It seems this method of performing groundbreaking research and science is horrifically detrimental to our collective progress. There's no reason for these groups to compete when they could collaborate.
Discussion of credit for CRISPR goes back years. The first controversy began with patents. It's been obvious to anyone following this that credit for it is difficult to attribute. Everyone agrees CRISPR is in need of recognition, and yet the major systems for doing so are still based on an erroneous "lone genius" paradigm (with modifications).
Someone really needs to change the game!
A better functioning science would be a huge boost for humanity as a whole.
I don't expect government to change how it operates, but maybe some billionaires can build alternative institutions.
For the first case, if molecular biologists make a lot of progress, then the molecular biology budget gets increased. Likewise if a discipline stagnates, its budget would be cut. This is probably how it already works to an extent. You still have the problem of a finite budget being shared between disciplines.
I think it's better to measure, and reward, collaboration directly rather than turn the gross knob of aggregate funding. First steps towards this would include publishing negative results, just so there's a data point. Then we reward such results insofar as they contribute to positive results (measured via citations maybe). Obviously positive results would be rewarded much more than negative results, but we shouldn't discount the efforts of the many researchers who diligently find dead ends and tell others to avoid them.
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
2) Because scientific discovery often requires multiple competing approaches (because you don't know which one will work in advance), and top-down control tends to discourage that.
3) Because biomedical discovery is not an inherently directed process most of the time, and top-down control would risk missing out on important discoveries that only happened because we gave individual scientists the freedom to work on whatever they wanted (like bacterial immune systems).
Complaining about this state of affairs is like complaining that housecats aren't vegetarians yet. We have a new genetic manipulation technology that has already revolutionized molecular biology just a few years after it was discovered, and is already being investigated in clinical trials. Anyone who looks at this and says "you're doing it wrong" has a vastly distorted idea of what is actually possible in biomedical science, or any other line of work that requires actual humans to carry it out.
It's a straw man to say that a better system must be competition-free. Simply ameliorating the level of intensity and competition would go a long way. We need a more incremental seniority and funding system, where the difference between being able to do academic science and not to do so isn't defined by dramatic forks in the road. We have a vast separation-of-wealth in science funding and institutional power that must be addressed to get back to a healthier place.
Some human beings work that way.
Others share and cooperate freely with their peers.
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― Anaïs Nin
All human achievement is fundamentally agonistic.
The really bewildering thing is how so many people who clawed their way to the top apparently forgot about the competition it took to get there.