

Tillery to Represent Hayes Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees - zzzeek
http://100r.org/2013/08/excessive-lab-fees-choking-research-scientist-says/

======
hdevalence
Again with the title-changing.

"Tillery to Represent Hays Against UC Berkeley in Dispute over Lab Fees" does
not tell me:

\- who Tillery is \- who Hays is \- why I should care about a dispute over lab
fees.

The original title made it clear what the issue is: the scientist in question
alleges that his lab is being shut down due to his criticism of a herbicide
made by Syngenta, who coincidentally give money to the university.

Please, stop secretly editing the titles.

~~~
zzzeek
FTR the original title is from this Michael Pollan tweet:

[https://twitter.com/michaelpollan/status/368771855064133634](https://twitter.com/michaelpollan/status/368771855064133634)

"Tyrone Hayes, embattled scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta, loses
his lab funding at Berkeley"

I had shortened it to "Scientist critical of Atrazine and Syngenta loses his
lab funding at Berkeley". Though I pretty much expected the HN title change.

~~~
tzs
I wonder if your title (which is orders of magnitude better than the title it
was changed to) would have survived if you had submitted the tweet itself,
instead of dereferencing to submit the original article?

~~~
zzzeek
apparently HN headlines have an 80 char limit.

------
epistasis
It sounds like there are a couple thing going on. First, the researcher has
run out of funding, and second, UC Berkeley is accused of ramping up his lab
fees far far faster than his colleagues in order to prevent him from
continuing research.

The first is a travesty, and there are many fine and outstanding labs out
there that are going through similar situations, due to stagnant funding for
years followed by the current sequestration. This is irreparably damaging US
scientific research, as once a lab closes and all the specialized reagents are
gone, it's going to take years to get back to the same starting point.

The second is puzzling, if true. The only thing that I can think of that would
cause UCB to act that way is I they feel that this professor will prevent them
from getting commercial finding for other professors. That seems tenuous at
best, but I can't imagine any other reason for administrators to blackball a
prominent professor. And this would be impossible for the administrators to do
at all if the professor was getting grant support for his research.

~~~
dnautics
the second is a travesty (if the accusations are true as characterized and
there isn't something going on, like, the researcher didn't read the fine
print).

the first is not. If you are not doing research efficiently, then you should
not be doing research. You may see "outstanding labs" but if the grant
reviewers disagree, then what. You are not entitled to research money. Someone
has to want to give it to you. It can be debated if grant reviewers are
actually doing a good job (versus being a whitewashed version of cronyism),
but the bottom line is, that money is NOT the researcher's money. It's the
taxpayer's money. And there is not an infinite supply of it.

~~~
epistasis
>the first is not. If you are not doing research efficiently, then you should
not be doing research.

My point, and perhaps I could have been clearer, is that funding is shrinking,
while the quality of proposals is increasing or getting better. Funding rates
for grants are now in the 5-10% rate, which means that even excellent,
efficient, outstanding labs that are leaders in their fields can starve due to
random chance.

It ha nothing to do with being entitled to research money. It has everything
to do with the US spending research money efficiently and not capriciously. A
research lab is not like a startup in that the intial time investment is quite
long, and cutting that off inappropriately is wasteful. Additionally, it is
incredibly inefficient to spend most of a researchers time churn through good
proposal after good proposal, and no let them do research.

US science is shrinking dramatically right now, and rebuilding it will be a
slow and long process, an if we lose the crown to China in the interim, the US
may never be the bastion it once was.

~~~
dnautics
I disagree. The quality of proposals is getting worse. There's a horrifying
cycle of cronyism, lack of managerial skill that is going into science. People
are promoted into research positions based on the impact factor of the
journals they publish in, not the quality of their work. High impact factor
journals publish things that are more likely to be scandalous than solid. The
most important aspects of scientific success (versus excellence) is "were you
your PI's golden child", and "just how lucky did you get"?... etc. etc. etc.

These trends are reflected in the proposals that I see getting pitched.

1) Who cares if "we" "lose the crown" to china? 2) I'm not worried about
china, anyways, the scientific culture there is miserable and dastardly, and
deeply entangled with the cultural value of "face" (I'm east asian, I think
this applies to Korea and Japan, and troubling - increasingly in the US - see
Hellinga, for example) and values Feynman's "extra integrity" less.

If you claim it has nothing to do with being entitled to money, then perhaps
you should rephrase. Cutting and pasting what you said,

"First, the researcher has run out of funding ... the first is a travesty"

Which implies that a researcher running out of funding is a travesty. _In the
general case_ , as implied by your use of the indefinite article, that is not
true.

~~~
OvidNaso
Do you claim that 90% of proposals are not worthy of funding? Because it it
was not an extremely high number, we could significantly increase spending and
still only fund the best.

You stated: " It can be debated if grant reviewers are actually doing a good
job (versus being a whitewashed version of cronyism)"

If they are already evaluating research and researchers the way the rest of
profession does, I don't see how cutting funds would help. It would not drive
better proposal writing. And if the cronies are already getting their money
anyway, the added batch might have a higher percent of high quality.

I understand the desire to punish the undeserving of your profession, but when
weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially
inefficient)...I don't care. And cutting funding won't make a significant dent
in the problems you describe.

~~~
dnautics
I'd claim that a lion's share of the top 10% of proposals are not worthy of
funding. The best proposals are probably usually rated in the 70-80% range,
depending on the funding agency (NSF, NIH, DOE), but most of it is utter
embarassment.

"when weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially
inefficient)...I don't care." Well, no, we're talking about funding here. What
if the structure of funding was causing a net _regression_ in the advancement
of science? Is it a safe assumption that funding directly correlates to
advancement?

"And cutting funding won't make a significant dent in the problems you
describe." If I had my druthers, I'd cut science funding to zero (there would
be other ways to raise money for science - endowments, 501(c)(3)s,
foundations, bake sales, etc. Keep in mind Peter Mitchell validated the
chemiosmotic effect, a cornerstone of basic biochemistry and cell biology, by
launching his own completely independent science research foundation) That
would make a significant dent in the problems I describe.

~~~
moocowduckquack
What about the medical funding for stuff like cancer, where the vast bulk is
in the public sector?

Also, while I agree with Theodore Sturgeon that 90% of everything is crap, in
science it is especially hard to tell what that 90% is going to be in advance,
so I think it is better to overfund and then concentrate on the improvement of
quality in the review process to filter out the crap.

~~~
dnautics
I guess I'm uncomfortable using taxes to pay for stuff (especially
overfunding) that will be mostly crap. Taxes, because if you don't pay for
them, you go to jail, should be subject to a particularly strong level of
accountability[0], and "we don't know what is going to be useful" is just
really a recipe for spending abuse.

Peer review is one thing (and it looks like it's going to be getting
better)... But reviews for funding - that's really tricky. How do you select
whom to review science? In our current system, you wind up with program
administrators (people who advocate and shepherd funding projects) who are
mostly[1] people who 'couldn't make it in science'. So you get effectively
second-rate-intelligence fanboys and fangirls who get paid six figures to fawn
over the scientists with the biggest mouths and most outlandish claims. To
actually conduct the reviews, typically PIs are hired (in a secreted
process[2]), so there's of course a level of cronyism involved - not to
mention how PIs are generally clueless for other structural reasons. It is
hard to believe that this system is efficient or effective at being a good
steward of the public trust.

[0] Science is not by far the worst area where government excels at failing to
be accountable, but I also see no reason to increase our investment in a
system that isn't working.

[1] I know one program administrator who isn't incomptent, she's my ex-boss;
the reasons why she wound up as a program administrator are rather complicated
_and_ everyone hates her because she isn't interested in doing things the
usual way. My neighbor growing up - who introduced me to science - was a
physics administrator was probably also not incompetent, but I don't really
know.

[2] by which I mean the process is not secret, but the actual goings on are,
i.e. you don't know who reviewed you etc.

~~~
moocowduckquack
I agree that using taxes to pay for stuff that isn't going to be used is
wasteful, however there is waste in all activities and at least science
funding has a good economic return on the whole, even when there is a lot of
waste. Besides, I don't see stuff like CERN happening privately.

Also, to avoid confusion, I was meaning tightening up the peer review process
and loosening the funding review. The biggest problem I see in poor science is
not in the fact it was funded in the first place, but that it is difficult to
filter out later. Like you said, funding decisions are tricky, but I think the
trick would be to fund even more things and concentrate on excellence in peer
review. This would, I think, increase the overall benefit to society, which is
the only thing that justifies paying for it with tax in the first place.

~~~
dnautics
I guess we'll just have to disagree. In my opinion, "benefit to society" is a
necessary but insufficient condition to morally justify paying for something
via taxation. The other necessary condition being "requires force to
administer", for example, police (if someone is murdering another person you
are going to have to detain them with force).

The reason, why it is insufficient, is the question, "if it were so beneficial
to society why didn't society pay for it voluntarily?" Now, the usual argument
is "because they were too stupid or selfish to" \- but then, why would we
expect the politicians to be any better? Day by day, it seems to me that the
political class is more capricious, narcissistic, and self-centered than most
humans they rule over. I do not see this as a particularly effective cadre of
individuals to be overseeing spending money on science research, however
indirect. Might as well just get money from the people directly with
outstretched hands.

To your original point, "What about the medical funding for stuff like cancer,
where the vast bulk is in the public sector?" This is a particularly bad
example because there is a large BINGO (although I would not call it a shining
example of an efficient charity) that funds quite a bit of cancer research -
the ACS. The early decades of the NCI were a disaster. To be sure, the NCI has
gotten way better over time, and there are some indispensible services they
provide (which nonetheless in theory could be spun off to nonprofit private
orgs) like the NCI-60 cell line screening service; but there are also plenty
of stories about the siloing/turfwarring that goes on between the NCI and the
NIH - which has led to severe inefficiencies and plenty of lost opportunities.
The ex-boss program manager manages projects for the NIH that OFTEN cross over
into NCI territory and the political machinations she's complained about make
my head spin.

~~~
moocowduckquack
I'm not sure that "requires force to administer" is that good a qualifier for
deciding on what should be funded by taxes, assuming that you mean force in
the political sense of force against people. By that standard you wouldn't
fund fire departments.

Also, government paying for things is society paying for things. Government is
part of society, not an appendage.

On the subject of cancer research, I don't know that much of the situation in
the US, but I did look into this a while back and found that the amount spent
by governments globally dwarfs the money spent by industry and charity
combined. I apologise for not having the figures to hand though and if you
think I am wrong on this, let me know.

edit - just had a look at your profile... I was not aware of what you are
involved in. Good luck with it all, I hope you do well and I will stop trying
to tell you about cancer funding as you are bound to know a hell of a lot more
about it than I am.

------
keithpeter
"While money doesn’t talk, it swears" as Mr Dylan sang.

I hope this gentleman gets his day in court. In the UK, we have tight controls
on fertilisers because of run-off into water supplies. You'll be drinking (a
dilute form) of what they spray quite quickly over here.

