
How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation - iswanghao
http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and-publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney-brenner/
======
plg
"But today there is no way to do this without money. That’s the difficulty. In
order to do science you have to have it supported. The supporters now, the
bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it
supported, they want to know from the start that it will work. This means you
have to have preliminary information, which means that you are bound to follow
the straight and narrow."

It's getting even worse, at least in Canada, where not only is the above true,
but another pattern is emerging, namely that the government is "intervening"
in the topics that get funded, by directing more funds to projects that have
an immediate (or even a perceived immediate) impact on commercial activity,
and/or topics of interest to the government (e.g. alberta oil sands)... and a
concomitant decrease in funding to "open competitions".

~~~
mjn
Although it has its own set of problems (some pretty large), this is one
somewhat nice aspect of the EU scientific funding system. It has ulterior
motives, but many of them are "meta" motives rather than specific ones like
oil-sands, because it's not one national government setting the priority.
Instead there are meta-motives like "improve European research/educational
integration". That's implemented by requiring that EU-level funding only go to
multi-country projects with partners from >= 3 countries represented (single-
country or two-country projects are supposed to be funded at the national
level). That adds coordination difficulties since every EU project is a big
multinational management problem, but it's at least a political criterion
that's mostly orthogonal to the actual research. And when they do pick actual
topics, because of the need to compromise between so many governments they
tend to be very vague, like "data & 21st-century society", which you can fit a
lot of things under.

I do recall seeing a study that suggested that just taking the total pot of
money and dividing it by the number of researchers would be at least as good
and maybe better, though. Even if the lack of competition leads to less hard
work and more money being spent on questionable things, there is a _huge_
overhead removed: the entire infrastructure of people writing 100-page
documents, other people reviewing those documents, people flying to Brussels
(or D.C. or Ottawa) to make funding decisions, support staff at universities
reviewing documents, etc., etc.

~~~
dnautics
The odd thing about your comment is that in my experience science in Europe is
a MORE feudal system than in the us, with hierarchies of professorships and
less independence for most researchers.

It's possible that this is a cultural thing writ large, but how exactly do you
get a committee to do anything but reward the 'haves' at the expense of the
'have not's?

~~~
mjn
That's one area that _really_ , really varies, and is completely
unstandardized across Europe (while the funding mechanisms and degrees are
becoming more standardized, which is a tricky divergence). Germany has more of
a traditional model where a Professor has a capital P, is not a social peer of
the lower-down people, and there is no clear route to becoming that person.
But once you are, there is a large degree of research freedom and some
guaranteed funding. Sweden has the diametric opposite, where a lecturer with a
masters degree who's been teaching at the same place for a few years basically
becomes permanent faculty with tenure, without having to either do a PhD or go
through a tenure application (and anyone _with_ a PhD is more or less equally
at the top tier). Denmark isn't quite as flat on the teaching side, but is
flatter on the faculty vs. PhD student side, with PhD students considered more
or less faculty, paid much better salaries than most PhD students (€40-45k),
and guaranteed funding (by law) for their entire PhD before they're admitted.
Italy is more feudal, with "barons" controlling the positions in some
departments (apparently Umberto Eco, mostly known to the general public for
his novels, is somewhat notorious in Italian academic circles for being one of
the big ones). Spanish universities can be super-regional, with complex
language requirements, e.g. a colleague of mine who was born and raised in
Galicia can't teach at a Galician university without doing additional
certifications, because his degree was not done in a Galician university. Etc.

But my point was mostly just that the EU as a funding body doesn't micromanage
research areas that much, because it has too many governments to do so:
Denmark might want all the money in wind power, but they won't get that
through. Instead the EU picks general meta-goals like "promote European
research integration", and a few broad focus areas, which allows quite a bit
of flexibility on what the actual scientific project is. Some blue-skies stuff
gets funded as a result, as long as it's multinational blue-skies work in a
broad area of interest.

------
FD3SA
Science funding has devolved back to Feudal times, where an aspiring scientist
must gain the favour of wealthy barons to support his research. Because of
course by capitalist reasoning, science as a pursuit has no immediate returns
on investment, thereby being a frivolous waste of time.

Honestly, I don't know if this insanity will ever stop in our lifetimes.
Profiteering has now become the number one profession of the developed world,
and anything that does not generate short term profit is seen as wasteful. I
increasingly fantasize about the days of the Manhattan and Apollo projects,
where the state treated science as critical to its survival.

Let's look at ourselves: how many brilliant people are now scrambling to make
web/social/mobile apps in hopes of getting acquired or hitting their IPO? Is
this what these people would do if left to their own devices? Or would they
become fascinated with the eternal undertaking of science, and make
breakthroughs in fields which would change the way we understand the world?

All the brilliant people I know have admitted defeat, along the lines of "If
you can't beatem, joinem." The only way they see research in their future is
if they can become the next Bill Gates or Zuck, and have billions to spend at
their discretion.

This is an extremely sad development. An entire generation of aspiring
scientists (myself included) are shut out of the system, while parasites such
as administrators and rent seekers suck the last bits of life from the dying
government funding apparatus that they have successfully gamed.

Science is the eternal pursuit of truth. It is the very thing which
distinguishes us as a species. The quest to understand ourselves and the
universe is a fundamental drive of every human being which should be nurtured
from birth. Increasingly, however, scientific pursuit is relegated to the
sidelines in the quest for pure capitalism. A society focused upon
profiteering can only have one end: fiscal and moral bankruptcy.

~~~
smd4
Hey, don't despair.

First, not everyone has admitted defeat. Maybe you just need to meet more
people. Grad schools are just wrapping up admission season, and I'm totally
inspired by the level of talent and quality of students I met this past few
months.

Second, scientists are among the greatest beneficiaries of the information
technology revolution. The most important instrument every scientist uses is a
personal computer. Brenner says "The way to succeed is to get born at the
right time and in the right place. If you can do that then you are bound to
succeed. You have to be receptive and have some talent as well." This
definitely feels like the right time and place to me.

Science may be the pursuit of knowledge, but that doesn't mean humans who work
as scientists get to be privileged when it comes to allocation of resources.
We will just have adapt to new ways of communicating why our work is
important, and new ways of raising money [1]. Science is way more expensive
than most people realize, but it costs millions, not billions to run a
successful lab.

Anyway, we'll make it work. Just like our predecessors made it work when
science budgets were a fraction of their current size.

[1] For example: YC-backed experiment.com

~~~
FD3SA
Of course there will be extremely talented yet naive students lining up for
graduate schools. They are mostly unaware of the soul crushing reality of
working in perpetual poverty in hopes of landing a tenured research position
that doesn't exist.

This is a perfect case of confirmation bias due to information asymmetry. They
have been in school their whole lives and thus have only met the few
successful people who've managed to land tenured positions. They haven't met
any senior grad students who've spent decades in a lab being paid less than
the lowest administrators, and dumped to the curb for a fresh batch as soon as
their best years are spent.

I'm not a pessimist, but when the reality is bleak [1], I will not convince
myself that everything is dandy. Will this change? Hopefully. When and how are
the questions I'm most concerned with at the moment.

1\. [http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/a-dark-
future...](http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/a-dark-future-for-
science/)

------
ihnorton
" I don’t believe in peer review because I think it’s very distorted and as
I’ve said, it’s simply a regression to the mean."

"SB: ... Somehow that’s why the journals insist they will not publish your
paper unless you sign that copyright over. ... everybody works for these
journals for nothing. There’s no compensation. There’s nothing. They get
everything free. They just have to employ a lot of failed scientists, editors
who are just like the people at Homeland Security, little power grabbers in
their own sphere."

------
Suncho
If we want scientists to be able to work on projects that nobody else cares
about, we can't be judging who deserves money and who doesn't. What we need is
a system that allows people to work on whatever they want without any
requirement that their efforts be sanctioned by greater society.

Sounds to me like a job for guaranteed basic income.

~~~
amark
That won't work. The money isn't going to line the pockets of (most) of the
researchers. It's going to fund the actual science costs itself, which is
millions per project.

The problem is that science nowadays is expensive. We've past the days where
scientits can preform chemistry experiments in their garage, most science
requires heavily specialized equipment, years of preparation, and/or lots of
people.

I don't see a clear way to fix this problem. The projects that have the
clearest ROI will continue to get funded first.

~~~
tensor
This really isn't true. Math and computer science research need very little in
terms of materials cost. The physical sciences are indeed more of a problem,
but I have difficulty believing that everything needs big money to research.
Surely a large communal lab would facilitate a lot of smaller scale work?

~~~
amark
Those fields aren't the issue, and not what he is discussing in the article.
The two fields he mentions, bio-chem (the DNA sequencing) and quantum physics
(higgs), both require large amounts of funding to progress. Think the large
hadrom collider was cheap? Think a DNA sequencing machine is cheap?

Math is only limited by computer power, and our own personal mental computing
power. Computer science, similarly. Those two fields are different from the
rest of science as we know it today.

~~~
Suncho
It's true that certain aspects of science are very expensive. We're generating
a lot of data these days through DNA sequencing, particle collision, and
various other expensive scientific measurement techniques.

But there's a lot of work to be done in making sense of that data. It doesn't
cost anything to play with data that's already been collected.

The biggest breakthroughs come from people thinking differently.

~~~
masklinn
Not sure what you're trying to say, do you believe collected data is currently
shunted to a bin while the next sequencing run is started or something?

~~~
Suncho
No. I'm just saying that we're collecting data faster than we can make sense
of it. New discoveries don't necessarily require new data.

------
bigd
Let's not forget about self-sustaining communities:

15 erasmus friends cite each other, and peer review each other.

In few years, one/two/ten of them will be also editors of more or less decent
journals (Impact factor usually between 4 and 12). Most of them will publish
10/15 papers per year, on their companion journal. Which is a good throughput
for having founds.

And if one is caught saying bullshit, 14 "experts" will protect him.

As an example see Stellacci story here
[http://raphazlab.wordpress.com/](http://raphazlab.wordpress.com/)

~~~
leoc
Well, that's eye-opening. So the rot seems to have reached materials science?

~~~
bigd
I've been in the community 5yrs now. And I've seen a little bit of everything.

This is my favorite one so far:

    
    
        A, B, C write paper, submit to his pal D.
        D appoints E,F,G as reviewers.
        C, and E were in school together.
        F was a C student.
        G sends the paper back to C to auto-review it. 
        C cannot be bothered, so delegates the review back to A.
        A reviews his first name paper.
    
        (poor phd student B doesn't even know)
    

yay peer review!

------
Toenex
One of the reasons I left academia was that, as an Engineer I became
completely disillusioned with the _novelty over utility_ bias. Things were
published because they were new and not because they were really any better
than existing techniques.

~~~
whathappenedto
I completely disagree with your sentiment and think that academia should focus
on novel work rather than incremental improvements. Something novel may not be
better than the existing techniques right now, but what's to say they won't be
better in the future? When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it was not
better than candles because it was extremely expensive, fragile, lasted only
briefly, and the light was very dim. But it was novel and with more
improvements, beat the state-of-the-art.

~~~
Toenex
You can't disagree with my reasons for leaving academia. I never said academia
was at fault, simply that I wanted to build useful things and couldn't achieve
that when I was only going to be measured largely on how novel the solution
was.

I would also suggest that most valuable research conducted today _is_
incremental. Even the amazing breakthroughs are usually the final piece of
many years of work by many varied teams.

------
hyp0
Academic funding is just like venture funding in that you need to convince
someone. And because they don't know what will work, they mostly follow trends
and fads. You can see this if you look back over the publication history of
the average academic (i.e. not a leading, ground-breaking academic who founded
their own field), with paper titles twisted to fit the then flavour of the
month.

Here's a popular thought for HN: why not a YC-style academic funding, where
you fund people, not ideas?

The metric for success would be parallel to YC: funding rounds from academics.
This potentially falls prey to the same biases as current - but avoids it, by
giving all ideas a initial start. The other question is whether academic work
really does require more mentoring and guidance than start-ups.

Though I guess the first year of a PhD often plays this role...

~~~
mjn
> Though I guess the first year of a PhD often plays this role...

In the U.S., the NSF Graduate Research Fellowships sort of do that for a bit
longer (3 years). You do have to write a short proposal, but like with YC,
there's not necessarily an expectation that you'll stick with the project that
was in the proposal. It's just there to demonstrate that you can come up with
a coherent project proposal. I actually did something completely unrelated to
the original proposal, and they were fine with that. So it ends up being 3
years of guaranteed funding to do whatever you want. The funding is also tied
to _you_ , not through a faculty member, so you really can do whatever you
want (e.g. if you change supervisors or even universities, the grant follows
you).

At the faculty level, there are also NSF CAREER awards, which are supposed to
fund promising researchers, not specific projects. However at that point it's
harder to dissociate the person and the research area: is it really possible
to judge only the person unbiased by which area they work in and what they've
been publishing? With the graduate fellowships it's a bit easier because, like
with YC, applicants often have no real track record, so you're just judging
college seniors' potential to do research, not judging their existing
research.

------
cinquemb
Part of me views this as a branch apart of a larger problem in our societies
today, which seems to be with the allocation of capital in general, combined
with the (mis)alignment of traditional institutions in general (the
state/corporation/church) with the (idealized?) vision some people look back
upon their effectiveness in the past.

I think this interview gives me insight as to what the void is (something I've
been wondering myself as I feel kind of estranged from academia, but wanting
to pursue pseudo-academic interests), and how its currently being filled (by
individuals in an ad-hoc fashion, who have capital it seems), but leaves me
wondering: who will be the actors in the future, where their incentives will
align enough, for something to take off on a larger institutional level?

------
DaniFong
Really fantastic interview, thanks.

------
lowpro
A bit of a read, but couldn't agree more, although I believe something of a
similar title was on HN within the last 6 months that made the exact same
points. If I didn't know better I'd bet that professor is an HN subscriber!

------
quarterwave
A significant element of scientific research is being the first to find
something. It's the ego thing, all the way to standing up there in fancy dress
some day to receive one's gong. Publishing is a time stamping service for the
ego trip. Why rail against it?

~~~
chetanahuja
That's a naive interpretation of state of things. Timestamp aspect can be
simply fulfilled by putting your pdf online and let google (and wayback
machine) index it. "Publishing" as understood in academia is very different.
It's about publishing a paper in a "high impact" journal and has pretty much
been devolved to a grade card for the working scientist.

------
restlessdesign
Clickbait. Next.

~~~
amark
Don't think so. The interview is long winded, but right around the mid-point
the author get's to the point. The title isn't misleading.

~~~
untilHellbanned
The scientist interviewed is one of the most important biologist ever. He is
worth listening to.

