The transformation that increased funding for science during the 20th century has brought is nothing short of remarkable. In the early 1900s the research was a cottage industry funded mostly by private firms and philanthropy. Thomas Edison electrified the world from his industrial laboratory in Menlo Park, and the Carnegie Corporation was a major supporter of Edwin Hubble. Advances in science during World War II – from the development of radar to the atomic bomb – prompted governments and companies to step things up. By the mid-1960s the US federal government was spending 0.6% of GDP on research funding and the share of overall investment in research and development increased to about 3%. This was followed by inventions including the Internet, GPS, and space telescopes.
That mobility is ending. A growing body of work shows that even as the world spends more on research, the compensation for each additional penny is diminished. One explanation for this is that the way science is funded is outdated. Researchers now have to contend with difficult bureaucracy. The rate of acceptance of grant applications has declined, which means more of them must be accepted. Two-fifths of a top scientist’s time is spent on things other than research, such as looking for money. One study found that researchers spent a total of 614 years applying for grants from a single funding body in Australia in 2014 alone. Risky ideas are often cast aside.
The present system is also one-sided. Western scientific systems are dominated by the distribution of project grants and peer review. Most of the money flows into universities, and the academic career ladder is such that researchers face incentives for incremental progress to gain tenure rather than boost citations and successful work. It’s time for another shock.
A growing group of scientists, policymakers, and philanthropists hope to improve science funding. The US CHIPS Act of 2022 reformed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to focus more on technology. America’s famous Advanced Research Projects Agency (today called DARPA) – founded in 1958 and which seeded the modern Internet – has inspired imitators in Britain and Germany. Tech billionaires’ plans to finance major projects are moving forward. On November 1, former Google boss Eric Schmidt announced he was funding a project to create an “artificial-intelligence scientist” to bring biology up to speed.
The problem is that no one really knows which approach works best. For example, many great scientific discoveries have come not from funding basic science but from the pursuit of commercial technology. For example, the transistor came out of AT&T’s Bell Labs. That’s why governments should start exploring the best ways to fund science as if it were a scientific problem in itself.
The first step is to try new things. More money could fund promising ones rather than specific projects, encouraging researchers to take risks. Funders can move fast and bypass peer review altogether, for example by using a lottery. Countries should also learn from the best practices of others. American philanthropists give three times as much to science as their European counterparts. Europeans could benefit from changing this.
More important still is to find ways to measure what’s working and what’s not and then adapt accordingly. Governments may consider appointing “meta-scientists” or “chief economists” to crunch the numbers in their various scientific agencies. One interesting idea is to keep track of an “anti-portfolio,” or list of projects that don’t get funded, and track how they perform.
None of this will be easy. Experimentation comes with trade-offs. More cash for bodies like DARPA means less for other approaches. Scientific funders say they want to experiment, but there is also pressure on them to support research to keep politicians happy, which can be easily explained. In some cases, more money may be the only solution. Nevertheless, the economic returns on research are so large – at least ten times the original investment, according to one estimate – that fixing the system is worth the effort. Like science, there should be progress in the way it is financed.
© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved.
From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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Published: Jan 17, 2024, 06:42 PM IST
