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The risks of revolutionary science


February 25, 1990

Risky Science by Tom Siegfried
Dallas Morning News
02/12/90

Scientific research is often risky.

Experiments with poison gas, for example, are not exactly free
from danger. But there's another kind of risky science that is
not at all dangerous in the ordinary sense. It's science fiction
on the edge, on the frontier, where the most productive course
isn't clear. The risk is in the odds against success. The danger
is in the damage that unsuccessful high-risk science can do to a
scientific career.

On the other hand, the payoff from success in risky science can be
great. But there can be no payoff unless somebody is willing to
invest in such risky research to begin with.

A growing number of scientists have begun to express concern that
federal funding agencies are not interested in giving money to
scientists who take risks. Funders prefer "safe" science,
mainstream research that is all but guaranteeed to deliver some
small increment to knowledge in a specific scientific field.
Grant proposals that stray too far from well-trodden scientific
paths seldom survive.

It is the common practice in Western countries - the United States
and Great Britain, for example - for scientists seeking funding to
send a grant proposal to an appropriate funding agency. The
agency seeks judgments on such proposals from scientists who are
themselves experts in the field - peers of the people proposing
the research.

If the peers give a proposal a favorable review, it stands a good
chance of getting funded.

Of course, bad reviews can scuttle a project. That can be good -
nobody wants to wast money on bad research. But sometimes, a good
idea can get bad reviews - especially an idea on the frontiers of
research where experts disagree on what the next best step should
be.

Ironically, in the Soviet Union - long known as a country
afflicted by a lot of bad research - some innovative, risky
projects are more readily funded. At certain research institutes,
the institute itself gets research money and its own members
decide what staff scientists are allowed to do.

Some of the benefits of such an approach were described recently
in the journal NATURE by earth scientists George Fisher, Priscilla
Grew and Bruce Yardley, following a visit to the Institute of
Experimental Mineralogy at Chernogolovka.

"The Soviet and Western styles of supporting science are very
different," they wrote. "In some respects, the Soviet system is
effective and flexible. As the West rethinks its funding
practices in this era of serious budget constraints, there are
important lessons to be learnt from the Soviet Union."

In particular, the funding of institutes instead of individuals
has clear advantages.

"The Soviet system tolerates some routine work in hopes of
nurturing a new and unexpected discovery that will open up a
totally new view of a subject," the scientists wrote. "In the
West, on the other hand, we are so preoccupied with ensuring that
no funds are wasted on unpredictable...research that we often fail
to support truly innovative work."

At the mineralogy institute, many innovative projects were under
way.

"We saw several innovative projects that would almost certainly
fail to survive the peer-review process in the United States or
Britain," the earth scientists reported. "During the 1980's,
increased competition for a diminishing budget has meant that
proposals need almost unanimous approval from reviewers. In
the process of weeding out pedestrian projects, the system
eliminates almost all of the really innovative projects, which are
often too controversial to generate universal approval. Most
proposals that attract funding are those which take just one small
step down a path that is currently recognized by the community as
'opportune', 'important' or 'timely.'"

They might have added "cheap." Sometimes expense is a critical
aspect of evaluating how risky research is. Computer scientist
Alison Brown of Ohio State University, for example, points out
that the high expense of supercomputer time squeezes out a lot of
important "high-risk" research.

"That's clearly a big impediment to advances in science, just
plain raw power available cheap enough," she said in a recent
interview. "The problem is, if you can't get cheap computing at
the high end, you stop letting people do risky projects. And it's
usually the risky projects that pay off. But when computing is
really expensive, it gets rationed very carefully, and since it
gets rationed by peer review....you end up funding mainstream
stuff.

"So the guys at the edges who are probably the guys that are going
to win the Nobel Prizes and make the breakthroughs, they just
don't get it. You can no longer afford adventure, and that's a
real bad thing in science."

Of course, not all risky science is good science, nor does all of
it pay off in revolutionary discoveries. In fact, most risky
science goes nowhere. But well traveled roads rarely lead
anyplace new, either.

 
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