding has dropped a bit in the last decade. Their funding was more than doubled (in nominal dollars) between 2000-2004. The federal government has been concentrating on shoring up other scientific fields in the decade since then.
Let's be honest. Science is partly to blame. I'm old enough to recall the early 1970s, when social scientists assured us that making divorce easier would have few if any harmful effects.
Today, you could do a heck of a lot of science, if we weren't having to pay all the costs of divorces and especially single parenthood, both in welfare budgets and the secondary costs of children whose homes leave them ill-prepared for getting an education.
A case in point, Patrick Moynihan drew enormous flack for his 1965 report on rising illegitimacy among blacks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For_National_Action
Moynihan generally concluded in the report: "The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States" That lamented an illegitimacy rate (meaning fatherless homes) of 25%. Today that number is around 70%.
Sorry, but if science wants more money, it needs to deal with the harm the social scientists in its ranks have wrought. That's one reason why there's no money for research.
This hasn't been my experience. Reviewers and grant officers want to fund high risk/high reward science. But you are competing with others who have already tried a bunch of risky ideas and are only proposing the ones that happened to work. You basically have to make a significant discovery before you can be funded and then you can get funding to bring that idea to full bloom and hopefully fund a few risky projects on the side that will serve as the basis of the next grant proposal.
Most new ideas are bad ideas, so funding agencies have to have a pretty rigorous filter to sort out the promising ones. As a result, it will always be very hard to get funding to explore an idea before there is evidence that it is on the right track.
Last I heard a lot of scientists are leaving is not that funding is really drying up, but they can be potential millionaires in some startup comapny in silicon valley. And be cool geeks, be the next Zuck, Brin, Page, or even a Jobs, live in a bubble of 'parties' at work and act like rock stars.
Just saying.
I'm leaving a top tier research university for work abroad. I began during the gravy days of 1970's/80's when national research policy was directed by the 'guys who won the war' - WWII - through advanced science and technology. There was an appreciation that basic science, with no direct link to an immediate application, was important for teaching us new things. Requests for Proposals reflected that policy. Even focussed technology development recognized that not all of the science was known to ensure that a desired widget could be realized with certainty, and that inevitable surprises were valuable to study.
As these patient grown-ups retired from the policy scene, they were replaced by the impatient generations of individuals focussed on personal, not social achievement. The few extra pennies on each month's phone bills that used to support research at Bell Labs could no longer be tolerated because competition for cheaper long-distance phone rates required that money could no longer be invested for the future, it had to be used to milk whatever technology existed at the moment and wring every last cent out for the quarterly profit statement. This new battleground was staffed with individuals whose personal fortunes were tied to squeezing out every cent today because tomorrow was someone else's problem.
This is our national mindset. Requests for proposals have to posture with weasel words like high risk - high reward that appear to recognize that uncertainties exist, but funding will not go to those who carefully examine the risks, but will go to those who promise the highest reward (usually those who are sufficiently ignorant of the risks to strengthen their belief in the certainty of the reward. When beliefs trump science, even in the pursuit of science, the game is over.
People keep trying to have the government do stuff that they're not allowed to do, such as funding scientific research. "But it's really important! We need to force everyone to pay for it by funding it from taxes." Hasn't anyone read the 10th amendment? The states can take care of that stuff. Keep the limits on the feds!
I just wrote a blog post on this subject a day or two ago:
http://freedomgeek.quora.com/S...
--- wad
Corporations have sold the government the myth that we need more STEM workers...of course, the unspoken part of their claim is "we need them for cheap"...
Never read the Constitution, I see. Funding things is one thing the Feds are specifically allowed to do.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No one here has mentioned crowd funding. What possibilities exist for a small percentage of the population of the net to see the long term philanthropically and financially.
Typically development can come to market with a product in 5 years or less. Larger companies can deal with longer development cycles than smaller companies. Big companies like the OLD AT&T had Bell Labs (I just don't know the current statuss, and it was significantly downsized when AT&T was taken over by SWBell), and IBM has its labs that both have done and do real research that may or may not ever come to market. Most of their 'research' could also be considered 'development'.
As much as I dislike government sponsored research and development, even as a conservative I think it has a place. DOD is a special case, but even there research needs to be separated from development, especially for basic research. To me, basic research has a long term 'payback' probability. Things like the Manhattan project was a special case (compressed research and development cycle, but was compensated by unlimited funds (within reason for the day)). We are still benefitting from the Los Alamos Labs continuing research. NASA is another compressed development that came from WWII development and went to a compressed/accelerated cycle or R&D in the '60s, and has tapered off since. ... All this to say, government sponsored research is best suited to long term ahd highly speculative research.
Also, Research is exploration with a low probability of usable (spelled commercially viable) outcome. Development is taking the results of research and often other developments and rolling them into a viable and typically useful outcome (commercial product).
China learned from the 'American Century' (1900's), to bad we haven't. ... Yes, research costs, and costs big money. The spinoffs overall tend to take a while to turn into 'profit'. But basic research is the investment we put into the future of our society.
On economics, we need to find a way to get much of the expatriated assets repatriated. Currently companies are not repatriating cash assets due to tax laws. How to do it depends on the the political winds, but it appears obvious that higher tax rates than other countries. Secondly, and more importantly we need to reduce the amount of national debt held outside our borders (by non-US citizens) to less than the GDP. That is a long term goal. It is basically like paying your mortgage to family members versus to a out-of-town bank that has no skin in the game seeing you succeed.
Am I right? I think so. Am I wrong? Not totally. -- Implementation is left to the interested student.
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."