Science has a short-term memory problem

In 2016, Vox asked 270 scientists to name the biggest problems in science. Many of them agree that the constant search for funding brought on by an increasingly competitive grant system serves as the biggest obstacle to scientific progress.

While more of our scientists are throwing more time and resources at projects, we seem stuck on the big questions — like how to help people live longer and healthier — that have big real-world implications.

Grants are funds awarded to researchers by governments or private organizations, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for a specific project. Most grant applications are very competitive. Only 20 percent Applications for research project grants to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds most biomedical research in the United States, are successful.

If you get a grant, they usually do Expires after a few years – Much less time than it usually takes to make breakthrough discoveries. And most grants, even the most prestigious, don’t pay enough to run a lab on their own.

Between the endless cycle of grant applications and the constant turnover of early-career researchers in labs, moving science forward is slow at best and Sisyphean at worst.

In other words, science has a short-term memory problem—but there are steps funding agencies can take to make it better.

Grants are too small, too small, and too limited

Principal investigators—often tenure-track university professors—doing academic research in the United States are responsible not only for running their own labs, but also for funding them. This includes running the experiment, keeping the lights on, hiring other scientists and often covering their own salaries. In this way, the investigators More like entrepreneurs than employeesRunning their lab like a small-business owner.

In the United States, basic science research studies how the world works to expand knowledge Most are funded by the federal government. The NIH funds most biomedical research, and the National Science Foundation (NSF) funds other sciences such as astrophysics, geology, and genetics. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) funds some biomedical research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funds technology development for the military, some of which finds use in the civilian world. Like the internet.

When the grant application process worked well decades ago More than half of the submitted grants have been funded. But today, we have more scientists – Especially the youth — and Less money, once inflation taken into account. Grants are harder than ever to get, scientists I’ve talked to say. What ends up happening is that principal investigators are forced to spend more of their time writing their grant applications—which often take dozens of hours each—than actually doing the science they were trained to do. Because the funding is so competitive, applicants must apply incrementally Twist their research proposal To align with whoever will pay them. A lab interested in studying how cells communicate with each other, for example, as it studies cancer, heart disease or depression, can convince the NIH that its project is worth funding.

Federal agencies typically fund specific projects and require scientists to provide regular progress updates. Some of the best science happens when experiments lead researchers in unexpected directions, but grantees usually have to stick to specific goals listed in their applications or risk having their funding taken away — even if the first few days of an experiment suggest that things won’t go as planned.

This system leaves principal investigators constantly scrambling to plug holes in their patchwork of funds. In his first year as a professor, Jennifer GarrisonNow a reproductive longevity researcher Buck InstituteApplied for 45 grants to get his lab off the ground. “I’m highly trained and specialized,” she told me. “It’s ridiculous that I spend most of my time on administrative paperwork.”

Relying on a transient, low-paid workforce makes science worse

In most cases, the principal investigators applying for the grant are not doing the science — their graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are. While professors teach, administer paperwork, and manage students, early career interns are the ones who conduct experiments and analyze data.

Because they do most of the intellectual and physical labor, these young scientists are usually the lead authors of their lab’s publications. In small research groups, a grad student may be the only one who fully understands their project.

In some ways, this system works for universities. With most annual stipends declining Less than $40,000“Young researchers are highly trained but a relatively cheap source of labor for faculty,” then-graduate researcher Laura Weingartner told Vox in 2016.

Grad students and postdocs are cheap, but they are transient. It takes an average Six years to earn Ph.DOnly about three to five of those years are devoted to research in a particular lab. These time constraints force trainees to choose projects that can be completed by the time they graduate, but science, especially breakthrough science, rarely fits into a three- to five-year window. CRISPR, for example, was First identified in the 90s – 20 years ago it was first used for gene editing.

Trainees usually try to publish their results as they go, or try to give ownership to someone being trained to take the wheel. The pressure to squeeze exciting, publishable data from a single PhD thesis project forces many inexperienced scientists into roles they cannot realistically fill. Many people (admittedly, I am included(as a fiery UC Berkeley neuroscience graduate student) leave behind a trail of unfinished experiments when they leave academia — and no formal obligation to complete them.

When the bulk of your workforce Pay less, burning outAnd constantly flipping, it creates a continuity problem. When a person leaves, they often take a bunch of institutional knowledge with them. Ideally, the research group will have at least one or two senior scientists — with training similar to a tenured professor — working in the lab to run experiments, mentor new scientists, and act as a steady source of expertise as other researchers come and go.

Here’s a major hurdle: Paying a highly trained scientist enough to compete with six-figure industry jobs costs far more than a single federal grant. A $250,000/year NIH R01 – the initial grant awarded to scientists for research projects – barely funds one person’s salary and benefits. Although NIH has special funds that students, postdocs, junior faculty, and other trainees can apply for to pay their own wages, funding opportunities for senior scientists are limited. “It’s not possible to get paid for a senior scientist role unless you have an insane amount of other support,” Garrison told me.

How can we help scientists do cooler, more ambitious research?

Funding scientists, the experiments they say helps – and we already have some evidence to prove it.

D Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has a funding model worth replicating. It is driven by a “people, not projects” philosophy, which provides multi-year funding without tying scientists to specific projects. Grantees continue to work at their home institutions, but they — along with their postdocs — become employees of HHMI, which pays them salaries and benefits.

HHMI provides sufficient funding to operate a small to medium-sized lab without requiring any additional grants. The idea is that if investigators are given enough money to do their work, they can redirect all their wasted grant application time to actually doing science. It is no coincidence that More than 30 HHMI-funded scientists Nobel prize winners in the last 50 years.

D Arch InstituteA new nonprofit collaboration between research giants Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, also awards renewable eight-year “no-strings-attached” grants to investigators and their labs. Arc’s mission is to give scientists the freedom and resources to do the slow, uncomfortable work of building better research tools — things that are important to science but not attractive to scientific journals (and to scientists who need to publish stuff to earn more funding).

Operating arc expensive, and currently funding models Depending on the grant From philanthropists and tech billionaires. Arc currently supports eight labs, and hopes to someday expand to no more than 350 scientists—much less than that. 50,000-some biomedical researchers Applying for grants every year.

For now, institutional experiments like Arc are just that: experiments. They’re betting that scientists who feel stimulated, creative and unencumbered will be better equipped to take the risks necessary to make big discoveries.

Creating new institutions is not the only way to break the cycle of short-term, short-sighted projects in biomedical research. Anything that makes it financially easier for investigators to keep their labs running will help. Universities can pay their employees’ salaries directly, instead of investigators having to find money for their trainees. Federal funding agencies may make grants larger Inflation rates match — but Congress is unlikely to approve such spending.

Science can also benefit from having fewer, well-paid scientists in long-term positions, rather than relying on the labor of low-paid, poorly-equipped trainees. “I think it would be better to have fewer scientists doing real, deep work than we have now,” Garrison said.

It’s not that scientists aren’t capable of creative, exciting, ambitious work—they’re just forced to lean into a grant system that favors short, risk-averse projects. And if the grant system changes, odds are the science will too.

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