Are research prizes a good way to advance science?
Heather Buschman
Sunday, 24 August 2008 18:49 UTC
Private space travel got a boost in Mojave, Calif. a couple of weeks ago. There, Virgin Galactic unveiled the White Knight Two, a special aircraft that will give tourist-filled spacecraft a lift into space. Virgin designed it because they needed a better way to launch the 12 such spacecraft purchased from Scaled Composites after they won the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for SpaceShipOne, the first reusable private spacecraft.
This reminds me of InnoCentive, a cool project I came across recently. Basically, it’s a website where “seekers” (governments, companies, non-profits) can post problems they need solved and offer monetary incentive to anyone who comes up with a useable idea. At the moment, seekers are looking for people to come up with things like a way to estimate the prevalence of seizures in schizophrenics ($50,000), the next generation of household cleaning ($5,000), or a design for an affordable solar powered device that prevents the spread of malaria ($40,000).
Maybe I’m just coming to realize this, but the Ansari X-Prize and InnoCentive seem to be part of a new trend of using prize money to drive science, engineering, and discovery. I also heard of another X Prize being offered for the first 100-mpg car that makes it to the general public. Is there a prize offered to the first person to cure cancer? Or come up with an AIDS vaccine?
So I want to ask: Is this a good way to advance science? What are the negative ramifications? Will prizes like these change the way the public views science and scientists?
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Replies
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That’s a really interesting question. I am not sure how these contests work, from a financial standpoint. Did the $10 million prize cover the expenses of the development of the winning space craft (not to mention all the losing prototypes)? Tackling problems such as cancer or AIDS could be even more costly. Where do the operating budgets for these huge undertakings come from? Additionally, problems in biology are not as finite as those in engineering or physics. They grow and evolve, slide off track and back on again, taking decades in all. Seems like a complicated proposition to ask a group to come up with a solution in a set amount of time with no funding.
Personally, I think there is more promise in lab collaborations and open lab science in solving big biological problems, such as the ones promoted by the Multiple Sclerosis Society awards.
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Actually, I’m not so sure this is a “new” trend, although it may be used a little more frequently now. The Knowledge Ecology International has tracked prominent instances of the use of monetary incentives for scientific innovation. The first one listed is the Longitude Prize in 1714 offered by the British government at the value of 10,000-20,000 British pounds for coming up with a method for accurately determining a ship’s longitude. The most interesting one I read about is the $100,000 Fredkin Prize offered in 1980 by computer scientist Edward Fredkin for the first computer chess program to beat a reigning world chess champion! (It was awarded to IBM’s Deep Blue Chess team in 1996 when their machine beat Gary Kasparov.) The Soviet Union actually implemented a Committee for Invention in 1931 to offer monetary payment for inventions, but it would be calculated as some percent of savings produced due to the use of that invention after 3 years of use. Basically, the more useful your invention is to society, the more the Soviet government would compensate you later. Another interesting fact is that in 1946, the U.S. Patent Compensation Board was established to provide monetary incentive for atomic energy innovation because a lot of the future inventions that would be necessary for society would not be able to be used for commercial purposes (therfore not for profit) due to security reasons. Also, it is not so much of a stretch to offer a monetary incentive for an AIDS vaccine – in 1994, the Rockefeller Foundation offered a prize of $1 million to anyone who could develop a low-cost, accurate diagnostic test for gonorrhea or chlamydia that could be easily administered in developing countries. Although, it would have to be a large sum and with no time limit, because apparently the Rockefeller Prize was not awarded to anyone (expired in 1999) and was criticized for being too low of an amount and offered over too short of a period.
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Amazing! I had no idea. It seems like a good idea to offer prize money, but it seems so prohibitively expensive to develop any of these projects that you also have to be 1) rich or 2) pre-funded some other way.
One reason I think InnoCentive is so neat is that most prize offerers (is that a word?) are only looking for a ideas in the form of a couple of written pages, not a fully-developed product.
Do you think that prize money makes scientific advancement more accessible to the general public? It certainly gives me a fun maybe-I-could-do-that feeling!
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i cant wait to see what they come up with for the X prize in Genomics. They challenge is to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days for less than 10,000 a genome.
Pacific biosciences looks like they have a good start
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I can’t see how there could be ramifications, this has been done before albeit in different ways.
It can work in finding quick fixes but I don’t think this approach could address big problems, which normally take years of research and require people with deep knowledge in a given field.
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I think money is always a good (the best?) incentive to get people do what you want them to do.
But that means the limited resources have been bundled up and given towards a few selected projects, and diversity in research is discouraged, which can become a major problem.
Given the nature of research, big (or important) discoveries seem to come in unexpected places.
Even without ‘research prizes’, some research topics are deemed ‘hot’, others ‘cold’. Most money goes to the ‘hot’ ones, but usually there is still money that goes to ‘cold’ research. However, if the trend of giving ‘research prizes’ becomes mainstream, then the ‘cold’ researches may end up getting phrased out. ‘Cold’ researches can be, e.g studying songbird singing or anything that does not directly contribute towards curing some human disease, ‘poor people’s illnesses’, ……… -
I just saw a cool new challenge issued by Google: help as many people as possible. It’s called Project 10 to the 100th. All you have to do is come up with an idea and they’ll spend $10 million to implement it. The deadline is October 20th and proposals can fall under any of the following categories:
- Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
- Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
- Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
- Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
- Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
- Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
- Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
- Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.
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