The Scientific Community's Great Weakness
Abstract (TL;DR)
The scientific community’s center, academia, has been slowly devastated by a shift in funding priorities by the federal government. The culture - how researchers work, what they work on and how they mentor the youngest and most curious minds - has changed in response. Here, I outline my own experience in research, explaining how I was caught in this shifting environment and relating those experiences to the conditions within academia.
To set the tone for the year, I’d like to outline experiences of mine within the scientific community that might enlighten as to both how I’ve gotten here as a science communicator and why I’ve chosen instructional design and writing over research as my current career pursuit.
I know, just from that first sentence, that it might sound like I’m pitting science communicators against researching scientists, but I want to ensure that I separate the two ideas from the start. We are very much on the same team and I’ve been fortunate enough to have had employment in both research and science communication. I make this article to define a problem that I’ve seen, after having been both on the inside and the outside.
My Motivations for Science Communication
Many readers don’t know much about the authors of articles that they read, which can lend to a sense of distance that, many times - especially these times - doesn’t seem helpful. I’d like to reduce that distance by explaining my reasons for creating this platform.
My utmost motivation for my science communication work is to ensure the education of the public, as having a more educated populace leads to more effective advocacy - which is sorely needed in the sciences, despite the positive public opinion on science. However, another of my motivations was to push the advancement of the sciences and the arts through popular thought. My philosophy series’, labeled “The Torrent” and “The Stream”, do something that, frankly, I haven’t seen done in many other publications. That is utilizing both research and common sense to make points as to where we are and where we should be going.
This is perspective that I wouldn’t have had without my research experience. But, I fear, that many researchers may not have this perspective, despite their proximity to the sciences.
The State of The Scientific Union
Besides writing, I read - as many writers that are colloquially considered “good” do. I read an assortment of novels, but I like to dedicate a part of my time reading the works of science communicators, such as the eternal Carl Sagan, science philosophers, such as the oft-referenced Thomas Kuhn, and a wide variety of active scientists.
One of those books that I picked up and read in January, which inspired this very article, stuck out to me as a unique diagnosis of the scientific community that I feel many researchers, former researchers and aspiring researchers know to be true, but can’t articulate. The title “Striking the Mother Lode in Science” by Paula F. Stephan and Sharon G. Levin is an incredible book because it doesn’t hold back - it declares that there is something wrong. Many things rely on you being in the right place at the right time, but this is uniquely true of the sciences.
There are times where science is more valued - such as when it would immediately benefit industry or, in times like now, when the sociopolitics mandates a scientific response. In a few of those cases, science is funded - sometimes handsomely.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has collected data over decades documenting the funding patterns of the sciences, allowing us to elucidate what’s been happening in the scientific community.
The data, taken from the yearly U.S. government budgets, tells us that, despite the public appreciation for science, the government has seen it fit to defund science, even after a drastic decrease in the research and development budget in the 1970s.
Interestingly, the funding of research by private business has risen, picking up the slack of the federal government, a fact that the National Science Foundation (NSF) themselves validate.
So what’s wrong with this? There shouldn’t be much of a problem if the corporate world is filling in for the government, right?
The problem is in the interest of the funder.
Images via AAAS
Basic research, or research that seeks to uncover new knowledge (not necessarily for the production of new products), is largely funded by the federal government - not private industry. Private industry prefers funding applied research efforts, meaning that the knowledge acquired is used for specific, commercial use. This is the research that leads to products that you can buy.
In other words, private industry didn’t pick up the slack of the government. They merely increased their support for research that could make them the most money. That means, despite the cost of research increasing year by year, the federal government hasn’t matched the vigor that they had for basic research in the time of the moon landing. As a result, China leapfrogged the United States in basic research in 2018, based on the number of publications that were published.
Image via Nature
Despite the increase in the dollars amount of funding, the “flat” percentage of funding, as Nature puts it, is causing catastrophic shifts within America’s scientific community.
The Laboratory Structure
Before we get to the effects of decreased funding, I would like to explain laboratory structure. Laboratories are operated by researchers of various levels. The lowest level, barring interns or contractors, are undergraduate researchers, researchers that work in laboratories during their undergraduate studies. Those that have finished their studies, post-baccalaureates, or postbacs, naturally follow undergraduates. Next are the graduate student researchers, who are often required to work in a laboratory to support a stipend. Then come the postdoctoral researchers, affectionately called postdocs, freshly minted owners of Ph.D’s that are receiving their training in research, normally in preparation for a faculty position. Lastly, at the top is the principal investigator (PI), who are usually the most experienced researchers that guide the laboratory through its goals. PIs are often tenured faculty within a university.
These laboratories are a key part of research universities, due to the money that they bring in through grant funding, and those universities are a key part of academia, the name for the collective of universities where research is done.
Pressure to Succeed
As the percentage of funding allocated to basic research decreases, academia has had to adapt. According to Edward Hackett, a former director in the NSF, laboratories, formerly able to support the graduate students they bring in for the extent of their research, are now only able to support the students that they bring in for a small amount of time. One department researched by Hackett stated, “[when] we accept a student, we make a commitment to fund them for one year [regardless of with whom they choose to work] then…they either have to write a grant [or fellowship proposal] and get funded or somebody decides to fund them and they’re really tied into that faculty member who doles out the money” (Hackett, 1990, p. 258-259).
Today, over 30 years since that article’s publishing, it’s extremely common for a person to apply for their own grants, as even stipends for research only cover a portion of room, board and tuition at many universities. It’s even increasingly likely that universities offer a guide to applying for grant or fellowship funding available for their graduate students to use [1] [2] [3] [4]. Today, the idea of a “fully-funded” graduate researcher or postdoc is practically mythological.
Naturally, since this same funding structure is used all throughout research, the need for external funding is not exclusive to graduate students, but also undergraduates, postbacs, and postdocs.
But it’s not just the student researchers; the faculty is just as important. In fact, PIs are under an incredible amount of pressure. After all, who better to secure funding than the scientists with the highest likelihood of producing results? In fact, the PIs organize their laboratory around the requirements of those grants, a point we will explore in more detail later.
However, as money allocated for basic research decreases, grant-giving organizations have to be more selective with whom they offer money to. This takes the form of biases in the funding structure where the younger you are, the less funding you receive - a trend analyzed by the President of Johns Hopkins University, Ronald Daniels, among others, in 2015[5]:
“The number of principal investigators for [a leading NIH research grant] who are 36 years of age or younger has declined from 18% in 1983 to 3% in 2010. Today, more than twice as many [of them] are awarded to principal investigators who are over 65 years as are under 36 years, a reversal from only 15 years ago”
So, not only is funding strict, but funding is overwhelmingly given to the oldest scientists, as they are more capable of showing that they can produce. Yet the lack of funding makes it hard for younger scientists to produce - a self-destructive prophecy.
This structure has catastrophic consequences for not only the freedom of scientific research and equitable competition among researchers, but also for the individual lives of young investigators. More specifically, since PIs are also faculty of universities, their job security banks on their ability to bring grant money to the university. The only way that security is ensured is if: (1) they have already received tenure or (2) they can produce enough to earn grants over even the experienced scientists.
A Grim Feature
That oppressive feeling was familiar to me during my time in research, but, at that point, it wasn’t clear to me just why the pressure to produce existed. That pressure belied the kind of environment cultivated by academia.
In my undergraduate years, for example, I was pushed by my PIs and lab partners to focus on my studies instead of continuing to balance coursework and research. That was no doubt due to my studies was taking too much time from my training, making me more of a drag on their resources. After my baccalaureate studies, no matter what laboratory I interviewed with, I would hear “when are you planning on going to graduate school” and “we recommend that you continue your education after two years”. Given what we know now, the questions and statements were likely because graduate students: (1) must research to satisfy their stipend requirements and, by extension, their enrollment in university, making them stronger value propositions than postbacs are, and (2) have greater access to grant funding than postbacs.
Upon my departure from lab life, I truly felt that, unless I was willing, or able, to give that time, likely at some cost, there wasn’t any room for me within the scientific community. That, of course, was an extreme feeling. The scientific community is far more vast than academia and I have since been welcomed and acknowledged as a communicator, instructional designer and more. The point is the somewhat depressing reality that, if you’re not capable of putting in 60 hours a week at the bench, you’re likely not going to be at that lab much longer. And, with the constraints that PIs have to bear, can you blame them?
Of Loss and Ruin
So far, I’ve outlined the main problem caused by funding - an increase in pressure at all levels. But the consequences of that go far - so far that the very culture of academia has changed drastically.
First, as Hackett mentioned in the quote above, there has been a shift in the education priorities of young researchers. This is, ultimately, due to the requirements of grants, which forces mentors to teach students to become technicians instead of researchers - the former masters techniques, the latter develops the methods that require those techniques. Hackett found that some scientists even recognize that “the value of [a student’s] education is their ability to master techniques rather than necessarily to find out how to think [and] how to formulate their own problems…” (1990, p. 261).
In the 1960s, federal grants didn’t come with as many restrictions; so long as you were performing valid scientific research, your work was seen as worthy of funding. However, more recently “decisions about the allocation of government research funds have gotten increased attention…as the importance of science for military and economic ends has become more fully appreciated and as various crises [justify] supporting scientific research. In consequence, the resource environment of scientists has been deliberately changed, through spectacular policy initiatives, such as the space program, the war on cancer, the AIDS effort…and through subtler shifts of priorities within agencies (such as the promotion of molecular biological approaches in the life sciences) (Hackett, 1990, p.256).” Hackett states that, due to the shifts, there is no longer a contrast between “free and proactive scientists supported by federal funds, who used those funds to advance their disciplines and career…and reactive scientists, supported by industrial money (or federal contracts), who apply those funds to the pursuit of practice ends” (1990, p.256) - they are one in the same.
In simpler terms, on top of mostly providing grants to older scientists, the government prefers to provide funding to laboratories that: (1) serve the economy or military, (2) rectify a crisis, or (3) fits some spectacular policy initiative. And, as a result of the need for that funding, there has been a shift in priority for labs, such that the practice of free, educational science has taken a second place position to the practices required by outside forces.
At this point, we have to ask ourselves what we risk by restricting the freedom of scientists so heavily. All of us have learned in schools about the exploits of Sir Isaac Newton, who was able to push our understanding of planetary science far beyond where it was. Would he have been able to do that under the constraints of commercialism, for a particular organization’s gain?
Aristarchus formed the Heliocentric Model of the universe almost two millennia before Copernicus.
Scientists without freedom cannot explore new potentialities because pre-established paradigms, or widespread beliefs and practices, are safer fields that allow them to publish more to appear more productive so that they can get more grant funding - a cycle that stunts discovery. How many new paradigms are we passing up because we can’t explore something that may not yield publishable data now, but might yield far more than the current paradigm does twenty years from now - a story seen in history time and time again.
Brian Wansink, a Cornell food researcher whom had over a dozen studies retracted from journals.
The pressure to produce creates mistakes and can even encourages taking shortcuts, just like preparing the turkey for your whole family on Thanksgiving does (if you’re not accustomed to it, anyway). That behavior has proven to lead to hand-wavy conclusions and maybe even misconduct brought about by putting biases in papers and falsifying data.
Finally and importantly, science just isn’t fun with all the pressure. Discovery is supposed to be enjoyable - the spectacle of seeing what happens when you try something new mystifies us all. What happens when we lose that? De-motivation is the least of it. If you are like me and you like learning for the sake of solving problems, then being a cog in the ego-driven and hyper competitive machine that is academia will deprive your will to continue of the very air it needs to survive.
The Path Forward
It’s hard to witness something you love be corrupted into something you don’t recognize, which is definitely why Hackett, Levin and Stephan wrote so much about it (and so will I over the next few months). So what can be done?
Stephan and Levin propose a change to the funding mechanisms where there is a long-term real growth of 4 to 5 percent in federal funding. “[Stop-and-go funding policies] of +15 percent this year and -2 percent next year sends shock waves through science that can be felt for years,” they correctly assess. A moderate growth in federal funding “[gives] the scientific community some long-term security…[and encourages] it to take a longer view than has otherwise been possible” (Stephan and Levin, 1992, p.166).
They also take a position that I never considered, but is incredibly sensible. They recognize that “more basic science for country X means more basic science for country Y (and Z)” (Stephan and Levin, 1992, p.166). Said another way, basic research done in one country benefits the basic research done by another, as all scientists have a larger body of knowledge to use for their own research. Therefore, they recommend that basic research funding should be supported by the global scientific community (or those member countries that could stand to afford it), not just nationally. This would require a UN-like research organization coordinating each nation’s contributions according to their economic strength and research output. For nations that can assist countries with weaker research programs, like the United States and China, we could see a return on investment, due to their improved research capacity, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. Their research helps us, our research helps them.
Moreover, since industry, as we’ve outlined earlier, is now responsible for a majority of funding of the sciences, academia needs to work with industry, not only to ensure that we are connecting the research results with immediate technological or medical change, but also to share the wealth from those advancements. Direct relationships between academia and industry would take some of the load off from government, who, in return, can fund younger PIs, who are critical, for reasons I will outline in my next article (stay tuned).
Lastly, the country needs to not only support “safe, but productive” scientists, but also scientists that are trying to explore new, potential paradigms without threatening their careers by taking away their future funding, should their research not yield immediate results. Some may say that it’s just desserts for those scientists - they should have stayed the course. Yet history has shown that the only reason we are studying what, today, is called safe is because paradigms have been challenged, a claim science philosopher Thomas Kuhn wrote an entire book explaining (a book that was a pretty big deal). Stephan and Levin cite that “[physicist] Paul Chu’s breakthrough in the field of high-temperature superconductivity in 1987 came from a laboratory operating on less than $150,000” (1992, p. 168). You know, superconductors. The things that can allow for electrical flow without any wasted energy, instantly making current power grids obsolete and allowing us to place our wires anywhere safely? AIDS funding received over 100 times that amount in 1986.
Focusing exclusively on big-name issues is not a productive way to spend money on science, especially when there are only a relative few organizations that work on those issues. There are an abundance of laboratories researching other, smaller and potentially valuable subjects that are being shoehorned into the “science corner” of the local paper because there’s no spectacle in what they do. Instead, we should be distributing our money across the spectrum or, better yet, investing more money into research, alleviating the pressures and ensuring that more can get a piece of the pie.
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References
[1] Grant Funding: A Guide for Graduate Students. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://ospa.siu.edu/_common/documents/grant-funding-grad-student-guide.pdf
[2] Find Funding | Research Support. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.bu.edu/researchsupport/project-lifecycle/finding-funding/
[3] McClure, S., & McClure, M. P. B. S. (2020, September 7). Your Guide to Fellowships and Grants | Berkeley Graduate Division. Retrieved from https://grad.berkeley.edu/news/headlines/guide-to-fellowships-grants/
[4] External Funding | Graduate School. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.brown.edu/academics/gradschool/external-funding
[5] Daniels, R. J. (2015). A generation at risk: Young investigators and the future of the biomedical workforce. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(2), 313–318. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418761112
[6] Hackett, E. J. (1990). Science as a Vocation in the 1990s: The Changing Organizational Culture of Academic Science. The Journal of Higher Education, 61(3), 241–279. https://doi.org/10.2307/1982130
[7] Stephan, P. F., & Levin, S. G. (1992). Striking the Mother Lode in Science: The Importance of Age, Place, and Time (1st ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.