
A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money - Fede_V
https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left-science-because-he-ran-out-of-funding/
======
etiam
Reminds me of a rather heart-breaking interview with a man who should have
been a laureate.

(I wish I had saved this at the time, but now I'm unable to give a link to the
video material)

The Chemistry prize in 2008 was awarded for fluorescent proteins, which can be
used to label interesting biological structures and functions. One of the
laureates' guests at the ceremony was a former colleague, whom they were
careful to point out had been absolutely critical for the discovery, implying
that he should have been sharing the prize.

A TV reporter caught this colleague for interview for a while during the
festivities after the main banquet dinner, and found, in addition to
congratulations to his friends and background on his contribution, a story of
extreme academic pressure and not getting enough money to sustain himself and
the research. To make ends meet, he left science and started driving long haul
bus transports, and that's how he had earned his living ever since. He looked
sad about it, but also resigned - claimed the pay is better and it's a lot
less stressful. You got to pay the bills and at least it's some financial
security. I found it a very moving story, and the reported seemed shaken at
that point too.

"But you were doing Nobel Prize quality research!"

"Well. That makes me a very overqualified bus driver, doesn't it."

~~~
DanielRibeiro
That's a great story! I found a book describing the story of Douglas Prasher
in more detail:
[https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=P...](https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=Nobel+Prize+%22fluorescent+proteins%22+%22overqualified%22+%22bus+driver%22&source=bl&ots=CCaThA-
SKx&sig=b6u08w4aji0tDtS7Ntfr9osGlZI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN7umrk97WAhXO0J8KHbLpDsIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Nobel%20Prize%20%22fluorescent%20proteins%22%20%22overqualified%22%20%22bus%20driver%22&f=false)

This is also told on his wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher)

On the bright side, it seems he returned to Scientific Research: _In June
2010, Prasher was finally able to return to science, working for Streamline
Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, and then from 2012 to 2015 in
Tsien 's lab at the University of California in San Diego_

~~~
etiam
Thank you kindly. It's good to know his name again, and it's something of a
relief to see that things seem to have shaped up for him since then.

I wonder how he's doing after the passing of Roger Tsien.

------
mcguire
" _He also said that these stars [that “have not really earned their status”]
have boasted to him that they almost never send their articles to “anywhere
but Nature, Cell, or Science“—among the three most prestigious science
journals. “And they are nearly always published in one of those
magazines—where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it’s
not always so great,” he continued._ "

I subscribed to _Science_ for a while (the only benefit I can see of AAAS
membership), and I was surprised by the work published there. I'm a computer
jockey, and not into the biology that _Science_ mostly publishes, but I had
expected it to be major, ground-breaking papers. Instead, it seemed like the
same kind of minimum publishable unit that goes on everywhere.

~~~
evolve2017
I think it’s unfair to discounts papers in a foreign field to one’s own as
‘minimum publishable unit’ - often the novelty and importance of a finding
requires some background, which the new, longer narrative abstracts in Science
are trying to provide.

~~~
mcguire
True, I'm out on a limb here.

But the "news" part of _Science_ is very good, and has insightful coverage of
science activities. In comparison with _the rest of the magazine,_ the
published research in _Science_ was...meh.

------
jaclaz
As a side note, there is another effect that we have to consider.

If these brilliant scientists/professors are not (adequately) financed for
their research, inevitably a large part of their time will be dedicated in
looking for funds, detracting it from the time dedicated to the research
itself.

So, not only some research is not possible (or gives scarce results) because
of the lack of funds, but the time spent in looking for other funds will
reduce the research results in a perverse spiral.

In a perfect world research institutions should be able to make their lead
researchers "worry free" (about the funding and the other bureaucracy
matters), as this condition is the one where creativity and productivity is at
the top level.

Since funds are obviously limited, maybe the issue is about starting too many
researches (underfunding each of them) as opposed to choose a limited number
of research projects and fully fund them.

But if you use this approach, the issue becomes the war for being selected,
the possible corruption (or simply bad judgement) of the selecting commission,
etc.

I guess noone has a proper solution to the issue.

~~~
jules
If you increase the funding then the supply of scientists will simply grow
until funding as again as competitive as it is today. The first order problem
is that the funding ends up with mediocre scientists rather than brilliant
scientists.

~~~
thenomad
This argument seems like it needs some evidence behind it.

Where's the infinite supply of scientists coming from?

~~~
Fomite
It’s not infinite, but the boom of funding during the Clinton-era fostered a
large increase in faculty positions, especially soft money positions.

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apsec112
The current academic system is rigged to produce a continual "shortage" of
funding and jobs, no matter what the nominal budget is. If an average lab has
3 professors and 15 grad students, and the average professor stays for 40
years while the average grad student stays for 4, then in equilibrium only 2%
of grad students can become professors.

~~~
kaosjester
Don't forget the part where those graduate students do some 80% of the work
and make <20% of the income of their their supervisor (and, in many cases,
<10% or none at all in several), and the university hosting the lab absorbs
some 50% of all grants "off the top." A half-million dollar grant pays a
single graduate student less than 20k/year for maybe 5 years, which, in the
context of other companies that get these grants, is _absurd_. Independent
research firms working from the same grants pay their employees competitive
wages and _still_ accomplish research. If these companies could issue Ph.D.s,
academia would shrivel and die: imagine working at a company for 4 years,
getting a salary 3-4x what a graduate school would offer, doing real work in a
professional setting, doing enough research to write a dissertation, and
receiving a degree. The entire incentive to attend a university would melt
away.

~~~
jostmey
I don't think many people (even graduate students and postdocs) realize how
much money universities suck in with grants. For every RO1 a professor gets,
the university gets to add a substantial (typically greater than 50%) indirect
costs. The PIs don't care because their budget is the same, but what it means
is that there are fewer grants being handed out. Then the PIs somtimes pay for
the "training" that graduate students and postdocs get using their own funds.
For a top university, this can be 50K/year.

~~~
greeneggs
That's not exactly how it works. If an agency wants to give a $1 million
grant, for example, and the PI's university has a 60% overhead rate, then the
PI will draw up a $625,000 budget (as 625*1.6=1000). So the overhead
definitely matters to the PI---except there is little the PI can do about it
after joining a university. Most big universities have similarly high indirect
cost rates, which they steadily increase over time.

UC Berkeley (2016): 57%

MIT (2018): 59%

Harvard (2018): 59%

Stanford (2018): 57%

This story, from 2013, gives some of the context and history, as well as
averages for universities and other research insitutions (which can have much
higher overheads):

[http://www.nature.com/news/indirect-costs-keeping-the-
lights...](http://www.nature.com/news/indirect-costs-keeping-the-lights-
on-1.16376)

~~~
killjoywashere
And all that overhead money is going to 3 things: increasing healthcare costs
for the burgeoning retiree population of staff, increasing the number of
administrators subservient to the king (I mean, provost), and new
construction. The political class sees these additional jobs from the last two
as the core justificatiin for the government increasing student loans for
students and overhead for grants. They don't comprehend the science or frankly
give a shit about it. Maybe when they get cancer they'll have a vague sense of
interest in their organ system of choice, but that's about it.

------
santaclaus
This guy keeps it real as fuck. Love that he is rocking an Idiocracy hat
during an interview.

~~~
nether
He would not be a culture fit at any biotech startup, that's for sure. I love
how at the end of the video, the Nobel laureate in medicine takes a long drag
from a cigarette.

~~~
flachsechs
a lot of doctors and especially surgeons are closet smokers.

bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.

~~~
sndean
> bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.

I initially found it surprising how many residency program directors tell
interviewees that their programs don't allow illicit drug use. But yeah,
extreme stress can lead to some bad habits, and it's apparently common enough
to feel the need to remind candidates.

~~~
cperciva
When I arrived at Oxford University, the first thing they told us at the
international student orientation session was "don't try to bribe the police
officers".

Things like this don't have to be very common to be worth pointing out.

~~~
praneshp
Were there many folks from developing countries in the orientation? In my
orientation (at an American university), there was a huge emphasis on "you
might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously".

~~~
cperciva
Some students from developing countries, yes. And I'm sure that admonition was
largely aimed at them. IIRC most of the room looked European.

 _you might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously_

Yeah, this is a problem my university runs into too -- international students
are around 20% of the undergraduate population but consistently around 50% of
the cases of academic dishonesty. :-(

------
j7ake
To add to these anecdotes, Ron Konopka (notably discovered the Period gene,
which controls the period of circadian rhythms in Drosophila) was denied
tenure and subsequently exited science.

Read more on his wiki:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka)

He died in 2015, about 2 years before Hall, Rosbash, Young won the nobel prize
for cloning the Period gene.

------
throw2016
Some kind of academic independence like a free press is essential for a free
society. Universities are often venues for dissent and perpetuation of ideas
as they provide the context and space for contemplation, research and
developing ideas.

This role has heavily and quite consciously diminished since the 70s. We have
already learnt a free press often does not function as we would imagine easily
co-opted into furthering various agendas and established interests.

With academia too engrossed in getting funding and a free press not really
'free' with their own funding constraints who plays the role of a watch guard
and informed comment. If everyone is too busy trying just to survive a society
in many ways ceases to be dynamic and loses its self awareness reduced to mere
trading and consumption.

------
Razengan
How come we have no international organization that does research for
research's sake, and is jointly funded by multiple countries and private
donations?

Or is there one and I'm just not aware of it?

~~~
OliverJones
Dr. Hall's short autobiography (the article linked here) shows one downside of
research-only orgs: the superstar effect - the celebrity principal
investigator effect. A prestigious research-only org can fall under the sway
of a single ego, or a few egos. When that happens it can drive away real
inquiry.

Readers of HN are generally accustomed to a winner-take-all approach to life.
That's also known as an inverse-power-law approach or a network-effect
approach. It's what makes cities and social networks get big.

Science policy well done struggles to counter this. It's smart to keep science
real by spreading the financing and the expertise around.

That being said, there are plenty of research orgs. The late lamented Bell
Telephone Laboratories, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Max-Planck
Institutes are just a few.

------
BrandoElFollito
I left academia 20 years ago after completing my PhD (in physics).

Getting the PhD was an awesome experience : intellectual effort, nice peers,
teaching was great and the parties in the campus were memorable. One of the
greatest periods in my life.

By the end I started to feel two things which drove me away : the begging for
money and the feudalism.

I was payed peanuts (which was ok) and was not willing to spend a big part of
my time looking after funding. I was a physicist, not a negotiator or
economist.

Then came the medieval feudalism where the mere fact that you had dr, or prof
or whatever was supposed to make others kneel in front of you. I did not
kneel, told a few professors (after they provoqued me for a long time) that
their contribution to the school was useless (no science, no teaching, no
anything, just sitting idle on their tenure) and inserted of telling me what I
did not know (that they were super heroes of finding, or whatever), they told
me that this is not a way to address a professor. I had a laugh and said good
bye.

I have a great job in industry, look at these years in awe but would not come
back. At least until something changes towards meritocracy.

------
SubiculumCode
And this funding model causes a lot of research money to actually be
wasted...because conducting research to followup bad research is not
efficient.

------
Nessuss
I'm shocked there has been no mention of The Economic Laws of Scientific
Research. Terence Kealey makes a compelling argument that government funding
more than crowds out private funding for Science.

I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because
'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research _surely_
has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely
wrong historically.

------
matt_wulfeck
The title seems disingenuous. He didn't leave science because of a lack of
funding, but because academic dysfunction caused the massive amount of funding
to go to those who don't deserve it:

> _In a lengthy 2008 interview with the journal Current Biology, he brought up
> some serious issues with how research funding is allocated and how biases
> creep into scientific publications. He complained that some of the “stars”
> in science “have not really earned their status” yet they continued to
> receive massive amounts of funding._

What should we do then, pile heaps of more money into academia? Sure, but also
address the obvious dysfunction in a meaningful way, or else it's wasted.

~~~
ryandrake
Hate to tell him, but welcome to the real world. This is not a problem
specific to academia!

Stars not having really earned their status? This is true in all institutions,
businesses, governments, schools, home owners associations, book clubs, sewing
circles, etc. Any group of people where "resources" are allocated by a human,
there will be people who earn their status and there will be people who
instead focus on influencing the allocators. Strange to have to tell grown-ups
this.

~~~
jknoepfler
I don't think Hall "needs to be told" anything.

The people who lost out here aren't Hall and the academics who can't get
funding. Hall is doing fine in the private sector. The people who lose in this
situation are the public, who no longer own the research output, and who no
longer benefit from the long-term gains made by primary research.

We should create, for ourselves, a sustainable research economy. We've failed
to do that. Are you suggesting it's impossible because you think "reality
isn't fair" or "people suck"? I don't think the latter entails the former.

~~~
pdfernhout
From the conclusion of this 1994 paper:
[https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html](https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html)
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at
an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential
expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that
fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions,
education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of
exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the
unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities,
government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came
of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that
generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we
are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain
that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we
face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era
of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality,
and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out
for us."

------
galfarragem
_' Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at
it.'_ \-- Albert Einstein

------
hudibras
That last paragraph is brutal.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-
left...](https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left-science-
because-he-ran-out-of-funding/), which points to this.

~~~
tdhoot
With respect, "points to this" is a little misleading. The original qz article
had an interesting video (with reaction of winning the Nobel prize) of the
laurete which the cell.com interview misses.

~~~
dang
I missed the video, and it was sort of a borderline call to begin with since
the older article lacks the current context. So maybe I would have left it had
I seen that. On the other hand, IIRC what they did with the text was flat-out
blogspam, i.e. cribbed completely from the other source, and it kinda galls me
to reward that.

------
ggm
The prize went to Roshbash. I knew a Rasbash at university. Doubtless
different people, but is this name a shared root in some distant migration?

