Paul Nurse on Funding
26/04/10 12:33 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 18:31.
While the peer-reviewed grant funding system in Europe and North America has significant problems, it would be further problematic to focus a significant portion of limited resources on a relatively small group of about a hundred researchers in the UK. The big breakthroughs in science often come from cross-interdisciplinary studies, and increasingly from discovery based-research enabled by "omics"-type technologies. More significant advances would arise if scientific' research was much more differentiated. I am always struck by the huge redundancy in research methods and results when I attend scientific conferences such as the annual American Association for Cancer Research Meeting and view the posters. By highly financing a small number of scientists, the research field would become even more narrowly focused, and probably more redundant as these investigators would likely compete on the same problems with similar approaches. I do think that greater support should be afforded to scientists with strong track records in terms of continuous funding, but it would be a huge mistake to bet a lot more on such a small number. If the poor productivity output per large dollar investment, for example as seen with Genome Canada over the last decade, is any indicator, distribution of funding for larger rather than smaller numbers of scientists would be much more effective.
Link to the original blog post
While the peer-reviewed grant funding system in Europe and North America has significant problems, it would be further problematic to focus a significant portion of limited resources on a relatively small group of about a hundred researchers in the UK. The big breakthroughs in science often come from cross-interdisciplinary studies, and increasingly from discovery based-research enabled by "omics"-type technologies. More significant advances would arise if scientific' research was much more differentiated. I am always struck by the huge redundancy in research methods and results when I attend scientific conferences such as the annual American Association for Cancer Research Meeting and view the posters. By highly financing a small number of scientists, the research field would become even more narrowly focused, and probably more redundant as these investigators would likely compete on the same problems with similar approaches. I do think that greater support should be afforded to scientists with strong track records in terms of continuous funding, but it would be a huge mistake to bet a lot more on such a small number. If the poor productivity output per large dollar investment, for example as seen with Genome Canada over the last decade, is any indicator, distribution of funding for larger rather than smaller numbers of scientists would be much more effective.
Link to the original blog post