Here’s two stories that make disturbing reading for anyone interested in scientific progress. First, the New York Times reports on the Nobel Prize’s nearly-man. Douglas C. Prasher did the work to isolate a jellyfish gene that produces a fluorescent protein. This was the subject of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. However, the prize went to the three chemists who used the discovery, rather than to Prasher.
The article makes it clear that Prasher is not bitter about this, but I am. Not for the lack of recognition, but because Prasher is now driving a van for a living. He couldn’t get the research grants to go on doing the science he wanted to do, so is now earning $10 an hour as a courtesy van driver in Huntsville, Alabama.
Science (or rather science’s administrative support system) has a knack of squandering talent. In the cold fusion chapter of 13 Things I related how Melvin Miles, a hard-working and hard-thinking researcher lost his job after associating himself with the subject. (I’ve recently learned – here – that Miles is now very much back in business again, which is great news).
Which brings me to the second story. A report in Science tells how the National Institutes of Health is bringing in a two-strikes-and-you’re-out policy on grant applications. If you can’t please the reviewers with one set of tweaks, pack up and go home (and get a job driving a courtesy van).
The problem is, the peer review system relies on human beings manifesting extraordinary – and frankly unreasonable – levels of altruism. Many professional scientists will tell you from experience that the reviewers of grant proposals are not disinterested parties: they are often in some kind of competition with the applicant – for status, if not for funds. Having only one chance to gainsay their criticisms (or, to put it another way, to give the reviewers a much better chance of burying the competition) doesn’t make it any easier to get a project funded, of that you can be sure.
The NIH says it is overwhelmed by the amount of admin involved in processing multiple versions of an application. I can understand that, but hasn’t the cart just moved in front of the horse? The process of science is essentially a twisted, convoluted search for discovery, and working out the best approach to making discoveries is similarly twisted, requiring iterative back and forth between everyone qualified to comment. The support system for science has to allow for that. What’s next? Grant applications that are written on a postcard so as to minimise the administrators’ time wasted opening envelopes?
I wonder if Prasher prefers driving a van to jumping the hurdles required to make world-changing discoveries. I also can’t help wondering if the soul-destroying and time-guzzling process of applying for research funding means that he was always working in a drudge job for less than $10 an hour anyway…
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