A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money | Hacker News Reader

A 2017 Nobel laureate says he left science because he ran out of money

qz.com

226 pointsFede_V80 comments

Reminds me of a rather heart-breaking interview with a man who should have been a laureate.

(I wish I had saved this at the time, but now I'm unable to give a link to the video material)

The Chemistry prize in 2008 was awarded for fluorescent proteins, which can be used to label interesting biological structures and functions. One of the laureates' guests at the ceremony was a former colleague, whom they were careful to point out had been absolutely critical for the discovery, implying that he should have been sharing the prize.

A TV reporter caught this colleague for interview for a while during the festivities after the main banquet dinner, and found, in addition to congratulations to his friends and background on his contribution, a story of extreme academic pressure and not getting enough money to sustain himself and the research. To make ends meet, he left science and started driving long haul bus transports, and that's how he had earned his living ever since. He looked sad about it, but also resigned - claimed the pay is better and it's a lot less stressful. You got to pay the bills and at least it's some financial security. I found it a very moving story, and the reported seemed shaken at that point too.

"But you were doing Nobel Prize quality research!"

"Well. That makes me a very overqualified bus driver, doesn't it."

That's a great story! I found a book describing the story of Douglas Prasher in more detail: https://books.google.com/books?id=L2zDBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA18&lpg=P...

This is also told on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher

On the bright side, it seems he returned to Scientific Research: In June 2010, Prasher was finally able to return to science, working for Streamline Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, and then from 2012 to 2015 in Tsien's lab at the University of California in San Diego

Thank you kindly. It's good to know his name again, and it's something of a relief to see that things seem to have shaped up for him since then.

I wonder how he's doing after the passing of Roger Tsien.

"He also said that these stars [that “have not really earned their status”] have boasted to him that they almost never send their articles to “anywhere but Nature, Cell, or Science“—among the three most prestigious science journals. “And they are nearly always published in one of those magazines—where, when you see something you know about, you realize that it’s not always so great,” he continued."

I subscribed to Science for a while (the only benefit I can see of AAAS membership), and I was surprised by the work published there. I'm a computer jockey, and not into the biology that Science mostly publishes, but I had expected it to be major, ground-breaking papers. Instead, it seemed like the same kind of minimum publishable unit that goes on everywhere.

Science today is like playing an RPG. You constantly solve quest which other players have solved already before you. But because you need the XP, you need to do it to reach a higher level, to play in the good league where all the good stuff drops.

It's mostly about clicks now! If they think your story or your PI's name will drive traffic then it gets accepted.

There are still a few very well done top notch paper that gets there, and some other half-backed but very creative which have some merit to be there. But even these have the "driving ads" as their first criteria.

I think it’s unfair to discounts papers in a foreign field to one’s own as ‘minimum publishable unit’ - often the novelty and importance of a finding requires some background, which the new, longer narrative abstracts in Science are trying to provide.

True, I'm out on a limb here.

But the "news" part of Science is very good, and has insightful coverage of science activities. In comparison with the rest of the magazine, the published research in Science was...meh.

It should be noted that many of the papers in Science are essentially summaries of larger, longer bodies of papers in other journals.

It’s especially easy, especially if you’re outside the field, to think these are trivial. What they’re actually meant to be is accessible to you.

I am a biologist, and while not everything these journals publish is super-compelling, by and large most of it is stuff that changes the way we think about particular scientific questions. The standard is definitely well above "minimum publishable unit".

As a side note, there is another effect that we have to consider.

If these brilliant scientists/professors are not (adequately) financed for their research, inevitably a large part of their time will be dedicated in looking for funds, detracting it from the time dedicated to the research itself.

So, not only some research is not possible (or gives scarce results) because of the lack of funds, but the time spent in looking for other funds will reduce the research results in a perverse spiral.

In a perfect world research institutions should be able to make their lead researchers "worry free" (about the funding and the other bureaucracy matters), as this condition is the one where creativity and productivity is at the top level.

Since funds are obviously limited, maybe the issue is about starting too many researches (underfunding each of them) as opposed to choose a limited number of research projects and fully fund them.

But if you use this approach, the issue becomes the war for being selected, the possible corruption (or simply bad judgement) of the selecting commission, etc.

I guess noone has a proper solution to the issue.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has been trying a neat approach at their Janelia research center: the researchers they accept are completely funded by them on the condition that they stop getting other grants. The idea is that they should spend all of their time on research, and since HHMI has a somewhat ludicrous amount of money if they need something they make the case internally rather than starting the grant process.

The role of professors in experimental sciences has simply changed. The most successful ones manage multi-million dollar annual budgets, have connections with politicians and local billionaires. They almost never do research themselves, their success is measured by their management of big projects. I know of one professor that has ~100000 citations, oversaw the construction of two institutes during his tenure and has been involved in big european projects for over 30 years now.

It is a wholly different story in theoretical fields like theoretical physics or mathematics of course, where you basically need no money.

If you increase the funding then the supply of scientists will simply grow until funding as again as competitive as it is today. The first order problem is that the funding ends up with mediocre scientists rather than brilliant scientists.

It’s more complex than that. For example, consider the subject’s complaint that “This old guy is out of touch” as a problem. It has been equally argued, with data, that giving established, older investigators a steady funding stream simply by weight of seniority is strangling promising early career labs.

This argument seems like it needs some evidence behind it.

Where's the infinite supply of scientists coming from?

It’s not infinite, but the boom of funding during the Clinton-era fostered a large increase in faculty positions, especially soft money positions.

From the same place that the infinite supply of budget is coming from.

In the US, in the biomedical sciences, it is pretty easy to be paid to get a PhD, but far more difficult to become faculty, and even more difficult get a grant as faculty. This imbalance has created the funding problem we have today.

An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s.

Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.

>Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.

It is also possibly part of the reasons why, sure, still there should be a "fair" method to choose the "best" among the "many".

What I fear is happening now is that instead - given the current situation - the scarce funds available go not to the "best" scientists, but rather to the ones that are better at relations/PR/self-promotion, so not only you need to be able at whatever your field is, but you have to be very good at selling yourself (which is something the "typical" genius may not be so good at) and - at least I have this impression - the lack of security/funding makes scientists more selfish and averse to collaborations.

I cannot believe that in current times it would be possible, to make an example, that - should a new Srinivasa Ramanujan come out - there would be a Godfrey Hardy capable of recognising him and sponsoring/supporting him.

To somewhat counter-balance this, in a recent grant panel I was on, several established, senior investigators were given a “pass” on methodological issues in their grants with “I’m sure X’s Lab knows what they’re doing...” while younger investigators got eviscerated.

“X is a genius” is a form of PR.

>To somewhat counter-balance this ...

I am missing the counter-balance effect, it seems to me we are saying the same thing, the "senior investigators" were passed not because they were geniuses (or not only because of this) but rather because they managed to get the reputation of genius[1], while "younger investigator" got eviscerated not because they were not (possibly) geniuses, but rather because they had not such a reputation preceding them.

[1] BTW not necessarily undeserved

I wasn't satisfied with "counter-balance" as a word when I wrote that, honestly.

It was mostly more the idea that what counts as "PR" for a senior academic isn't necessarily intuitive.

I guess it is easy to trace casuality to increasingly imbalanced wealth distribution. People who don't picture themselves as the rare exception who somehow makes the jump over to the winning side (as seems to be the default on hn) will aim for the best salaries and the traditional answer to that is education. Everybody is pressing hard into the highest qualification brackets because it is everything that is left of 20th century middle class. The market does what it does when supply increases but that won't make those on the way into being part of the oversupply reconsider, as no qualification is not an option.

In all this struggle, science is the unnoticed roadkill. Inconsequential publications have always been a part of modern scientific process, they are the soil on which occasional advances of the art grow. But when the fraction of involuntary pretend-acts who will never succeed at getting beyond writing only for the sake of having published gets too big, the real deal will suffer. What could have been the soil for something to grow on turns into a landslide that buries the seedlings.

Given the current resources and constraints of the economic system, it might be accurate to state it as an "oversupply" of scientist.

Given the sad state of actual science however, I think it's more useful to characterize it as an undersupply of resources and/or political and societal will to value science correctly.

We need large scale studies validating and invalidating each other with publicly available data so they can be repeated, performed with different population groups, and we need negative results to be seen to be just as important as positive results are. And hopefully a better understanding from everyone in the world of what the process of science is and should be.

The current academic system is rigged to produce a continual "shortage" of funding and jobs, no matter what the nominal budget is. If an average lab has 3 professors and 15 grad students, and the average professor stays for 40 years while the average grad student stays for 4, then in equilibrium only 2% of grad students can become professors.

Don't forget the part where those graduate students do some 80% of the work and make <20% of the income of their their supervisor (and, in many cases, <10% or none at all in several), and the university hosting the lab absorbs some 50% of all grants "off the top." A half-million dollar grant pays a single graduate student less than 20k/year for maybe 5 years, which, in the context of other companies that get these grants, is absurd. Independent research firms working from the same grants pay their employees competitive wages and still accomplish research. If these companies could issue Ph.D.s, academia would shrivel and die: imagine working at a company for 4 years, getting a salary 3-4x what a graduate school would offer, doing real work in a professional setting, doing enough research to write a dissertation, and receiving a degree. The entire incentive to attend a university would melt away.

That's the Anglo-Saxon model. In Sweden/Norway/Switzerland/Netherlands, a Phd student costs at least 100k dollars/year to a lab, with full-pension payments. It's a (relatively well-paid) job here.

I don't think many people (even graduate students and postdocs) realize how much money universities suck in with grants. For every RO1 a professor gets, the university gets to add a substantial (typically greater than 50%) indirect costs. The PIs don't care because their budget is the same, but what it means is that there are fewer grants being handed out. Then the PIs somtimes pay for the "training" that graduate students and postdocs get using their own funds. For a top university, this can be 50K/year.

That's not exactly how it works. If an agency wants to give a $1 million grant, for example, and the PI's university has a 60% overhead rate, then the PI will draw up a $625,000 budget (as 625*1.6=1000). So the overhead definitely matters to the PI---except there is little the PI can do about it after joining a university. Most big universities have similarly high indirect cost rates, which they steadily increase over time.

UC Berkeley (2016): 57%

MIT (2018): 59%

Harvard (2018): 59%

Stanford (2018): 57%

This story, from 2013, gives some of the context and history, as well as averages for universities and other research insitutions (which can have much higher overheads):

http://www.nature.com/news/indirect-costs-keeping-the-lights...

And all that overhead money is going to 3 things: increasing healthcare costs for the burgeoning retiree population of staff, increasing the number of administrators subservient to the king (I mean, provost), and new construction. The political class sees these additional jobs from the last two as the core justificatiin for the government increasing student loans for students and overhead for grants. They don't comprehend the science or frankly give a shit about it. Maybe when they get cancer they'll have a vague sense of interest in their organ system of choice, but that's about it.

Indirect costs cover things that we aren’t allowed to write into grants. And at my institution at least, it’s questionable as to whether or not that indirect rate actually fully covers the cost of research.

In the UK at least, independent research at pharmaceutical companies or Contract Research Organizations typically costs 1.5- to 2-fold what it costs at a University. Mostly because they pay higher wages than PhD students get, but also because they have heavier overheads. They're also typically less nimble as their research programmes are larger with more layers of management.

Uni research is probably minimally taxed, too.

How, exactly, is commercial research taxed? Only profits are taxed, and research is all expenses, and can be deducted from profits for tax purposes in the year they occur.

In the UK a commercial profit making company, even if it is doing research would still be subject to a form of local property tax called business rates[0]. Whereas a university would likely get relief from such taxes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_rates_in_England

They have this in some European countries like Denmark where it's called an "industrial PhD." However, they also compensate graduate students more fairly and seem to have more systematic and closer collaborations between academia and industry.

Such an independent research firm could grant Ph.D.s. Getting a Ph.D. in US universities like where I went is primarily a matter of satisfying a committee of existing Ph.D.s that the student has done suitably creditable work.

A firm with good researchers, whose newly minted students also did good work, would soon have the suitable reputation. And those letters after your name are only as valuable as the reputation of the institution.

At least my university does offer such an option, it's not often used, but sometimes is - if you've done (and published!) an appropriate amount of research in the industry, then you can apply to the committee to defend a thesis and get the degree without doing a PhD program. You still need to write the thesis, though, and it's much easier to do it while being paid as a PhD student/researcher.

A PhD from say Microsoft Research ought to be as good as any. Or back in the day, Bell Labs.

Back then, PhD graduates would be employed in industrial research labs, but with all the outsourcing that has gone on it's no surprise that the employment landscape looks as it does.

I wouldn't say outsourcing, it's just there's less industrial research in basic science going on in terms of dollars spent: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7965967/corporate-research-basi...

I used to work at HP Labs. Outsourcing really isn't a factor at all. The main problem is that the mothership's core business has suffered, and budgets and timelines have been cut.

In addition, newer companies seem to just license/use the research that comes out of universities (which has the aforementioned labor model) than take on the responsibilities themselves. (at least that has been my impression, but happy to be shown the err in my beliefs)

In pharmaceutical companies much of the stuff that used to be done in-house (synthesis, early discovery &c) is now contracted out to contract research organizations, often overseas. The knowledge-broker model has become more common, work that used to be done by staff scientists is now done by students and postdocs, the risk has been shifted from the company to the employees, and that really has made labour conditions worse.

Grad students were never intended to all become professors.

Except perhaps in history

This guy keeps it real as fuck. Love that he is rocking an Idiocracy hat during an interview.

He would not be a culture fit at any biotech startup, that's for sure. I love how at the end of the video, the Nobel laureate in medicine takes a long drag from a cigarette.

a lot of doctors and especially surgeons are closet smokers.

bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.

> bad habits picked up during residency and ER/on-call work die hard.

I initially found it surprising how many residency program directors tell interviewees that their programs don't allow illicit drug use. But yeah, extreme stress can lead to some bad habits, and it's apparently common enough to feel the need to remind candidates.

When I arrived at Oxford University, the first thing they told us at the international student orientation session was "don't try to bribe the police officers".

Things like this don't have to be very common to be worth pointing out.

Were there many folks from developing countries in the orientation? In my orientation (at an American university), there was a huge emphasis on "you might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously".

Some students from developing countries, yes. And I'm sure that admonition was largely aimed at them. IIRC most of the room looked European.

you might be used to plagiarism back home, but please take it seriously

Yeah, this is a problem my university runs into too -- international students are around 20% of the undergraduate population but consistently around 50% of the cases of academic dishonesty. :-(

Where is the video? Was the link changed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ct1hkROmxc

To add to these anecdotes, Ron Konopka (notably discovered the Period gene, which controls the period of circadian rhythms in Drosophila) was denied tenure and subsequently exited science.

Read more on his wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Konopka

He died in 2015, about 2 years before Hall, Rosbash, Young won the nobel prize for cloning the Period gene.

Some kind of academic independence like a free press is essential for a free society. Universities are often venues for dissent and perpetuation of ideas as they provide the context and space for contemplation, research and developing ideas.

This role has heavily and quite consciously diminished since the 70s. We have already learnt a free press often does not function as we would imagine easily co-opted into furthering various agendas and established interests.

With academia too engrossed in getting funding and a free press not really 'free' with their own funding constraints who plays the role of a watch guard and informed comment. If everyone is too busy trying just to survive a society in many ways ceases to be dynamic and loses its self awareness reduced to mere trading and consumption.

How come we have no international organization that does research for research's sake, and is jointly funded by multiple countries and private donations?

Or is there one and I'm just not aware of it?

Dr. Hall's short autobiography (the article linked here) shows one downside of research-only orgs: the superstar effect - the celebrity principal investigator effect. A prestigious research-only org can fall under the sway of a single ego, or a few egos. When that happens it can drive away real inquiry.

Readers of HN are generally accustomed to a winner-take-all approach to life. That's also known as an inverse-power-law approach or a network-effect approach. It's what makes cities and social networks get big.

Science policy well done struggles to counter this. It's smart to keep science real by spreading the financing and the expertise around.

That being said, there are plenty of research orgs. The late lamented Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Max-Planck Institutes are just a few.

CERN, ISS, the ITER, EMBL, ESA, and, of course, the International Potato Centre.

Like CERN?

I left academia 20 years ago after completing my PhD (in physics).

Getting the PhD was an awesome experience : intellectual effort, nice peers, teaching was great and the parties in the campus were memorable. One of the greatest periods in my life.

By the end I started to feel two things which drove me away : the begging for money and the feudalism.

I was payed peanuts (which was ok) and was not willing to spend a big part of my time looking after funding. I was a physicist, not a negotiator or economist.

Then came the medieval feudalism where the mere fact that you had dr, or prof or whatever was supposed to make others kneel in front of you. I did not kneel, told a few professors (after they provoqued me for a long time) that their contribution to the school was useless (no science, no teaching, no anything, just sitting idle on their tenure) and inserted of telling me what I did not know (that they were super heroes of finding, or whatever), they told me that this is not a way to address a professor. I had a laugh and said good bye.

I have a great job in industry, look at these years in awe but would not come back. At least until something changes towards meritocracy.

And this funding model causes a lot of research money to actually be wasted...because conducting research to followup bad research is not efficient.

I'm shocked there has been no mention of The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. Terence Kealey makes a compelling argument that government funding more than crowds out private funding for Science.

I.e., we are worse off in terms of absolute contributions to Science because 'everyone' expects government to fund it - especially basic research surely has no profit motive so only public funding can possibly work. Completely wrong historically.

The title seems disingenuous. He didn't leave science because of a lack of funding, but because academic dysfunction caused the massive amount of funding to go to those who don't deserve it:

> In a lengthy 2008 interview with the journal Current Biology, he brought up some serious issues with how research funding is allocated and how biases creep into scientific publications. He complained that some of the “stars” in science “have not really earned their status” yet they continued to receive massive amounts of funding.

What should we do then, pile heaps of more money into academia? Sure, but also address the obvious dysfunction in a meaningful way, or else it's wasted.

No, he says he ran out of research money:

>I admit that I resent running out of research money…recent applications from our lab have had their lungs ripped out, often accompanied by sneering, personal denunciations—perhaps reflecting the fact that this old-timer has lost his touch.

It's more disingenuous to say that the title itself is disingenuous.

If a startup winds down because it doesn't get funding, it's perfectly ok to say that it wound down due to lack of funding. Saying that it wound down because others got the money that could have gone to them, is a really really weird way to phrase it.

I, for one, am happy to hear Dr. Hall speaking up about the problem of superstar principal investigators. They do have the potential to slow down real inquiry.

Hate to tell him, but welcome to the real world. This is not a problem specific to academia!

Stars not having really earned their status? This is true in all institutions, businesses, governments, schools, home owners associations, book clubs, sewing circles, etc. Any group of people where "resources" are allocated by a human, there will be people who earn their status and there will be people who instead focus on influencing the allocators. Strange to have to tell grown-ups this.

I don't think Hall "needs to be told" anything.

The people who lost out here aren't Hall and the academics who can't get funding. Hall is doing fine in the private sector. The people who lose in this situation are the public, who no longer own the research output, and who no longer benefit from the long-term gains made by primary research.

We should create, for ourselves, a sustainable research economy. We've failed to do that. Are you suggesting it's impossible because you think "reality isn't fair" or "people suck"? I don't think the latter entails the former.

From the conclusion of this 1994 paper: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."

> Hall is doing fine in the private sector.

He moved into the woods of Maine to a town w/ a population less than 500. He is doing fine, but he isn't in the private sector. Losing funding meant "he's retired with dwindling coffers"[1].

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2017/10/03/jeffr...

It is though...

He's not arguing that stars shouldn't exist; he's arguing that funding decisions should be less influenced by "star power" and there are policy tweaks that could help achieve that.

It's worth noting that at the NIH (etc), you don't really know who "the allocators" are. Program managers make the final funding decisions, but they rely heavily on peer review and you don't know who in the study section will be reviewing your proposal. Changing this so they don't know the proposer's identities either might help.

I agree that there are parallels of this phenomena in other fields. It’s part of human nature. The people good at self marketing procure more resources even if they are technically worse.

Don't you think you should design a better system where this doesn't happen, or perhaps occurs less frequently?

For example, stop simply awarding grants based on proposals, and instead spread the money more evenly - reducing grant-writing overhead and giving everyone funding to at least _do something_.

'Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.' -- Albert Einstein

That last paragraph is brutal.

Url changed from https://qz.com/1095294/2017-nobel-laureate-jeffrey-hall-left..., which points to this.

With respect, "points to this" is a little misleading. The original qz article had an interesting video (with reaction of winning the Nobel prize) of the laurete which the cell.com interview misses.

I missed the video, and it was sort of a borderline call to begin with since the older article lacks the current context. So maybe I would have left it had I seen that. On the other hand, IIRC what they did with the text was flat-out blogspam, i.e. cribbed completely from the other source, and it kinda galls me to reward that.

The prize went to Roshbash. I knew a Rasbash at university. Doubtless different people, but is this name a shared root in some distant migration?

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