Comment You're right and wrong. (Score 2) 320
You're absolutely right about incentives and grant money.
How you tied this to the Nobel Prize is beyond me, so let's drop that.
The incentives are all about grant money and outside (the campus) capital. As a result, the science takes a back seat to market economics, market-ing (both of corporate partners and of academic institutions themselves, which increasingly operate in a competitive marketplace for enrollments), management concerns, investors, etc.
This incentive structure is increasingly becoming the norm well beyond U.S. shores.
So the problem isn't that science is increasingly wrong, it's that scientists are increasingly doing labor that may *involve* science, but that is in fact product-oriented R&D driven by short-term investment timelines and economic and investor-friendly optics, and whether any of it is good *science* is secondary or tertiary to whether it's profitable, whether directly or indirectly.
Let the scientists go back to doing science first and money-making (whether to support their own tenure lines or to support corporate profits) second or even better, third, fourth, or fifth, and you'll find that the ship rights itself.