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Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat Mar 08, 2008 11:15 AM
from the big-piles-of-cash-often-motivate-people dept.
from the big-piles-of-cash-often-motivate-people dept.
Bruce G Charlton writes "A new paper in Medical Hypotheses suggests that very big cash prizes could specifically be targeted to stimulate 'revolutionary' science.
Usually, prizes tend to stimulate 'applied' science — as in the most famous example of Harrison's improved clock solving the 'longitude' problem. But for prizes successfully to stimulate revolutionary science the prizes need to be:
1. Very large (and we are talking seven figure 'pop star' earnings, here) to compensate for the high risk of failure when tackling major scientific problems,
2. Awarded to scientists at a young enough age that it influences their behavior in (about) their mid-late twenties — when they are deciding on their career path, and:
3. Include objective and transparent scientometric criteria, to prevent the prize award process being corrupted by 'political' incentives.
Such mega-cash prizes, in sufficient numbers, might incentivize some of the very best young scientists to make more ambitious, long-term — but high-risk — career choices.
The real winner of this would be society as a whole; since ordinary science can successfully be done by second-raters — but only first-rate scientists can tackle the toughest scientific problems."
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Submission: Mega-cash prizes for revolutionary science by Anonymous Coward
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Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Don't discount older people (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad idea. It should be open to any and all.
Parent
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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More than that. It is plain stupidity. If someone is to receive the prize during their mid/late-twenties, and these are long term projects, what are we talking about here ? 18yo scientist ? They might be brilliant, but serious lack experience. Also, we have to consider the "productive" life of a scientist (I know, the expression sucks), which usually goes all the way to the late-sixties (or even more).
On the other hand, I agree the prize should be given in a relatively shor
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:4, Insightful)
And they'll do this only by awarding the mega-prize to people who make the breakthrough.
It's like expecting smart people to want to play the lottery. It's smart people don't base a career on a 0.1% chance of making $1M, with a 99.9% chance of $0. They might do it if it's easy enough to do in their garage on their free time (i.e., the lottery ticket is free), but it's too risky to expect smart people that understand math to enter as a career field.
On the contrary, just expanding NSF funding for researchers in the specific direction, with smaller prizes for specific endeavors, is probably the best way to go. I might not have ever left college (I was a researcher for years) if the pay was good and I had an interesting task to solve.
Parent
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When you are speaking of making a major contribution to the world, it's true. If you are over 30 and you aren't a shining star in your field, you never will be. Pascal wrote "Pascal's Theorem" at 16. [wikipedia.org] Ben Franklin was writing noted newspaper articles at 15. [wikipedia.org] Louise Braille invented writing for the blind at age 15. [wikipedia.org] Alexander Graham Bell was working with mechanical speech at age 16. [wikipedia.org] Westinghouse was 19 when he patented a rotary steam engine. [wikipedia.org] Farnsworth had the first [wikipedia.org]
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, that's based on the unsupported assumption that science is only valuable when it's "ground breaking".
Parent
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I imagine that this could work if it was more like a generalized version of google's summer of code. High school and undergrads for the most part love that competitive stimulus. They need to worry less about the problems given to them by their teachers and professors, and start looking at the cutting edge problems facing the world
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:4, Insightful)
Restricting mega-prizes to the young may eliminate groundbreaking work by mid-career and early-second-career scientists.
Not only that, but it sends the wrong message to our children: Once you hit 30 you aren't worth as much.
I don't think this point can be over emphasized enough in this discussion.
The author is aiming this prize at me. I went to college on a academic full ride, cranked through a PhD in chemistry in 4 years on a hot project that got national media attention, and am currently trying to figure out what my career is going to be. I'm 27, which is extremely young for a PhD.
I am the wrong person to aim this at. You want to throw money at someone, you need to be targeting my PhD adviser. She has connections that I can't dream of, a funding rate that is basically unheard of, deserves a big chunk of credit for my success, has published major work in two very different fields, and, most importantly, she's currently in the prime of her career - age 45. She has now left the university and started a company - it's the only way for her career to continue to move forward with the grant situation as bad as it is right at the moment.
It takes a very long time to establish yourself as a superstar in the world of science. Nobody does it by age 30. The best of the best, with all of the breaks going their way, might do it by 35 - with the caveat that they have to specialize to such an extent that they can't even consider going after a big prize like this unless it is perfectly suited to their field. And unless you are already a on the path to becoming a superstar, you won't get a sniff of big money like we are discussing here.
Better yet - don't throw that money at anyone at all. Inevitably, some of it would stick, but far more resources would be wasted competing for it.
I'm rocking the boat in a localized fashion right now. I'm making a name for myself by being the programming/database guy in a room full of biologists. I'm don't have to the smartest guy in the room - I have access to an entirely different set of tools than anyone else does, and I can communicate with the biologists in ways that a normal programmer would never be able to, allowing me to make a huge impact fresh off of my PhD.
If you really want see progress made, without the high risk/high reward gambles, look to make progress in the gaps between fields. Engineers collaborating with traditional academic scientists. PhDs in two major fields, instead of just one. Collaborative projects between industry and government, academia and industry. Corporate think tanks like we used to have - really good R&D in industry is hard to come by these days, but many of our best advancements in the last 50 years came from these sorts of institutions. Improved math/comp sci training for scientists and engineers (I don't care how much you had, more would probably have done you good). A major, national-involvement project to tackle, on par with putting a man on the moon - real renewable energy looks like a good candidate right now.
This is the future of America, and most of the rest of the first world. We have outsourced our blue-collar jobs, the white-collar jobs are slowly going international, and our high standard of living looks unattractive when someone in India will do your job for half the cost, even if they only do it half as well.
The way forward is to move faster, drive innovation, reward the people that are superstars (regardless of age) with incentive packages that make them want to work harder. America has had this sort of system in place a few times before in history, and we have attracted the best and the brightest, both domestic and foreign, to get involved and make huge strides in many fields. Progress is made on the margins - any attempt to maintain the status quo or fund a regression to the mean kills us slowly. Throwing big money at science keeps mediocre talent in, wasting resources, when they should throw in the towel and move on to
Parent
Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
Science, particularly basic science, is different. Corporations are not nearly as interested in investing in something that won't develop into a product in the foreseeable future. For basic science you need money to replace the corporate sponsors: money up front. There are plenty of young scientists who will happily do great research, they just need some funding to get started. The granting agencies are the ones who have to be trained to take more (intelligent) risks.
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Just imagine you had the patent for lasers. Or radar.
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Re:Disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
The preliminary data thing is a catch 22 that I've already gotten caught in. In order to have a shot at a grant you've got to have data showing your technique works. But in order to get that data you pretty much have to perfect your technique. But if your technique already works, why do you need funding to develop it?
Parent
Opertunity Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
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Consider how much faster progress could be made if there were incentives encouraging a large number of our best minds to all focus on the most pressing issues of the day.
We already have that (Score:2)
For short/intermediate term research on things that are easily patentable, that is an easy question. The most valuable research is almost always that which makes the most money to the firm that "owns" the discovery, and rational scientists will work toward discovering the most valuable things that they can(Public heath and environmental techno
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Also, there is one way to eliminate duplication of effort. At a young age children are given aptitude tests and educated appropriately to enhance their strengths. When they come of age, they are assigned a research topic and work on it for a
system of the world (Score:2)
- link has background on the invention of a better watch to solve the longitude problem.
I recently finally read Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, where there's a plot line involving
the creation of the longitude prize. It took about 50 years longer than expected to be claimed.
A pile of hoopla (Score:5, Insightful)
Secondly, those best qualified to decide which avenues of research will bear fruit are those doing the science, not someone with prize money. Not only are we best qualified to decide what to do - we are best qualified to decide that we are the ones to do it. You may think that one of those young engineers doing successful, and, yes, profitable work on reducing power consumption in laptops could have made super-rope for a space elevator instead, and there are individuals for whom this is true (see next point,) but most of the time, people at this level of skill and education pursue the questions that interest them, and on which they have some confidence that they can usefully contribute. If we were in this for the money we'd have had MBAs in half the time it took to get the PhD.
Now, there is a legitimate problem. You can get private money to fund research in applied science, but the government (or some agency which does not expect any return on each, individual investment) has to fund basic research, for basically the reasons stated in the article. This does not mean we need huge "prizes". What we need are grants - which are in short supply at the moment thanks, and I'm willing to be partisan because the facts are brazenly clear in this case, to the stupid, short-sighted and wasteful policies of the current administration.
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Also, status and recognition are very important motivators.
And we mustn't forget the egos of the donors, who'd much rather have their name associated with a big time award than a useful fund that doles out modest amounts of money to deserving proposals.
So let me suggest a new kind of prize, that recognizes the author of major scientific results, and comes with a massive cash award which he must give away as
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There is a baisc premise underlying you views concerning who should choose what is researched and where the funding should come from and it is the same view of all people who advocate socialism or social
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or more precisely, the spending of the money of others
Fruitcakes like you really need to grow up.
Your taxes being spent on something you don't like is much the same as you being a minority shareholder in a company and the majority shareholders deciding to take the company in a direction you don't like.
Except in the case of a democratic government it's one man, one vote, not one dollar, one vote.
In both cases you can try to get sufficient votes to change the direction of the organization. In both
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Truth is, you need both luck and talent.
Any number of petri dishes had been contaminated by the year that Fleming his "breakthrough" on penicillin. It took a person with the sort of curiosity to go, "Hmm, that's odd -- I wonder why?" when he got his lucky (or unlucky... it ruined his experiment) break.
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The question is - if we want more such grand advances, do we want to cultivate more Great Men who can make them, or do we want to cultivate the countless minor advances, not to mention dead ends and often informative failed experiments, etc. etc., on which their work was predicated?
I would say the latter.
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Exactly. The standard NIH R01 investigator grant, which supports most successful mid-career biomedical scientists, pays around $100-250,000 per year for four years, renewable with reasonable progress. This is enough to support the investigator (at an academic's salary), lab space (universities generally take 50% of the top), and anywhere from 1-4 employees, depending on the location (yes, grad students and postdocs make that little money). These are the grants that get scie
Clay not enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Topics like what? (Score:2)
Seems to be that younger scientists are by nature full of interesting and "outside the box" ideas. Money won't push them to do cool stuff unless it's to get them free of some of the limitations of academia.
For people bad at math... (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand this idea will go over well among the flat earth crowd. They don't do science, but they think high-stakes prizes are the only way to get out of the trailer park.
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Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying all scientists are like this (I have a science degree myself), but it is a VERY common attitude among the academic elite. When I went from a small undergrade college into a large university for grad school I noticed a big difference in the teaching. The lat
It usually costs more to win than it's worth (Score:5, Interesting)
It usually costs more to win such prizes than it's worth.
Netflix $1,000,000 Prize as Case Study (Score:2, Interesting)
I think an important argument that can be made to support the 'cash prize theory' can be directly seen with the Netflix Prize [wikipedia.org] project. For those unfamiliar, they are offering a $1,000,000 cash reward for the best third-party team/individual that can develop the best algorithm for predicting movie preferences for their users.
Of course, to a company like Netflix, this may be more of a cost/benefit issue as hiring a team of bright researchers still won't guarantee that even a million in R&D will lead to
An "old" idea (Score:2)
Seems to me Robert Heinlein came up with a somewhat similar idea in "Methusala's Children". If both your grandparents lived past a certain age, and you married somebody whose grandparents were similarly long-lived, the Methusala Foundation would pay you.
In either case, it comes down to forking out cash to improve the chances of getting desired results. Certainly not the worst idea I've ever heard.
Bad idea, misunderstands scientists (Score:3, Interesting)
Overkill (Score:2)
I have plenty of awsome ideas, which would make billions. The average potential backer is way to stupid to understand the simple science that explains how these ideas work. Anyway, in my considerable experience. the powers that be would rather not have any new ideas, and especially not "awesome" ones.
If anyone is interested in real energy saving systems/machines, I have plenty. I can provide one technology alone which will enable your c
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But in each case, you will need to have control of at least $100M to get the ideas to market.
A modern oil rig costs a billion dollars. $100M is certainly available as venture capital in various places in the US -- IF you have a real product to show. Which you don't. As can be easily seen in your next sentence:
(100 fold return of investment no problem - over 10 years).
If you had ever talked to ONE venture capitalist in your life, you'd know that you don't have to show profit -- if you can break even in year three or four and show that there's a healthy growth potential under the hood, you can get VC money. If the $100M buys a $50M company and provides t
I win! (Score:2)
Completely and Utterly Wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
What budding young scientists need is support to do their research while they haven't produced results, not place a pot of gold at then end of the rainbow.
If one pursues the academic tract, you need to get into grad school, secure a good advisor, get put on good research, get a decent faculty position, get funding, attract decent grad students and then perform
The number of people who get this far in challenging fields tends to be very low, and a lots of bright, smart people don't make it.
The creation of prizes is very attractive for the grant givers, since it allows you to attact many more people than your funding would normally allow, but don't try to convince us that it's a real way of funding science.
Think of it as charity (Score:2)
that's not how it works... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is extraordinarily expensive to tackle the big problems, and the vast majority of scientists are not independently wealthy. Do they expect scientists to run up multi-million dollar personal debts on the off chance they get a prize? At my institution, we're trying to get a $20 million grant right now. That's not going to pad our pockets, but it will pay for lots of new equipment and materials. We need large amounts of money to do revolutionary research. Without funding, it doesn't matter it there's a prize out there, we simply can not do what we need to do.
Why would I, as a scientist, NOT work on the biggest problem I can find, award or no award? These guys suggest that the best scientists choose to work on lesser problems because of greater payoff. They say easier science leads to more papers, more citations and ultimately more peer-reviewed grant funding. They then suggest that we can use the same process to determine if revolutionary research has been done. So is the problem that grant giving institutions are not interested in hard research? That's not been my experience, but I'm in a different field than the authors.
I think they're complaining more about a culture specific to their specialty (medicine and biology) and less about the culture of science in general. A side effect of the doubling of biomedical research funding a decade ago is that a whole bunch of uncreative people were able to have success. Now that funding has decreased, those people (who perhaps should not be in leadership positions) are a drain on resources. Not having gone through recent turbulence in funding, other areas lack this problem.
Why would someone intelligent work on this? (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it absurd that anyone really intelligent would depend on essentially a lottery for anything. It's absurd because 99% of the time you will simply be wasting your time and could make a lot more money by doing something else.
Logically the prizes would be pointless like they are now, a company is formed and it's engineers are paid by sponsors/rich people. It's essentially like venture capitalists, they take on the risk and get a decent large chunk of the payoff.
IAAS (Score:4, Interesting)
However this will not work for basic research in natural sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, etc). The reason is that there are no singular achievements. Experimental measurements are often not trusted until they are repeated by several groups and usually these other groups add key details to the original measurement. Likewise, theories are often explaining the same phenomena from different angles (schrodinger and heisenberg versions of quantum mechanics, Landau and BCS explanations of superconductivity, etc). So large prizes are only likely to sow discord in those communities not foster more productivity.
Such a stupid system... (Score:3, Interesting)
Even those who do get the new major insights in science just... get them -- after a lot of work of course. Sure they deserve accolades and recognition and even money, but I have this strange feeling that just making them win the lottery is somewhat oddly unfair towards those who partake in the noble pursuit but don't get similarly "blessed".
In the meantime, in order to actually have those flashes occurring in the heads of some young scientists, they need to eat. THAT lures people into science, not taking huge personal risks -- and the intense pressure that comes with it -- with their life. For example I quit thinking about staying in academia when I realized that I would perform poorly if my life really depended on getting great ideas from grant to grant. So science needs to be funded as a whole... you toss a whole lot of them at the wall and see which ones stick.