The high priests of science are holding it hostage
pemScience is ruled by a small club of insiders who decide what kinds of research are getting us closer to the truth—and they’re getting it wrong. Brilliant ideas are shut out, innovation is stalled, and billions are wasted chasing safe bets. If we want real progress, from cancer research to cosmology, we should move to a radically egalitarian method of funding scientists, argues philosopher of science Jamie Shaw. We need to break the monopoly, spread the funding more widely, and start trusting scientists to be as wild, diverse and unpredictable as the world they seek to explain./em/pp /ppstrongScience funding is broken/strong/ppIn 2022, the US, China, the EU, Japan, and Russia together spent around two trillion dollars on science. While this may make one think that scientists are spoiled with riches, this is far from enough to go around. Scientists often clamor for funds, with one estimate suggesting that they a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29707193/" target="_blank"spend upwards of 60% of their time just applying for funding/a, and it is rare that more than a href="https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/5/e002800" target="_blank"20% of submitted applications receive funding/a. This forces tough decisions about where funds should be prioritized within science./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"While a lot of innovation happens in science, most of it gets blocked by peer review./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppAlmost universally, these decisions are made or informed by consulting scientists who act as “peer reviewers” to tell funding institutions what is worth their investments. The idea behind it is simple: scientists know the science best, so they have the authority to decide what sorts of science are getting us closer to the truth. This justifies giving them power to make funding decisions. On top of this, scientists are assumed to know where the most emimportant /emtruths lie. Asking scientists to review the project proposals of other scientists, therefore, can seem to be the best way to get the most bang for our buck. Governments and funding agency spokespeople routinely use peer review to promise publics that their tax dollars are going to the most important scientific projects that are out there./pp
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/ppBut there are several very serious problems with peer review. One is how expensive it is. One study found that a href="https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2" target="_blank"over 100 million working hours went into peer reviewing journal articles in 2020/a—and this is an underestimate and the numbers are growing. Reviewing grant proposals is similarly time consuming. And this is just the reviewing side of things. Writing grant proposals takes much more work. That’s a lot of time that could have been spent on other things, like doing the actual science./ppAnother worry is that peer review tends to be biased against scientists from specific social groups. If you’re a woman, person of color, person with disabilities, non-native speaker, or a person from a “less prestigious” institution, a href="https://www.cmaj.ca/content/190/16/e489" target="_blank"odds are you will have a tougher time getting funding/a, regardless of how capable you are. Many scientists do not advance in their career because peer review blocks them from getting a chance. This gets called the “Matthew Effect”: to the rich go the spoils! If you don’t start off “rich” (e.g., at a prestigious university), you have worse odds of proving your capabilities. While, in theory, focusing on the science should make peer review more “objective,” peer reviewers are humans and, like all humans, have biases that they do not fully recognize./ppMaybe this would be tolerable if peer review made sure that huge government expenditures on science went to the most deserving places. Research piling up since the 1970s, however, suggests that a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631277900900203" target="_blank"peer review often does not do this particularly well/a. Scientists tend to be pretty bad at predicting which projects will succeed or fail and they disagree, more often than not, about which projects are the best or the worst. This poses a serious challenge to their claim of authority. Not only this, but peer reviewers often decide that ground-breaking, innovative research is not worth funding. The most famous recent example of this is Drew Weismann and Katalin Karikóa’s research on mRNA vaccines, the basis of the COVID vaccines that eventually won a Nobel prize, which a href="https://ideas.repec.org/h/nbr/nberch/14573.html" target="_blank"failed to get funding over ten times/a. Similarly, Ed Boydon’s work on expansion microscopy, which eventually won the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, a href="https://nintil.com/discoveries-ignored/" target="_blank"failed to get funding nine times/a. Brian Kobilka’s work on G-Protein Coupled Receptors, essential for understanding a diverse array of drugs and physiological processes, which won a Nobel prize in 2012, took over 15 years of persistent effort to get noteworthy funding. While a lot of innovation happens in science, most of it gets blocked by peer review. There are pockets of times when peer review works as we would hope, but it is increasingly looking like this is the exception rather than the rule./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"Scientists not only have no entitlement to speak with authority on where science should go next, but the scientists who do end up with such authority have extreme amounts of unjustified power./pp class="article-plus-content--header" style="text-align: center;"___/ppThese problems are a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2643622/" target="_blank"becoming better recognized/a, and many who work at science funding institutions are trying to fix them. But in most cases, they merely tinker with peer review by changing some parts of it, in the hope of retaining the original aspirations of an objective guardian of the responsible use of public monies in science. They remain convinced that peer reviewers deserve the power often granted to them. This might include making reviewers take “implicit bias” tests, giving them slightly different instructions, or having them mark somewhat different things. These small adjustments are not unimportant. But people have underestimated how deep the problems with peer review go. Because of this, they miss out on just how radically we need to transform science-funding policy./pp /ppstrongThe battle over power, authority and truth /strong/ppOne philosopher who recognized the root problems was Paul Feyerabend. He argued that scientists doa href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Against_Method.html?id=8y-FVtrKeSYC&redir_esc=y" target="_blank" not follow a fool-proof “method” that leads them to truth/a. Because of this, they have no authority to speak about what is true or which pursuits are worthwhile. Moreover, scientific progress does not involve a href="http://iai.tv/video/science-trust-and-truth" target="_blank"a gradual accumulation of more and more truths about the world/a. Using landmark examples from the history of science, he shows that science advances in a more unpredictable way. Science is constantly changing, and so are its methods. This means that there are no solid benchmarks in science that we can use to evaluate what research we think is going to go somewhere important or reach a dead end. Moreover, when we do use benchmarks based on what we emthink /emwe know, we artificially limit scientific creativity. The strongest resistance Galileo faced when he tried to show that the earth rotated on its axis was from those who wished to enforce the most popular physics of the time—that of Aristotle. If we constantly imposed currently entrenched standards, we would not make progress./ppWhat becomes upsetting is that scientists not only have no entitlement to speak with authority on where science should go next, but the scientists who do end up with such authority have extreme amounts of unjustified power. Science, says Feyerabend and many others since him, is a diverse practice with many conflicts of opinion and interests. Giving a small handful of peer reviewers power over others is not only unwarranted but actively harmful. Diversity becomes silenced because of power politics, not because some scientists are especially in touch with “the truth.”/ppThis point is even salient for urgent areas of research, like medicine. Trillions of dollars have been spent on research on cancer but progress has been painfully slow. This is partly because so many of the resources get funnelled into the same couple of research programs (mostly chemotherapy and radiation therapy). As we now know, a href="https://