{"id":132,"date":"2009-06-28T18:09:07","date_gmt":"2009-06-28T23:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/06\/28\/risk-averse-science-funding\/"},"modified":"2009-06-28T18:09:07","modified_gmt":"2009-06-28T23:09:07","slug":"risk-averse-science-funding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/2009\/06\/28\/risk-averse-science-funding\/","title":{"rendered":"Risk-averse science funding?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s New York Times has an article headlined “Grant system leads cancer researchers to play it safe,<\/a>” discussing the thesis that, in competing for grant funds, high-risk, potentially transformative ideas lose out to low-risk ideas that will lead to at most\u00a0 incremental advances.\u00a0 A couple of comments:<\/p>\n

Although the article focuses on cancer research, people talk about this problem in other branches of science too.\u00a0 When I served on a grant review panel for NSF not too long ago, we were explicitly advised to give special consideration to “transformative” research proposals.\u00a0 If I recall correctly, NSF has started tracking the success rate of such transformative proposals, with the goal of increasing their funding rate.<\/p>\n

Personally, I think this is a legitimate concern, but it’s possible to make too much of it.\u00a0 In particular, in the fairy-tale version of science history that people (including scientists) like to tell, we\u00a0 tend to give much too much weight to the single, Earth-shattering experiment and to undervalue the “merely” incremental research.\u00a0 The latter is in fact most of science, and it’s really really important. It’s probably true that the funding system is weighted too much against high-risk proposals, but we shouldn’t forget the value of the low-risk “routine” stuff.<\/p>\n

For instance, here’s how the Times article describes one of its main examples of low-risk incremental research:<\/p>\n

Among the recent research grants awarded by the National Cancer Institute<\/a> is one for a study asking whether people who are especially responsive to good-tasting food have the most difficulty staying on a diet<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite the Times’s scrupulous politeness, the tone of the article seems to be mocking this sort of research (and in fact this research in particular).\u00a0 And it’s easy to do: Expect John McCain to tweet<\/a> about this proposal the next time he wants to sneer at the idea of funding science at all.\u00a0 But in fact this is potentially a useful sort of thing to study, which may lead to improvements in public health.\u00a0 Yes, the improvement will be incremental, but when you put lots of increments together, you get something called progress.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s New York Times has an article headlined “Grant system leads cancer researchers to play it safe,” discussing the thesis that, in competing for grant funds, high-risk, potentially transformative ideas lose out to low-risk ideas that will lead to at most\u00a0 incremental advances.\u00a0 A couple of comments: Although the article focuses on cancer research, people … Continue reading Risk-averse science funding?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/physicsbunn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}