Nobel Prize winners discuss the UK research environment
Matt Brown
Thursday, 08 May 2008 10:53 UTC
A lengthy but must-read article in today’s Times Higher Education looks at the state of UK research from the point of view of several Nobel Prize winners.
Many felt that the US has traditionally been a big lure for researchers, but that the tide is steadily turning in favour of the UK and Europe.
There are many good quotes in the article, but this one from Richard Roberts particularly caught my eye:
Looking ahead, Roberts feels that “America is where the action is, but there are also plenty of hotspots in Britain and Europe”. He still worries that British official policy has “too much of an obsession with measuring practical utility. The future (as well as the Nobel prizes) comes from blue-skies research rather than applied. As soon as you say you know where you’re going, you know what you’re going to discover in advance. Funding mechanisms discourage people from digressing and following their noses.”
Is he right? Do we need more blue sky research?
Updated 08 May 2008 10:54 UTC
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Replies
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Yes.
But I don’t think the logic in the excerpt is correct. You can (and we do) have blue-skies research and funding mechanisms. I think that there needs to be a competition to be able to do your reserach in the first place, a competition that involves independent assessment by a peer-group.
But it can be a competition for blue-skies research as well as for applied research.There was an Editorial not so long ago in Nature about a group of Nobel prizewinners who had set up to advise on research projects—maybe the same group as described in the article you refer to here! Nature said that being a Nobellist didn’t qualify you to make such judgements. At least one Nobellist wrote in to disagree. Do you think that getting a Nobel in a discipline makes you more qualified to make general pronouncements about the direction of science (outside your field)?
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I’m not sure about ‘more qualified’. But my suspicion is that a Nobel laureate may be able to give a better big-picture overview of the system, thanks to greater hobnobbing with movers and shakers in government than the typical scientist.
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I’m going to take a slightly contrary position (I know, what a surprise). I am not sure that competition per se for research funding is necessarily good.
Just as a thought experiment. What if we had a system by which research proposals were refined and improved by referees input until they reached an appropriate quality level for funding?
I did the calculation once, and this is probably no better than a guess, but if you assume that 25% of research proposals are funded (which is a generous figure) and that the average grant proposal probably represents a month of highly skilled labour (lets say 20,000 active academics in the UK writing one proposal a year, average full economic cost for an academic per year of £120k). Then I make the cost of wasted time in UK academia for preparing grant proposals around £150M per year.
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The NIH has put in processes to try to reduce that time, Cameron, by a two-tier process. I suppose an analogy is an over-subcribed journal where many submissions are declined before they absorb a significant amount of the time of the reviewers and the editors.
There also have been times when the UK research councils were less than frank with applicants about the proportion of grant applications that would get funded.
The process is also not necessarily wasted, if unsuccsseful candidates can transfer their peer-review reports elsewhere. At Nature, we sometimes receive submissions containing reports from another journal that has rejected the paper.Sorry if I am taking you too seriously. In an era (eg as frequently referred to by Terence Keeley) where scientists funded themselves, then of course they could follow their own course. But it seems to me that in an environment of professional scientists who need someone else’s money to do their research, a process of selection is important, or they’d all be building perpetual motion machines, because they sound fun.
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I tend to agree with Cameron. It astounds me that this is one of the few (probably only) ‘professions’ (at least in the UK) where one is required to compete for money to hire your own staff.
And the whole added process of selection offers the undertone that you incapable or incompetent, having been hired to an academic research post, to know what direction research in your area should take. I for one wouldn’t be bothering with perpetual motion machines – we all find different things cool.
Included in this is that selection does rely on referees, who are also human, and who know who you are – so you will not always get the best science coming to the top thanks to human nature … -
I agree that there is clearly a need for selection. That or an extreme reduction in the number of research groups. I guess I’m just asking whether a radical re-thinking of the process might make that selection process more productive and efficient. The current system trains young scientists to a high level, takes a small proportion that are judged to be the best, and then locks them in office for four years writing unsuccessful grant applications just at the point when they could be the most productive in a lab/bench/computer. My calculation was tongue in cheek but there is unbelievable wastage of human resources in academia. In real terms I think £150M for the UK is a serious understimate. One of the (very few) benefits of FEC is we can start to put numbers on this.
The problem in the UK in particular is that you are very limited for funding sources. If you are a chemist and EPSRC knock you back for a non-industrial project (and I think we started on the need for more blue skies research) then you’ve got no-where else to go. BBSRC currently strongly recommend against re-submitting unsuccessful proposals, even when the project was deemed fundable (and allowing for the fact that’s a rather odd label to give a non-funded grant). It will be interesting to see what difference a European Research Council makes to this in terms of widening the options.
I do prefer two stage grant processes (disclaimer – I’ve also been more successful at them) because it does reduce the time wastage. Although I note there has been quite vociferous complaints from some quarters about the NIH approach as well. One thing that has been happening a bit recently is that two stage processes in the UK have included funding bodies suggesting that two different preliminary proposals get put together which I think is a quite productive model to think about. Hence my original suggestion of refining rather than binning.
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