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The Allen Telescope Array is used by Northern California’s SETI Institute to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is often difficult to fund.Redding Record Searchlight / Zuma Press
This story was originally published in Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Science is builtExplore the natural world with bold curiosity Astounding leaps of imagination and insight—coupled with a laser like focus on empiricism and experimentation—have brought forth countless wonders of insight into the workings of the universe we find ourselves in. The culture that encourages, supports and rewards the bold mental daring that is the hallmark in science is at risk. It is being eroded by a mountain of cautious, risk-averse and incurious advancement that seeks to win grants and approval from peers.
I’ve encountered this problem myself. After completing my Ph.D. degree in Physics, I began postdoctoral research on cosmic voids. These vast areas of almost nothing dominate the universe’s volume. My coworkers and I were using voids in order to understand the evolution and structure of the cosmos. We were also fascinated with voids as objects. As I was applying for jobs beyond that postdoc, senior scientists repeatedly told me that I should concentrate on something else. Something more mainstream. Something safer. Something safer.
My experiences weren’t unique. I’ve met many junior scientists who were given similar advice, and senior scientists—now that I number among their ranks—confide that their top priority is in achieving deltas: a physics jargon word that they use here to refer to tiny, incremental advances of their current research. They admit that the tenure system, which was created to allow academics to explore new directions in safety, rarely serves this purpose.
There is no denying that science involves some risk-aversion. As science matures and scientists focus on the low-hanging fruits, the problems become more difficult, and require more people and resources to solve them. It’s also easy to fall into a trap of conformity. Graduate students are encouraged to explore the problems that interest their advisors. A sub-problem of a much larger domain; junior scientists, under pressure to please the senior scientists who make grant and tenure decisions, opt for small, incremental advancements of existing knowledge over risky, high-payoff research lines; even senior researchers tend to choose research directions that their peers will approve of.
The current grant funding climate plays a significant role. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to get a federal grant. According to the National Science Foundation’s Annual merit review reportThe agency has funded approximately 20% of all research proposals it has received over the past decade. Down from roughly 30 percent in the 1990. The majority of grant awards go to researchers with more than 10 year experience. Proposals from these senior scientists are accepted at a higher percentage than those of junior scientists by around 5 percentage points.
The fierce competition has set the stage for a cultural shift from “What problems am I interested in?” to “What problems are likely to be funded?” Because without funding, the ability for a scientist to do science becomes severely limited.
This culture of risk-aversion puts science at risk. An incremental approach to scientific study—where large collaborations spend enormous amounts of money to refine existing knowledge to greater degrees of precision—may win grant funding in the short term because it’s a sure bet, but it cannot be sustained in the long run. Policymakers and the public will eventually lose interest and disconnect from what makes science fascinating and engaging, namely discovery.
Scientists must make cultural changes to prevent science becoming another bureaucracy that exists only for the purpose of perpetuating itself.
First, reward risk. We need to allow scientists to make mistakes—to explore interesting research directions and find nothing of value. Junior scientists need this double. Junior scientists need to be able to explore new directions and use their unique perspectives to discover them. We can reward those who take risks by celebrating both null results and great discoveries. Both paths lead us to new knowledge, which is a fact that is not often acknowledged enough.
We can incentivize risk by hiring and promoting junior scientists who do something new, even if they weren’t lucky enough to have it pay off. As long as an investigator shows sound intent, effort, and clarity of insight—the hallmarks of a great scientist—they should be considered for awards, positions, and prestige.
We can also reward risks in the grant proposal processing. According to the NSF merit review report, the program officers who ultimately make the recommendation to award or deny a grant proposal are expected to consider, among other factors, “support for high-risk proposals with potential for transformative advances” when weighing their decisions. This is a reminder that riskiness should not be celebrated, but managed.
The agency supports funding mechanisms that are specifically designed for high-risk research. This includes the Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research program. In the past decade, however, EAGER grants have amounted to only 1 to 2 percent of NSF’s allocated research grant money. Why can’t it be 5 percent? Or 50 percent? What’s stopping us? Fear of failure
Scientists must also manage the expectations of policymakers and the public. Scientists and their advocates have been playing a dangerous public relations game for decades, billing science as an institution that can. Deliver Society a guaranteed rate of return on a given investment. Science is messy, full of mistakes and blind spots. Discoverers of all kinds don’t know what they’re going to get until they go out and look for it themselves. We need to level with the taxpayer that scientists shouldn’t be expected to always deliver promising new results. We need to celebrate—both internally in the scientific community and with the public at large—the so-called failures that also represent the growth of knowledge.
We need to convince the public that science is a daring act of curiosity in order to give scientists the support and confidence they need to make great discoveries. This is a very, very risky endeavor.
