Patrick Collison and Michael Krastios: Fireside Chat @ Science: A New Golden Age

No, thanks for having me, and congratulations on this event.

That was very exciting.

So I think this is a really interesting thing for people to understand and a very useful radicalizing number to know. So a couple of years ago, we ran a survey of top biomedical scientists, actually many people funded through Fast Grants. And there's a lot of discussions and debates in science, you know, at what level should we fund science? Should we fund science more or less? And those are important debates and discussions, of course. But there's another question you can wonder and ask about, of course, which is, well, what science is funded for any given level, and what are the scientists permitted to do? So we surveyed all these top researchers at top institutions. We simply asked them, forget questions about how much you're funded, if you could spend your current grant dollars however you want, so you're not getting more money, just you can spend your current grant dollars however you want, rather than the kind of prescribed project-based way with which you receive funding today, how much would your research agenda change? And as you say, 78% of those scientists said they would change their research agenda a lot. I think this is extremely striking. Four out of five scientists would change their research agenda a lot if they had flexibility to pursue a research agenda of their choice. And we furthermore asked them, well, you know, in broad strokes, what would be the character of the change of your research? And I mean, this is five years ago now, but I think it was 83% said that they would make their research agenda more ambitious if, again, given this unconstrained freedom. So we inadvertently have gotten ourselves into this ecosystem and into this equilibrium where some of the smartest and most self-sacrificing people in the country, they can all be earning much more in the private sector, are toiling away in their labs producing these amazing goods for the rest of society, and we have put them in these strictures, these cages, that inhibit them from pursuing the research agenda of their choice. And you know, that's the bad news, but I think the good news is that's also an opportunity for us to, you know, there's some low-hanging fruit there where we can really liberate them.

It does seem crazy. I think...

Yes, yes, yes. We, the taxpayer, are funding them to work on something in some sense other than what they think would be, you know, highest impact to work on. Yeah, no, it's inefficient. I mean, look, I think all the mechanism design is tricky, and you know, I don't pretend to be, I mean, maybe at some point we'll get to ARC, you know, rather than sort of trying to prescribe the answers for everybody else and sort of pretend that I have magic silver bullets. We tried to kind of build something in practice, but I'd say generally speaking, I think funding more young scientists, which I know has also been a focus of yours. There are many analyses and many papers showing that scientists don't tend to change their minds as new discoveries occur so much as future generations supplant and succeed them. There's a famous analysis of the age at which scientists do Nobel Prize-winning work, and even though people tend to receive the Nobel Prizes, you know, this week, later in their careers, in their 50s, 60s, and so forth, the age at which they do the Nobel Prize-winning work tends to be late 20s, early 30s, mid-30s. And so I think generally speaking, skewing more the research funding towards early-career scientists. A fun or not-so-fun fact on this front is that in the 1980s, specifically, you can divide scientists into two categories: scientists under 40, let's just arbitrarily call those early-career; let's say scientists of 50 or older, let's call those, you know, mid or later-career. In 1980, for the NIH, we funded 1.7x more dollars to these early-career, under-40 scientists than to the 50 or above. So 1.7x more to the younger scientists. As of 2023, which is the latest year I believe for which we have data, the under-40 cohort receives 22% of the dollars that the 50-and-above cohort receives. And so there's been this dramatic change over the last 45 years in terms of the composition of the funding. I'd say more young scientists. Secondly, more curiosity-driven work. I mean, this is maybe sort of tautological or something, in that if we want more curiosity-driven work, we should simply enable people to do that by funding people, scientists who we think have amazing potential, iconoclastic ideas, who are likely to produce, you know, the future breakthroughs, rather than by trying to judge in some consensus-oriented way the sort of minute parameters of any given... I mean, you know, by definition, if you can write a proposal where you know what you're going to discover, you know, it's at least arguably not that scientific. You know, what's the discovery if you can anticipate it up front? And then lastly, I suspect, and you know, this is speculative, you know, people should try it, and you know, this is where I think meta-science can play a role, but I suspect longer grants. You know, it differs across NIH and NSF, and obviously there's different grant mechanisms and so forth, but generally speaking, you know, there's some data from, for example, showing that HHMI grants, which tend to be the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which tend to be longer than standard NIH or NSF grants, that scientists who, kind of identical scientists who receive an HHMI grant, which is longer, tend to produce larger and more consequential discoveries than scientists who don't have that same project time horizon. So I'd say younger, more curiosity-driven, and longer time horizons.