Science Funding's Unintended Consequences

According to an eye-popping article in the June 9 Nature, about one-third of more than 3,200 polled U.S. researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health self-reported serious scientific misbehavior during the three years prior to being surveyed.

High responses for serious infractions came in categories such as "Failing to present data that contradict one's own previous research" (6% of respondents), "Changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source" (15.5%) and for lesser categories such as "Dropping … data … based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate" (15.3%). Because the answers are self-reported, the polling researchers think the results may be underestimated. The researchers speculate that misbehaviors are keyed to "perceptions of inequities in the [science] resource distribution" process, and argue that identifying those perceptions might aid the promotion of scientific integrity.

Since 1970, total federal non-medical research spending as a fraction of Gross Domestic Product has declined by about one-third. No formal history has tracked research misbehavior, leaving it impossible to say if ongoing stresses on budget allocation systems would partly explain current misbehavior.

Continual budget pressures, though, are transforming U.S. research and development. Funding agencies now weigh more heavily a proposal's aim toward practical applications, especially those with near-term payoff.

Dr. Steven J. Beckler, a former National Science Foundation official now at the American Psychological Association recently wrote, "A general panic is developing [at the National Institute of Mental Health], especially among social psychologists, because the institute's recent reorganization appears to be shifting funding away from basic research and into translational research."

Another earlier example shows that the problem has been ongoing: The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) in 1999 judged federal investment in information technology then as "inadequate." While the "non-inflationary growth in high-technology businesses fuels U.S. world leadership" and generates "hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs," federal support "has been compromised by a shift toward applied" research and development.

PITAC explained that federal funding in its discipline is "excessively focused on near-term problems." To no one's surprise, agency "managers correctly favor their agencies' missions when budgetary pressures grow and they have to choose between long-term research and short-term mission needs."

A key, early step for today's Internet came in the 1970s when the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Program Agency (ARPA) funded a project to transmit information packets among computers. Few researchers (except perhaps Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy or Vinton Cerf) or agency managers could have foreseen ARPANET's downstream economic penetration and societal integration.

Not many downstream applications can be credibly bulleted in a grant-request summary for research funding at the boundaries of the unknown. Hence, bottom-lining near-term, practical applications out of the sometimes serendipitous path to fundamental scientific principles would create public misunderstanding of the nature of basic research and development. In turn, that misunderstanding of science might undermine public support.

The modern emphasis on practical results where none can be foreseen leads us to think back to a young Professor Richard Feynman arriving to teach physics at Cornell University in the late 1940s. In his own words ("Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" pp. 157-8) he was "burned out" from the demanding work at the Manhattan Project, so he began afresh: "I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever."

Freed of the impediment of relevance, Feynman watched a plate tossed in the air in Cornell's cafeteria. While the plate lofted it wobbled, and the red emblem at the center of the plate spun around noticeably faster than the plate wobbled. To Feynman it demanded understanding in terms of basic physics of spinning objects. He ground through ladders of equations. And the answer surprised him because "the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate [at small angles]." That two-to-one ratio seemed extraordinarily basic.

Feynman explained this result to his colleague, Hans Bethe, who would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 (two years after Feynman shared it with Julian S. Schwinger and Tomonaga Shin'ichiro) for his work in understanding nuclear reactions like fusion in stars. Bethe asked what the value of the exercise was. "There's no importance whatsoever," Feynman told him. "I'm just doing it for the fun of it."

But the fun unforeseeably led somewhere. "I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity … and then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time). … The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

That "whole business" of Feynman's Nobel Prize work is an astonishingly accurate depiction of how light interacts with charged particles such as the electron; in short, it is a fundamental insight into one of the cloaked secrets of nature's workings. Almost half a century since Feynman's discoveries, they remain cornerstones of theoretical physics.

Questions of how funding is distributed are as critical as how much funding. While the survey of researchers published in Nature did not directly address the factor of stressed resources, the authors write, "Certain features of the working environment of science may have unexpected and potentially detrimental effects on the ethical dimensions of scientists' work." Beyond that, the consequences of eroded resources may drive away Feynman-type thinkers. After all, science sometimes happens when unusual minds think about the seemingly unimportant

Dropping data isn't as bad as it sounds. If you begin an experiment and you know something has gone wrong, i.e. the wrong chemical was added, the person admitted to having a mental illness, etc., it is acceptable to toss that data regardless because it is contaminated.

Several years ago the American Economic Review published an article in which the authors tried to verify the statistical output of ten articles in a previous issue. About five authors simply refused to cooperate, despite AER policies that they must, and only one enthusiastically cooperated and had his results replicated. From this I became convinced that fraud in empirical economic research may be very widespread. I suspect a journalist with enough free time could make quite a splash by looking into it.

The Economics of the Jihad II - The Demand for Jihad.

Yes, but the Manhattan Project did build the bomb without him. Now how does this apply to medical research? The NIH is way out on granting research.

For example, they will grant basic research on diabetes that will study one issue after another that has no hope of ever curing T1 diabetes. Yet there are researchers begging for money to do translational research to actually cure diabetes. Companies like Living Cell Technologies, Cerco Medical LLC, Novocell, and others all believe that they have a cure and have at least partially demonstrated that cure in animals. Yet the NIH funds another study on the mouse immune system or the mouse islet cells or the mouse complications of diabetes. It is sickening how much money they have wasted breaking plates that are thrown in the air.

This is why there is pressure to change the NIH. Lets hope they do so before more people die before more plates are broken.

Beyond that, the consequences of eroded resources may drive away Feynman-type thinkers. After all, science sometimes happens when unusual minds think about the seemingly unimportant

Does this guy know how to make an argument? From his article's description, Feynman wasn't given a grant to look for weird things, just a university position.

After a techno-triumphalist phase in my teens, I've grown more skeptical of demands for more governmental science funding. It so often takes the form of those Teachers' Union bumper stickers pleading that all they need to fix our problems is higher salaries and better equipment, paid for at taxpayers' expense. The hype of the "LATEST SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY" when combined with NASA's blatant and very expensive public relations stunts only confirm my mild cynicism.

Does this guy know how to make an argument? From his article's description, Feynman wasn't given a grant to look for weird things, just a university position.

Feynman would not be allowed to do that in today's research university. Since the universities developed a taste for federal money, they have demanded that faculty not waste time on "unproductive" research—i.e., research that does not bring in research grants. Those who fail to bring in money can expect to find another job.

In other words, "Publish or perish" has been replaced by "Get funded or get out."

After a techno-triumphalist phase in my teens, I've grown more skeptical of demands for more governmental science funding. . . .

We should all be skeptical. More often than not, big government programs turn out to be wasteful, even counterproductive. Why should big government science programs be any different?

According to an eye-popping article in the June 9 Nature, about one-third of more than 3,200 polled U.S. researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health self-reported serious scientific misbehavior during the three years prior to being surveyed.

Since 1970, total federal non-medical research spending as a fraction of Gross Domestic Product has declined by about one-third.

Two different domains. Medical research spending has gone way up.

The last projects that I worked on were directed. The funding agencey said to work on this only; get results; tell us the results you will get before we give you the money; if you succeed we will not fund you next time.

Congress is trying (and has for at least 25 years) to cut basic research. The politicians only want immediately (before the next election) available results. Fortunately, the Asian countries are taking up the slack in science.

The spending imbalance is even greater, when you consider how many chemistry and physics research centers are getting out of "pure" research in those fields and are starting to focus more on biological research based on the application of physics/chemistry research and techniques. For instance McMaster University's top-flight physics labs (a Canadian example, yes, but we're experiencing the same thing) are focusing more and more on biophysics and nuclear medicine applications, at the expense of areas of study.

But you already knew that from personal experience, dididn't you? :-)

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