Whenever these days you talk to scientists about their funding situation, the situation is bleak. In the US whichever way you look at the issue, funding cuts are on the horizon. Japan had a national debt exceeding its gross domestic product already before the earthquake, with science budget cuts implemented already then. It’s even worse now. Most European countries are also reducing science funding. And that’s not just Portugal or Greece. The UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Ireland all are cutting back research. And what I hear from science policy makers in Germany, their relatively comfortable funding situation will not last forever either.
All in all, the situation is rather depressive, despite the fact that along with many others I strongly believe a strong scientific effort is one of the best long-term investments a country can make. Not investing in science and technology to me means a negative spiral for wealth and prosperity. But sometimes, whether you like it or not, a healthy science funding just isn’t possible. Adding to that depression is then that these deep funding cuts are not followed up with structural reforms to make sure academic research can survive those challenging circumstances.
It’s certainly time now to ask: how do you conduct science in such an environment?
There is a broader range of solutions adopted by different countries. A possibility is simply to cut back across the board, which is an option for smaller budget cuts. But that’s too simplistic and only hurts the research infrastructure indiscriminately. The question is rather how to use the available money most effectively.
Some countries therefore focus on individuals. In Japan, where the research structure generally is based on large groups with a strong hierarchy, there is the FIRST programme. In 2010, 30 researchers were awarded up to $50 Million each for four years. It’s a huge pay-out to the country’s research elite, and it will be interesting to see what they achieve with this funding. But what it means is that you invest a lot of money in only 30 research fields.
Indeed, focussing only on a smaller number of research areas is not uncommon. This could be specific topics such as energy or health, or a focus on applied research that benefits industry. In the UK, there is a lot of talk about the need to show an ‘impact’ in research projects, whatever is really meant by that. Richard Jones has an informative blog post on this debate in the UK. And even worse, entire research areas can be neglected. Again the UK sets a bad example, by shutting down funding in nanotechnology. To quote Richard Jones again in his blog post ‘Why has the UK given up on nanotechnology?‘: “Currently, the UK has no actual on-going nanotechnology program.” Cutting back a technologically relevant area like this one is sheer madness to me, and surely there must be better ways than cutting the proverbial branch on which you’re sitting on.
The Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada as a model for a successful research institute. Photo by 'Red Hippos' via flickr
More generally though, funding agencies seem to mostly rely on variations of one of the two models, or a combination of both. But as I tried to argue, neither of them does seem very smart. They might work well in the short-term, but could lead to a real problems later on. You can’t only focus on the big shots at the top. It is equally important to support promising young researchers with new ideas. In Japan, those 30 high-flyers in the FIRST programme also have to support young talent. But in my view, truly innovative ideas can only come from independent talent. And with respect to limiting research areas, the issue is of course that long-term benefits are notoriously difficult to predict. I don’t think Einstein had any idea that his theory of relativity, which initially was also scientifically contested, would one day be important to the running of GPS devices.
But I do think there are alternatives that could be discussed. One way might be reduce redundancies in research An idea to provide funding in a larger number of key areas that would avoid duplication is to create dedicated research centers where several investigators can work in parallel on complementary topics. There are several great examples for this already – both within universities and as independent institutes. And these needn’t be industry-related research such as that conducted by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany. For more fundamental research, there’s also the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada as a successful model for fundamental research. In my view this trend to create such institutions, whether at universities or outside of them, will increase with time. In the UK, the science minister has indicated similar plans, but I don’t see much having come out of this so far.
Obviously, it won’t be possible to offer any realistic solution to the problem in a blog post. But to me the present approaches to manage shrinking research budgets is inadequate. If we do less research we need to do it right. And using this crisis to think about our research infrastructure needn’t be a bad thing. It should be seen as an opportunity to reform the academic research system in a more comprehensive and fundamental way than the academic community and the politicians normally dare to think about.
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July 18, 2011 at 14:04
Excellent thoughts, Joerg. And well put. I personally feel that the large research grants are a mistake in that they kill diversity of thought. In my postdoc, I was at a research group that would have benefited from such a policy. I don’t know that I can say it would have been money well spent. I also worry that killing “redundancy” may have the same effects. In this respect I’d also worry about centers. I think that centers can be wonderful things. But, I also think that they need to watch themselves closely to make sure that multiple ideas within a focus are properly percolating.
July 19, 2011 at 06:40
Perhaps this period of austerity will lead to a retrenchment that actually strengthens science, rather than the impending doom some many seem to fear. How much of what is called “science” is really important, or even science for that matter? At the risk of pissing off everybody, too much of what is called research today is just crap by self-indulgent academics. For all the research that is being published, far too many results are so minimally incremental that finding the real results among the chaff is a huge burden.
As outrageous as it may seem, one first step would be to pay academic scientists less. When a faculty opening attracts hundreds if not thousands of applicants, with at least dozens of fully, if not exceptionally qualified applicants, economics suggests we’re paying far too much – well above the “market clearing” price. When academics, who are free to pursue virtually any topic of their choosing, with minimal supervision, are compensated at a scale comparable to equally trained industrial scientists who actually have to accept direction from their employers, then we are paying too much.
How would I suggest we sustain science through this drought? Quite in contrast to the Japanese approach of giving massive grants to superstars, I would spread the money widely, but in a way very different from today. I would drastically reduce salary support. Academic departments and faculty were not historically profit centers (say, pre-1980s). If some university wants to hire a superstar for some outrageous sum of money, fine. But don’t expect the NSF to reimburse the university for a half-million dollar salary (plus overhead). In fact, the NSF should be very limited in providing salary support at all. Sure, pay for lab equipment, modest travel (I feel more generous about travel for real field research as opposed to yet another conference), graduate research support. But let the university pay the faculty to teach. Even with a couple of courses per semester, that still leaves a lot of time for research, esp. for senior faculty who have well-developed materials for courses they’ve taught before. When faculty salary support is provided, it should be at some national or regional rate, perhaps based on faculty rank (ie, full profs get more than assistant profs), but independent of actual salary. But even this should be the exception, not the rule.
July 20, 2011 at 05:47
Faculty openings attract so many applicants because the marginal cost of applying for an additional job is essentially zero. When our department (in the UC system) makes an offer to one of these applicants over the last few years, the chance of it being accepted is somewhat less than 1/2, with rejections almost always because the salary is too low compared to other academic offers. We have had several years in which we could not fill the open positions we had, with sufficiently strong people.
And the comparison with industry is ludicrous—I’ve been offered more than double my UC salary to work in the private sector. I have declined, so far, not because of the direction of the employer (which would be minimal), but because I prefer the day-to-day interactions with students and faculty at the university as they are, on average, noticeably brighter than the people (other employees, but mainly customers or potential customers) with whom I interacted while on leave at the company making me the offer.
NSF (and the NIH), by the way, have fairly low caps on how much they will pay support of an annual salary.
July 19, 2011 at 21:21
While some of the redundancy in research is certainly wasteful, we have to remember not all redundancy is wasteful, and that even research that has been ridiculed for it’s obviousness has produced new and unexpected research.
Similarly, when access to research technology is fiscally restricted, there’s a danger that governments and corporations will have more control of who gets to do research and what research they get to do. This goes against crucial scientific principles, and turns science into political puppetry.
We have to be very careful that we don’t interfere with free inquiry, access to research results, and independent confirmation, or we won’t be doing science anymore.
July 19, 2011 at 21:41
Hi Stephanie,
yes, good points. Obviously, governments should never have a direct say in who exactly gets research money. And yes, I’m not saying reduced spending is a good thing and not damaging to present research. But if the assumption is that money will be cut – then it’s better to look the beast into the eyes and try to find ways to minimize the damage caused…
July 20, 2011 at 00:00
Stephanie:
Sure, not all redundancy is wasteful. In fact, confirmatory experiments (which are woefully unperformed and virtually impossible to publish) would be welcome. But the fact remains that an embarrassing amount of total research funding is devoted to work of little or no consequence by any number of measures. For example, ISI cited citations ten years on as a proxy for usefulness. An overwhelming majority were never cited. I seem to recall the study involved Phys Rev (B, I think), a prestigious physics journal. Marginal journals would fare much worse. I think it would be disingenuous to suggest that we couldn’t do better filtering at the proposal stage.
As to access to research, the more the scientific community relies on industrial and even government funding, the more likely we are to see restrictions on access to research results, requirements for prior review before publication, and on directions of research. At the risk of sounding perverse, the more government funding (and industrial funding) at play, the more external control will exist on “who gets to do research and what research they do”. Let’s look at university research. In a world where faculty are expected to bring in research funding, support graduate students, pay overhead to the university, only those who are successful at winning grants will remain in the system. Conversely, if universities were to abandon their view of faculty as profit centers and return to the abstract quest for knowledge, with faculty salaries being paid by the university, then the faculty could pursue whatever they choose. (Of course, this is naive, as appointments and tenure will be based on a wealth of factors that will in turn create constraints on “free inquiry”. Just look at the departments where external funding is scarce, such as English Lit or foreign languages)
I’m not sure what to make of the last sentence of your comment. Are you suggesting that reducing government funding is somehow tantamount to restricting free inquiry, access to results, and independent confirmation? At the risk of sounding like some sort of anti-government libertarian (which I assuredly am not), you seem to be conflating free inquiry with some perceived right to receive unrestricted government funding to pursue whatever research directions your heart desires, while presumably being as well compensated as a peer at an industrial research laboratory who is expected to actually contribute to the welfare of his employer.
July 20, 2011 at 00:10
Hi there,
well, to clarify, with my last sentence I just was alluding to Stephanie’s comments and the fact that if you cut funding some researcher surely will feel restricted in the freedom of what they do. What I did not want to imply is that this would be threaten the broader freedom of research. But for some restrictions (at least as far as funding is concerned) would of course be inevitable. But what we really ought to do is to discuss the research infrastructure needed to implement (presumably inevitable) budget cuts in the best possible manner.
July 20, 2011 at 00:23
There is an answer in globalization of research, unfortunately it will never become a reality. It’s this nationalized/corporate fragmentation of research efforts and the competitive nature of research grants that increase the costs and hinder meaningful advancement. Because there are profits to be protected, national security fears, and governments playing politics research will remain under-funded, often duplicated, and put on the back burner.
There are areas of that have the potential to side-step these issues for now, specifically biological systems and astronomy. Unfortunately finding someone to invest the money in an organization that could globalize such research would be near impossible.
July 20, 2011 at 10:34
Joerg, here is another angle – and probably completely wrong. I am an engineering manager. So I’ll take the following view.
Going by Pareto (80-20) rule, most immediately useful fundamental research should be already present.
In times of economic difficulty, money should be diverted to non-fundamental research that may bring results the quickest. Such low hanging fruits will nourish the economy. Eventually money will be back to fundamental research.
For example, fine tuning Einstein’s theory is less likely to bring immediate change in the market than an all-optical internet router. So photonics takes priority.
July 22, 2011 at 16:54
A few comments on the comments:
1) Giving vast amounts of money to a few handpicked research groups is a sure fire way to kill science. First of all, experience shows that much of the money will be wasted. Few people can use $50 Million with any degree of efficiency, Moreover such large amounts of money foster overhyped claims and politicization of research.
2) Looking for commercial “low-hanging” fruit is the job of industry, not academia. University research can never compete with industrial research on this, nor should it. University research provides the “nutrition” in terms of fundamentally new ideas which makes the development of low hanging fruit possible in the first place. Eradicating that will only eliminate opportunities for industry in the future.
What’s the solution? It should be a balanced approach. Maybe for a short time, overall funding amounts could be reduced, while keeping funding levels (probability of funding) in a reasonable range (say ~15-20%). One can survive on a little bit less money, as long as there is still a chance to get some funding to keep going. Giving all the money to a few groups would lead to devastating drops in funding levels (I am not talking about big particle physics groups here, but rather groups in condensed matter physics, biology etc). Small research groups often produce excellent research, and moreover, are the main driver of the education of future scientists. Cutting off most of these groups at the expense of a few big winners would be inefficient and would devastate science.
August 2, 2011 at 16:34
People are in fear, and that fear is growing in America!!!
You can’t think of austerity in scientific research…that’s ridiculous.
Thinks will never be the same again like before. Sweet memories are more painful during hard times. And so, goes with the research community. Gone are those days when Universities in the US never really palmed for funds to promote research, study, exploration and innovation. If you grow crops, you have to think about its yield. For that, you have to work hard and invest in agriculture and nurture those seedlings so that, those seeds may bear fruit some day. The quality matters.
Ever now and then threatened and disillusioned by fluctuating business cycles and falling forever into the deadly trap of recession did not teach those cozy policy-makers that if you have those world-class institutions, you should have world class minds working on breathtaking, innovative projects without thinking what would I eat next day? The act of vanishing funds from the Universities started following Bush era regime when he masterminded the drastic cuts in research budgets, enough to cripple the American productivity, and the businesses associated with those quality outputs. Instead, they funneled and channeled those much needed funds into the business of cozy defense deals and useless bogus spending having no social value at all.
New bright minds nowadays have nowhere to go, but beg for funding, and they can be found on the net, in the alley, in dark lanes, or wherever they think some funding would be available to promote their ideas and creative thinking.
The Washington has asked them not to think further. The government is trying to mould them into bogus citizens who would invariably end up doing petty clerical jobs-‘govt. accounting of national debt’. No more funding, do whatever you like but don’t ask for support. We don’t have money to sponsor your mindboggling experiments! That was all.
And that was enough. For a layman, we may now understand that why the business has become so volatile, why there are looming recessions every now and then. It’s because, the things coming out those naked research, half-fed half-funded ill-staffed story telling “papers” that was never part of the American Dream of Productivity.
Can’t blame the corporate sector either, how can we? They usually struggle hard these days to cut costs and maintain budget, and to ward off a double-dip recession replications. So, where can they find and allocate fund for such long-standing future benefitting endeavors? They don’t print money do they?
But who prints them? The crippled, dim, weak US Fed Reserve. It’s not their duty to allocate funds by managing deficits and controlling budget. But it’s their duty to provide fund at the least. They can and should print enough money to channelize those into but- only research. For the sake of a greater cause, it is advisable to print money since such funds would re-illuminate the research organizations at large. Such investments have both social and economic value at the end. But what is the Fed up to?
Pumping dollar bills and selling Treasury that they cannot support or afford to pay some day. Their job is not to pump the pot-bellied political rumps for their comfy habits. You cannot think in empty stomach- forget research. The days of prized papers are gone. What we have now is some sort of paraphrased, popped-up, sloppy and lousy research outputs from those very same prestigious and place of many breakthrough public funded Universities. How can you blame those minds?
Just imagine how much funding were available in those days post war and during the Reagan era. He also dealt with the oil market crisis and defense dealings those days if you remember? And the US economy grew at 6-8% for a few years which was enough! And we had great outputs too. In those days, there were pure inventions rather than sloppy innovations of these days. Nowadays, these innovations are just built on previous inventions, so nothing new coming out really. Just look at China and feel the difference. I don’t need to explain why China would someday dictate public policy of the US and that very day; Americans will loose diplomatic sovereignty of their own treasury-to China, who else?
Still there is time to act.
A funny research finding came out today which have a hidden meaning- by the research group lead by Prof. Simon Laughlin saying “People may not get smarter since grey matter has stopped evolving’.
Is this the dead end of our civilization that we won’t grow rather shrink in future? What does that literally mean? It means demands are not met and the brain (labs) need vast amount of energy (fund) to become smarter (viable). Because people (government) is unable to provide that needed energy (funding) any more. Well, what a way to say that…sounds crazy after all. Well, there goes the saying; vacant stomach doesn’t nourish a deprived brain. And so, there is no new knowledge without well funded research college. So, devolve rather than evolve.
Paul Krugman once mentioned this. He was ridiculed and thanks god he was not sleeked out and exterminated! Anyone talking these days about good things (shear truth) runs the risk of being-silenced! So people fear to speak out the truth. That’s politics and don’t think that’s free enterprise either. This is soviet style socialism. Kill innovation and innovators and kill their instinct intellectualism before they draw closer.
America cannot afford Marxism, Leninism or a collective communism of this sort and change is overdue. The day the government will announce big budgets in research, would be the days of glory and old good times coming back, and end of crony capitalism in America. And we can dream of frictionless economy and no hard bounces like the back-to-back recessions crippling the very same art of America-originated capitalism.
Remember, there were no major recessions post war, and though there were just a few (1972-1975), so insignificant that doesn’t even qualify to be bothered when compared to the dotcom bubble burst(2000) and Subprime(2008), and wait, another coming. We now know the reason and the treason both.
Rather, the hearsay that is silently being passed into the minds is, about shutting down all those labs and fabs and kick out those thinkers altogether. People are in fear, and that fear is growing in America!!! Cultural devolution, this is to speak.
Don’t discuss these thinks at home or in public… you don’t know where you may end up!! Read it, and forget it.
Good Luck and Good Night.
Nikol Svedersky
Moscow.
August 2, 2011 at 16:43
Well, as I said before, with this blog post I do not advocate cuts in science budgets. But in case of countries such as Greece (and also elsewhere) budget cuts have either been implemented already, or are about to. And in my view simply looking away and ignoring the facts doesn’t help. Either you do something actively to reverse such cuts, or if not successful, we need to think how to implement them in the best possibly way. In my view that’s not done much, and there is a danger that then reality sets in hard…