Academic scientists perform research to expand the boundaries of human knowledge. New knowledge may have application – it may not – but ultimately, academics pursue questions because they are interesting.
Academics are 'blue sky' researchers. They value intrigue over profitable application.
In contrast, industrial scientists (working for companies) use the scientific method to make money. They perform research as a means to capitalism. They pursue questions because the answers are profitable.
Industrialists are 'profit maximisation' researchers. They value profitable application over intrigue.
Each axiom also has its trade-offs. Academics accept reduced professional and financial stability in exchange for creative freedom. Conversely, industrialists accept reduced intellectual freedom in exchange for professional and financial stability.
Both academic and industrial scientists are well trained. Both are smart. Both do cutting-edge research. One is not 'better' than the other. Academic and industrial scientists simply use the scientific method for different goals based on whether they value intrigue or profit respectively.
This professional dichotomy allows scientists to choose between the creative freedom of an academic career or the profitable stability of an industrial career.
At least that's how it's been in the past – because this paradigm appears to be changing.
Recently I've observed increasing claims that a 'creative crash' in academic science is looming.
Writing for Ars Technica, Ben McNeil explains:
"The hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding that supports the world's academic research ecosystem is distributed based almost exclusively on the opinions of senior experts (or ‘peers’). These experts review proposals and seek to find ideas impervious to criticism. Unfortunately, a research idea that is immune to criticism during peer review will, by its very nature, be cautious and take minimal risks.
Rather than have peers assess the innovative potential of an idea, preliminary data and publication records are now the dominant parts of the evaluation. Funding is so tight and proposals are so heavily critiqued that any one reviewer can kill a grant proposal based on arbitrary metrics of quality—or even if they suspect the idea just won’t work.
Yet relying only on peer-review misses something about the nature of scientific innovation: some of the biggest discoveries are deemed crazy or impossible by experts at the time."
Risk-adverse critique by senior peers has the potential to produce a conservative (arguably right-wing) anti-novelty bias in scientific funding. Given that new ideas are the core medium of academic research, this anti-risk taking bias is extremely dangerous.
New ideas – by definition – always journey into the unknown. The entire purpose of non-profit academic research is to push the boundaries of our knowledge. But you can't push boundaries if you're scared things won't work and want to play it safe. Famously: “If we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research, would it?”
New ideas are high-risk. That’s exactly why professional companies can’t justify doing them. And that’s exactly why non-profit academics should be doing them.
What is the point of academia if only low-risk, highly-proven projects are the only ones who get funded? If academics can’t pursue creative, novel, blue-sky research – yet still experience volatile employment conditions – the traditional academic (freedom + instability) vs. industrial (stability + no freedom) argument unbalances. Academics might as well work in industry.
Unsurprisingly it's already happening.
I've been coming across more and more and more and more examples of well-trained, successful scientists leaving academia because they couldn't get funding for creative research. These people are not lacklustre bums. These are people who have been educated into their 30's by the very funding sources that are now crippling them. And because they lack the piles of preliminary data and safe track-record that grant reviewers require, the conservative funding bias can hit junior researchers hardest.
Ben McNeil recounts an increasingly familiar perspective:
"In the early 1970s, Roger Kornberg, a 27-year-old Stanford PhD, was working at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. With a modest post-doctoral salary, Kornberg was given freedom to explore untried and risky areas of research. This would ultimately allow him to make a revolutionary discovery about how DNA is copied in cells.
Kornberg would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2006 for that work. Yet he told The Washington Post that he’s convinced his groundbreaking Nobel Prize winning idea would never have been funded today.
"If the work that you propose to do isn't virtually certain of success, then it won't be funded,” he said. “Of course, the kind of work that we would most like to see take place, which is groundbreaking and innovative, lies at the other extreme.""
And Kornberg isn't the only Nobel Prize winner who's worried about research funding. Sydney Brenner shares a similar concern.
Fortunately, all is not lost for those wacky ideas just yet. A small rebellion has begun....
The Wellcome Trust recently announced their new 'Seeds' funding. A Seed grant is "a new kind of funding to support the generation of new ideas. It aims to address a gap identified by our community: small awards to investigate riskier concepts." Seeds are explicitly for un-proven creative ideas. Wellcome can do this because they're rather moneyed and don't have an explicit applied science agenda – but there is little reason why other grant sources can't attempt the same.
Hopefully more funding bodies will remember their academic objective is to push the boundaries of human knowledge. Not to tip-toe around the boundaries – scared incase something doesn't work.