In the course of making my Radio 4 doc on mind controlling parasites, I visited Professor Jaroslav Flegr at his lab in Prague. Flegr came to prominence after demonstrating that drivers involved in car accidents were far more likely than the general population to be infected with toxoplasma gondii, a parasite known to interfere with risk perception and reflexes in rats.
In a small attic office, we chatted about the university and its funding compared to the larger, better-funded parasitology labs in the UK and beyond. Over endless cups of black tea, Flegr told us that the relatively meagre funding available had led them to study areas overlooked by bigger institutions. If more money had been available, he said, there would have been a pressure to design complex experiments in order to justify (and receive) large grants.
This struck me as an incredibly interesting idea. Ten years ago, Malaria Journal established itself as an open access channel for the latest research on a disease that kills millions every year. Not only did this allow those at the forefront of anti-malarial campaigns to read the latest findings from high-powered research centres, crucially, its novel financial structure allowed even the smallest instiutions to share their experiences tackling the disease on the same pages, creating a two-way flow of ideas. Today it is the leading journal on malarial research.
Flegr's identification that there is research that can only be carried out in the absence of generous funding is certainly something I'd want to explore in more detail. I wonder if readers know of similar examples?
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During WWII, a Dutch astronomer spent his time calculating energy transitions in hydrogen molecules that might happen in interstellar space. Since the German occupation had shut down most research, there was not much else for him to do.
After the war, he started to look for the expected energy signature with a primitive radio telescope, and found it. Since different spiral arms in the Milky Way have different radial velocities, the Doppler effect made it possible to make the first tentative map of hydrogen in the nearby spiral arms.
Thanks Birger, that's a great story! But err.. who was it?
I think this is a pretty fair observation. I can think of any number of labs in my field that feel the need to 'sex up' their research proposals with fancy equipment, and also look (often in a rather contrived manner) for international collaborators and other tick boxes that make for sexy applications.
One of my bosses actually refers to the act of applying for grants as not being an 'act of science' but being pure 'grantsmanship'. Some research just isn't expensive, I could do three years research on £150,000 including three-years salary; but when it comes to it, I know that I'll ask for massive provision of 484 sequencing and high-throughput equipment - thus MUCH more expensive. Of course I could get the sequence data I need from simpler methods, 484 would be overkill. Likewise any number of very expensive methodologies in some fields of microbiology wouldn't give appreciably more data than an old fashioned test-tube assay.
Sometimes I wonder whether it's just correlated with the need to be fashionable (and often expensive), or whether its akin to perception of value and quality, e.g. the phenomenon where same personal trainer friend of mine had problems getting clients at £35/hr, but had to turn people away when he offered his services at £150/hr.
Thanks Jim
I think a big part of this is the assumption (from people outside the lab, at least) that an institution's income is derived from the discoveries it makes (and their profitability) rather than the process of finding it.
It would be fascinating to find some areas that have been overlooked by this environment. Also, I wonder if there's a way to counter it - something akin to microloans, perhaps. Microgrants? Interesting idea...
I'm struggling to think of examples Frank, I can think of a fair few where there was little money until a breakthrough was made then funding floodgates opened but that's not quite what your after.
WRT Jim's point, I went to a talk by the head of the Sanger Centre a while back, he made the point that because they had a reputation they had to spend vast amounts on new sequencing machines every 6 months lest they lose that reputation. He was pretty open that at this point in time they aren't working at full capacity, but if you're the Sanger Centre you have to be cutting edge.
That said though, a lot of research does have huge start up costs, anything involving heavy use of microscopy for example. I suspect the low hanging fruits of cheap research have been plucked many years ago in the fields most relevant to human societies in the developed world. Which brings you back to my first point, once a topic becomes interesting then the money becomes available and things get complicated quickly once the cheap and easy stuff (expensive and easy is another category - hello GWAS) is out the way.
I think a poster child for this problem is systematics and taxonomy. Those disciplines describe the diversity of life on earth and define the relationships between organisms. Wonderful work, all warm and fuzzy, and biodiversity disciplines desperately want to know these things.
The "problem" is that the huge majority of that work boils down to field trips to collect specimens, then microscope work in the lab to sort and define what was collected. For costs, we're talking a couple of airplane trips and a few buckets. A US$20,000 grant can keep a systematist working extremely productively for years.
Why is that a "problem"? At institutional overhead rates of roughly 50%, a university only sees US$10,000 for general costs from that multi-year effort. Contrast that to a modest genomics lab that might be costing US$2,000,000 per year to run. The institution gets US$1e4 from the systematist and $1e6 from the genomicist.
Guess which jobs are hiring?
Comment #6 is right on. Taxpayers don't get the best science money can buy, they get the most expensive science money can buy.
Nice post! In my field (bioinformatics), there seem to be several labs making a name for themselves using other people's experimental data (e.g. from microarrays or more recently sequencing), which has been made available through the NCBI, EMBL, etc. To do that, you have to ask questions that are not the obvious ones - those would have been answered in the original publications.
Funding bodies buy headlines rather than paying for boring science.
The concept of scientific "novelty" is now very different, and wrong.
Thanks to Erin Biba who points out this article she wrote for Wired about research micro-funding.
Science Funding for the Little Guys
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/st_sciencekickstart/
I work for a Government department and it's true that large 'collaborative' projects with multiple researchers often take the lion's share of the funding, although we only fund research which informs policy making rather than the blue sky stuff.
However, we do provide some of our core research agencies with a small amount of money that we call a 'seedcorn' fund and the agency can use that money for whatever research it sees fit without having to explain to us why they are doing it. Hopefully this at least provides some incentive for them to go off and do something less mainstream.