Mega-Cash Prizes and Revolutionary Science 134
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."
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:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disagree (Score:0, Insightful)
Exactly. Look at the requirements for preliminary data when applying for grants. NIH and NSF fund the past, not the future. And when the climate is as bad as it is now, they only fund established labs that need to stay afloat.
The author suggests that cash prizes will provide incentive for young scientists to tackle high-risk high-reward projects with the promise of a big payoff on a 10 year timeframe. How exactly is this going to happen if they can't even get an RO1 and have to shut down well before there's a chance to witness a payoff?
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.
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Clay not enough? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:5, Insightful)
Bad idea. It should be open to any and all.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Re:Disagree (Score:1, Insightful)
(1) that your technique will very likely work, say with probability of 60%+
(2) that your technique will be either
(i) cheaper;
(ii) safer;
(iii) faster;
(iv) more efficient; etc.
compared to grantor's current methods.
(3) you are committed to achieve what you claim and that you have high rate of success in R&D.
The bigger the grant, the bigger the risk for the grantor and hence stricter requirements.
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:2, Insightful)
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 steps towards a working television built and working at age 19. [wikipedia.org] Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 21. [wikipedia.org] Einstien wrote "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields" at 15. [wikipedia.org]
So in the realm of groundbreaking works: If you are over 30 and no breakthroughs has surfaced so far then likely they never will.
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:1, Insightful)
It is true that genius tends to show itself before 20, which is the only thing your examples prove. It is less true that it tends not to achieve anything after 30, which seems to be what you want your examples to prove, and which they do not address at all.
Re:Don't discount older people (Score:1, Insightful)
Pascal wrote "Pascal's Theorem" at 16. Not science, maths
Ben Franklin was writing noted newspaper articles at 15. Not science, literature
Louise Braille invented writing for the blind at age 15. Not science, technology
Alexander Graham Bell was working with mechanical speech at age 16. Not science, technology
Westinghouse was 19 when he patented a rotary steam engine. Not science, technology
Farnsworth had the first steps towards a working television built and working at age 19. Not science, technology
Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 21. Not science, business
Einstien [sic] wrote "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields" at 15. BINGO! - science
Re:A pile of hoopla (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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
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.
Re:Finally! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A pile of hoopla (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A pile of hoopla (Score:3, Insightful)
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 cases you can sell out and leave. In both cases you can adjust your shareholding by voting for tax increases/decreases or buying/selling your shares. In both cases you can vote for changes in the structure and rules of the organization.
The anti-tax fixation that many people have just shows they're shallow thinkers. Many people think that government and taxes are sometimes a more efficient way of solving some country-wide problems. In particular, one-man, one-vote is very important to limit the excessive dominance of the rich, even if it can lead to sub-Pareto optimal outcomes.
It's no panacea but in the real world neither is any other form of social organization.
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