
Michael Nielsen » The mismeasurement of science - mblakele
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-mismeasurement-of-science/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+michaelnielsen%2Fwmna+%28Michael+Nielsen%29
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crocowhile
Funding in Science is becoming a huge huge problem, well beyond the criteria
used to distribute money. We need a major revolution on how people actually
work and think. At least in the biomedical field.

There's a lot of talking about it, I wonder what we can do to act.

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JoachimSchipper
Care to elaborate? I'm not very well aware of funding in the biomedical
field...

I will, however, say that all scientists that I know of spend a significant
amount of time chasing grant money. A streamlined process would be very
desirable.

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crocowhile
The bottomline is that there is way more people to be funded than money, to
the point that even a 2x or 4x increase in overall budget would not be enough.
And a 2x increase is pretty much science fiction anyway.

The lab structure has changed dramatically in the past 50 years: your average
research lab is way bigger than it ever used to be and it's mainly composed of
students and postdocs. The principal investigator would invest all of their
time on a) writing grants proposal to get funded b) hire and coordinate lab
members c) writing papers when it's time to.

This leads to the following problems: a) it's difficult to identify
intellectual contribution. Many times the postdocs and students are the ones
who did the whole work, starting from having the initial idea to writing the
paper. The PI may or may not help and at the end of the day will always get
full credit.

b) PI who are successful by this standard will keep in getting money to hire
more/new people.

c) with labs this size, there is no way everybody will get a job past the
postdoc phase. In fact, only 1 in 10 postdocs can get a professorship
nowadays, simply because there's too much demand and too little offer.

This means that a lot of smart people simply will not be able to continue with
their career and, as a corollary, that a lot of not-deserving PIs will still
be able to thrive exploiting their students and postdocs. In shorts, there's
little money and it's not allocated properly.

