They were talented idealistic risk takers on the road to what they thought would be important medical discoveries. But when funding for for risk takers dried up, these two academics called it quits.
This terrifies me, both from a personal "I am about to apply to grad school for biostats and epidemiology and want to do research" standpoint and a "this has tons of possible implications for our future as a society and I don't like any of them". And I don't really know how to fix it.
It could be that these two scientists were great but not funded. Or it could be that their ideas weren't that great, and that they're disgruntled. Can't really tell from just a couple anecdotes. That said, there are huge systemic problems that this story didn't really touch on. The one side is funding, which they mentioned a little, but they didn't address the elephant in the room, which is where the money is going. NIH budget is still north of $30 billion. That's not chump change. But let's say the two guys profiled here are as good as advertised. Why couldn't they get a grant? Because almost all the money goes to old, established scientists. Barely any goes to young women and men. The most funded demographic across all NIH institutes is scientists in their 60s, even though experience and evidence shows that people are most creative and productive when they're young. This is a result of otherizing, according to my wild speculation. I think the study sections are all populated by old men and women, so the grants go to people who look like them: old people. Exacerbating the issue is that older people have more experience writing grants, so playing the game is easier still. Writing grants is a difficult, subtle brand of advertising oneself. The story's claim that only safe science is getting funded seems unsupported, and they don't offer a lot of evidence. Safe science has always been funded, because it's easy to understand. Part of the problem is that in order to write a grant, you need a lot of "preliminary data." That is, you need successful studies that support a hypothesis you're trying to prove or disprove. Makes a lot of sense, right? The NIH has tried some strategies to encourage giving grants to younger researcher, such as giving bonus points to young and early career scientists. These have had a very minimal effect, because in order to get bonus points, you need to get "scored" to begin with, which means that your grant has to be in the top 50%, which most young scientists' grants are not without explanation. It's terribly frustrating, but not insurmountable. The good thing about going into grad school now is that you'll have five years to be protected, then a couple more as a post-doc. You're looking at 7-10 years before you have to worry about it. Maybe the economy will be better, and the GOP will be less in control then than they are now. A lot can change in a decade. Also, as more labs fail, supply and demand will tend to bring funding levels back up. My advice is to pick a well funded lab in which to learn, because you want to have freedom, learn science, and learn grant writing. Write fellowships and small grants while in grad school, and make sure your adviser knows that's your intent before you start. It's a great career, but there are certainly challenges in this day and age.
Yeah, when it comes to these two guys, who knows? But I've kept hearing about systemic issues about how science is funded and the pressures that puts on researchers and how that effects what science gets done. And I guess thats a hopeful thing, at least- I've kept hearing about it. People are talking about it. Hopefully this leads to change. Your theory about otherizing is interesting; I've always assumed that the preference for older researchers primarily comes from the fact that older researchers, by dint of having been around longer, have longer track records that can justify getting funding. On the other hand, people do tend to otherize like crazy- do you think there might be a possibility of removing some of its influence in the grant evaluation process? Obviously there can't be complete blindness (I'm thinking of orchestra auditions that take place behind a screen)- for one thing, experience at writing grants will show through- but is there any place in the process that could be more blind?
It's tough, because when you write a grant, you always cite your own work heavily (e.g. "we have previously done such and such [ref], and based on that we propose thus). Citing one's own work, which is indispensable to making the grant concise, necessarily removes anonymity. Like most armchair quarterbacks, I'm better at identifying the problem than offering solutions. Part of me thinks that we might need a quota system. That is, say, $5 billion is going to researches who are less than 5 years from their post-doc, or something. That's not a great solution, but the status quo sucks worse.
A lot of this sounds like typical Academia politics, I think maybe these two scientist were a little naive in thinking how easily they'd get funding or how good their ideas where. Your right "Academia" favors older well-established scientist who have the stacks of research behind them. The federal dollar game is tough, and you can't completely blame them for giving money to the guy with the long standing record of success vs. the new kid with an interesting idea when there's constant talk cutting funding for this and that. In the future, when the economic climate is a bit better, I think there will be better opportunity for younger scientist or maybe we'll see some growth in corporate R&D