When I was on tour with the band, I was fortunate enough to play a show in Boston, MA where I have a good friend who is a post-doc at Harvard. After the show, in the sweaty confines of the club we played at-his wife (also a post-doc) and I launched into a pretty interesting conversation about the nature of our experiences in labs since graduating. (This much to the chagrin of the punk-rockers downing Pabst Blue Ribbons behind us).
After exchanging the obligatory list of “this is what I am working on now” we began to share our worries about the future of scientific progress and our own funding opportunities.
The discussion whittled down to how society sees science as being done. As in my earlier posts (an ongoing thesis of mine), I told them that I was frustrated with the romantic idea that has been pushed by the main stream science media. Namely that science progresses through massive “paradigm shifts” and in between these paradigm shifts, which are often attached to some great thinker, there is not much done. This “little science” as I refer to it is often dismissed as unimportant.
My friend challenged me on this point, asking me to remember before and after the discovery of DNA. His point was well taken, but I think that the biological sciences are special in that the discovery of DNA really depended on the “little science” that preceded it. I do believe that physics and biology are two different sciences operating at different levels of complexity, and that the typical paradigm shift model is more suited to physics than biology. Thus, my hypothesis is that great discoveries depend on thousands of “little science” papers that may not make the front page of Science or Nature or Neuron.
We began to wonder out loud, how can we speed up the rate of scientific progress on diseases like bladder cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease? Increased productivity means longer hours for us, and we discussed how there is an inverse relationship at a certain threshold between hours and the bench and productivity. There are only a limited number of post-docs, but we agreed that progress in scientific discovery really comes down to man-hours at the bench.
On the ride out of Boston, through rural Connecticut on my way to the hotel, I began to think about why progress in the sciences seems so stagnant. I began to formulate another hypothesis-that is-the progress of scientific discovery follows closely with the fertility rate of a given country. In other words, if you want man-hours at the bench, then you have to put men and women at the bench in large numbers to do the “little science” that yields great discoveries.
A new report in the Economist suggests to me that I may be on to something.* Not only would increased fertility rates lead to increased possible researchers, but also increase the tax/revenue base from which most public and private research is funded. Given this, it seems odd to me that being educated enough to look for the cure for cancer also results in less numbers of people who are around to look for it. (Read: more educated western countries have lower fertility rates).
There is one country that stands out, and that is the United States, which is the only western country with a fertility rate that is at replacement rate. What is different between the U.S. and the European nations cited in the Economist article? The U.S. is a much more religious country (although that is now in decline), and these religions put more emphasis on the creation and maintenance of the family.
I know this sounds quite orthodox coming from a scientist, but maybe it is high time we team up with some of the religious and cultural organizations in the U.S. to encourage them to support families that can have their own religious beliefs, but also have a fundamental trust in the scientific method.
I know it seems logically impossible-but if we suggest that raising a family is the fastest way to cure cancer, which by the way may be part of God’s plan anyway, we may just help science and the scientific method in the long run. This is one suggestion I have for buffering what I see is a long, slow decline in the science output of the U.S.
*And yes, I realize that correlation is not causation. But this topic should be discussed in the open nonetheless.
There was a pretty good article on that in the New York Times last year about the topic. They suggested the reason why the fertility rate in the USA is higher is because the job flexibility is higher than in Europe. It is indeed quite more common in the USA to quit or change jobs, so easier for women to drop out for a while. However, I personally think it’s to some extend a sociological effect that doesn’t necessarily have any particular reason (combined with a totally distorted attitude of Americans towards sex). People orient themselves on others around them. If you live in a country where women have more children or have them earlier, you’re more likely to do the same thing.
In any case, you sure that Americans are more religious than Italians?
Interesting. Would that it were that simple. ‘…a limited number of postdocs’? There’s buckets of them! They just can’t all get jobs; or can’t get permanent jobs. Which suggests insufficient funding – even in the rich west.
There are many ways of looking at this. Another, perhaps, is that countries with high fertility rates are often poor, less educated, highly religious – and contribute not a whole lot to science because they can’t afford the infrastructure. It’s not that the rich USA is religious; it’s that so much of its religious population is readily provoked into anti-science – like the creationism/ID-ripe fodder reflected in that survey graph (and which largely, directly or indirectly, supported the Bush-era anti-science agenda). A higher fertility rate-driven increased tax/revenue base would need to fund a whole lot of things besides an increased number of potential researchers. Rather, an increased US fertility rate might mean more people with an anti-science attitude – not more potential scientists, who tend to come from middle-class, expensively-educated and less fecund families. ‘God’s plan’? Umm.
There’s more than one way to increase your working population and tax base… what impact would changing immigration rates have?
Sorry guys, I could not login to my own account for some reason.
Changing immigration rates is difficult, because that means you would have to discriminate against “non-skilled” workers and that would be a problem.
The “God’s plan” line: that was supposed to be in quotes and the fact that it is not is kind of funny, but the idea is that we need to use their own doctrine to convince them of ours. But you bring up a good counterpoint to my article, Lee, in pointing out that more may not necessarily mean better.
And no, I am not sure about attitudes about religion in Italians versus Americans.