I
always wanted to be a scientist. But I didn’t want to be a scientist so that I
could ask questions and investigate answers; rather, I asked questions and
investigated answers and so I became a scientist. Being a scientist is not a
choice as much as it is a born identity. I think most scientists were born
asking questions. It’s not something we learned. Family lore has it that my own
first sentences demanded explanations of mysteries rather than more basic
desires. “Mommy, why is that fire hot?” I asked. Knowing only the obvious, in
this case that the fire was hot, was not enough. I wanted to know why.
And so I became a scientist.
As a
scientist, observations are not enough. Observations are just data –
information with no context, random letters with no language. The scientist’s
task is to interpret meaning from Nature’s maddening babble. We are not authors
but linguists forever cracking the infinite, cryptic code of Nature’s lexicon.
The reward we seek is dialog. What elation it is to feel as though we’ve
conversed with Nature, if even just a few words, to receive a new primer that
helps us towards curing a disease, fabricating an atomic-sized transistor, or
discovering a new planet! Deciphering Nature’s meaning gives us meaning.
This is why we ask “Why?”. This is why we are scientists.
Yet,
only five years since earning my PhD in neuroscience and I already know more
graduate school peers that have abandoned science than are currently doing
science. Given the enormous commitment it takes to become a scientist, this is
significant. After their PhD work some of my peers became real estate agents,
patent consultants, bartenders, business and sales representatives, or are even
unemployed or have decamped into obscurity. Now, I respect the choices people
make regardless of their background and training. It takes a diverse workforce
of interests and talents to make our complex economy function. And many of
those who left science did so intently and gracefully to pursue something they
thought would make them happier. That said, it’s unlikely that most of these
scientists upon finally receiving their PhD and/or Masters after a lifetime of
investment suddenly realized that they were not a scientist. We are born
scientists, after all. We don’t discard that identity any more than we ask for
it. On the contrary, I’d posit that it is science that decided it doesn’t want
scientists. Therein lies a serious problem.
The institution
of science, with Academia as its CEO, has abandoned scientists because this
institution has abandoned scientific ideology. This is an ideology that
defies belief in the name of reason, defies convention in the name of
creativity, and defies pragmatism in the name of risk. Science is a culture of
counter-culture. We have always been iconoclasts, skeptics – antagonists
to dogma because we reason with creative deduction that observations and
beliefs are often illusions. Consequently, the meaning discovered in Nature’s
language is rarely palatable. It’s simply not easy for our corporeal human brain
to accept that we are but a lonely blue marble spiraling through spacetime
among a vacuumed sea of unanswered prayers. Naturally, this unforgiving reality
litigated by scientific scripture has been the subject of persecution,
sometimes even resulting in imprisonment and death to its disciples. But
centuries of grit committed to learning and accepting nature’s language
eventually transformed incredulity into trust as diseases were eradicated,
industrialized energy was unlocked, and an ambitious new human agenda was
realized. Such success built the academic institutions that stand to this day –
the very institutions by which young scientists such as myself accepted the PhD
torch with humility. But alas, the soul of science isn’t the skeleton of an
ivory-boned institution; rather, the soul of science is an abstract institution
of ideas that seeks the observable truth. From this truth, however ephemeral in
our possession, we as scientists all contribute. And we all extract. This
communion of ideas is the soul of science. But our modern day academic skeleton
has no flesh to house a soul.
Perhaps
the most nefarious pathogen infecting modern science is corporate ideology.
Academia has become a business. Except here it is data, not dollars, that are
bundled, hedged, and managed with the irresponsibility of an unregulated
trading firm. The preferred product in this academic sector: positive results.
Positive results – those data that support a hypothesis – have become the
unfortunate gold standard in science assigning inflated value to institutions,
investigators, publications, grants, and spin-off companies. Like any product,
positive is “good” and negative is “bad”. And when Academia increasingly flirts
with marketing itself as a product of good fortune through flashy new
buildings, quixotic panacea initiatives, and fund-raising billboards and
infomercials, then it doesn’t have time for the often drudgingly slow,
sometimes discouraging process innate to quality science. Consequently,
experimental results are groomed in favor of the desired outcome so that papers
can be published, grants secured, tenure installed, and endowments retained.
The product – the data – must remain “good” despite its actual
integrity. Under this paradigm the goal of science research is more about
preserving stock value and expanding operations rather than objectively testing
hypotheses.
But
unlike a product, data are neither good nor bad. They are simply observations.
Negative data is just as revealing as positive data, as it tells us that our hypothesis
is incorrect, incomplete, or simply statistically underpowered, and that
readjustments may be needed to reach the truth. Unfortunately, our current
paradigm ignores negative data as an aberration in protocol (“you’re doing it
wrong”) or simply unmarketable (“that’ll never get published”). But those
aren’t legitimate dispositions because we proudly created a self-governed
system of peer review and self-critique, and so we’re choosing to accept these
excuses at the expense of scientific integrity. For example, study sections at
the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public-funded reservoir
for biomedical research, now expect much of the proposed work in a grant to be
completed before the grant to do that work is even awarded; publications shove
negative findings into “Supplemental Results” sections, if not out of the
report entirely; and – perhaps most egregious – experiments are sometimes
repeated only until the intended results are obtained. When such favoritism is
placed on positive data then the focus shifts from testing a hypothesis to
simply advertising one. The problem magnifies exponentially when others then
build their own hypothesis based on these falsely advertised hypotheses, and
now they too perpetuate false expectations based on previous expectations (“Because
how could years of work in an entire field be wrong?!”). All the while the
product, no matter its integrity, is advertised and sold to the consumers, who
are ultimately the public. This is not scientific ideology. This is corporate
ideology. There is no real exchange of currency, and no real investment – just
a shell game of false promises and expectations. It fact, it looks a lot like a
market bubble. And all bubbles eventually pop.
The
evidence is mounting that science is experiencing a “market correction” through
a dramatic, albeit alarming decline in public support for science. And this
isn’t just reflected in ever-declining NIH funding (correcting for inflation).
We live in a new age of vogue anti-intellectualism where scientists are no
longer the heroes of my parents’ generation, but rather villainous conspirators
plotting to swindle the public in pursuit of fame, power, and money (which
sounds a lot like the current public opinion of Wall Street bankers). In an ironic
twist of fate, scientists have become the spurious spiritual healers distrusted
for their voodoo and ersatz prescriptions, whereas the local medicine man has
regained the trust of the public placebo. Indeed, scientists are again facing
persecution; we are refugees fleeing the indictments of a reigning mythological
order that has no regard for facts. It’s downright inexcusable in 2016 that
evolution and climate change are still debated (let alone dismissed in some
cases), or that vaccines can be more feared than the return of deadly,
once-eradicated diseases, or that fluoride is considered a “toxic chemical”
poisoning our water supply. Furthermore, there seems to be a resurgent appeal
of unproven homeopathic and “transcendent healing” approaches such as reiki,
dietary “cleansing,” acupuncture, or nonsensical portmanteaus like “cryotherapy”
that are used to treat conditions – some serious – that instead demand
scientifically proven intervention. Admittedly, mysticism is a pill that has
long been swallowed by human kind, and living in Portland, Oregon may skew my
perception of the broader public’s acceptance of such nonsense, but there is
undoubtedly a growing disregard for facts and science-based health care in
America. The ramifications of this antediluvian mindset could be disastrous.
The
responsibility for our brave new fact-free world lies mostly with us, the
scientists. The scientific community increasingly sold its promises and cures
like commodities until the public’s consumption became impossible with
expectation. We promised too much too quickly and delivered too little too
late, all the while cashing in on the public’s trust to make our ivory towers
taller and wealthier. But science doesn’t cure diseases quickly, nor does it do
so as a linear function of funding. The relationship between scientific output
and funding has an efficiency asymptote that simply cannot be overcome with
more buildings, more equipment, and more talent. Data integrity, skepticism,
and patience are what ultimately deliver real scientific progress. Yet, these
are the ingredients currently receiving little institutional investment.
Instead, the institutional priority seems to be recruiting inordinate amounts
of money by peddling impossible promises. But what happens when those promises
fall short due to the innately slow pace of quality science? Well, they simply
don’t fall short: “Of course progress is being made by our world-class team
of experts and their state-of-the-art equipment! Just look at our positive
results!” There’s simply too much money at stake to renege on the promises
that recruited the money in the first place. Ultimately, the actual investment
of Academia seems to be in showboating the icons of science – the science
itself is secondary. But like in any committed relationship, a deceitful façade
eventually collapses and the victim, in this case the public, leaves the
relationship. And they’ll demand alimony.
The
NIH is the quintessential public trust fund for biomedical research in the United States. Its mission is
“to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems
and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and
reduce illness and disability,” with a specific goal to “exemplify and promote
the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability, and social
responsibility in the conduct of science”. This is not the language of a
business plan. This is the language of a social service pact. It is our duty to
apply our awarded public dollars with utmost respect towards the betterment of society
through quality science. Any other appropriation is a breach of contract. As
such, when the public feels betrayed they’ll pull out of the contract, which is
what we’ve witnessed in NIH funding over the past decade. The resulting
resource limitations in turn further increase internal biases towards positive
data and false promises, which ultimately further disillusion the public
towards even more resource limitations. This insatiable spiral feeds off itself
until, as mentioned above, the goal of science becomes to simply preserve
existences rather than to justify them. All the while, the older generation of
scientists will continue to sequester more and more of the available funds
because they’ve been around long enough to preserve their existence regardless
of whether their ideas are still relevant. This leaves the younger scientists
with little options but to conform to the corrupted conventions because that’s
what gets published (which has become a hyper-inflated benchmark of “success”
anyway), which preserves their nascent career, which reinforces further
perpetuation of this voracious ouroboros. And in the meantime the
independent-minded, creative scientists are marginalized because they inject
too much risk into the system.
This
is not how the institution of science should work. Science is foremost a creative
endeavor that embraces risk to conjure cleaver solutions to problems.
Conservatism, while certainly pragmatic as follow-up on initial big discoveries,
is not inherently scientific. Nor is it inspiring. Being a scientist in a
vapid, conservative business climate is not where we found inspiration to risk big
ideas of how the human brain prescribes consciousness, or how dark energy
accelerates the expansion of the Universe, or how Mr. Schrödinger’s cat is both
dead and alive.
The
risks required by science are not just abstract. We also take literal social
and economic risks by choosing to be scientists. The educational investment
from our pocket and the public’s (i.e. NIH training grants) is significant, as
is the time investment. Many of us delay our lives, putting off marriage,
children, home buying, and other significant milestones so that we can
arduously lay the foundation for a science career. Moreover, we delay (if not surrender)
the expectation of reasonable pay given the importance of what we do and the
hours we work, all the while maintaining sight of an ever-narrowing career path
ahead. Yet we do it. We do it because it’s who we are – because we can’t not
do it. What a valuable workforce! There are few fields that could claim the
committed workforce like that of science. Scientists pursued their line of work
because they were inspired. Yet, I don’t hear that word in the lab much
these days: “inspired”. If I do, it’s in jest as the conversation distills to
cynicism, “Well, inspiration doesn’t get a grant anymore”. But it can.
Inspiration
drove our young minds into the science fairs, then the books, then the lab
benches, and eventually the ivory halls. Without inspiration, we are not
scientists. We only have to take risks to employ it again. In fact, science is
going need most the very people it’s currently marginalizing. These are the
risk-takers that no longer recognize their robotic peers or mentors, nor feel
invited to express their creative wonder and potentially ingenious ideas; these
are the people with talents of art, communication, politics, humility, grit,
and, of course, raw scientific prowess. I challenge senior investigators to
rediscover the inspiration that once motivated them by rewarding at their next
study section the creative risk crammed into an applicant’s Aim 3; I challenge
administrators to look beyond a heavily curated CV to promote and hire minds
that are also full of creative wonder and bold ideas; and I challenge students
and postdocs to do that clever experiment you thought about during your bike
ride or your late-night bar-bender simply because it inspires you.
We as scientists built Academia and so we can
restore it. If we are currently relegated as mystics by popular culture then we
must accept our responsibility to confront this difficult reality. We need to
reclaim our identity by becoming scientific disciples. It is our duty to spread
the word of The Truth – the observable, repeatable truth of science –
and again make the public believers. This starts with rediscovering ourselves
as scientists. We are proud of our academic system and it has been an enormous
success for our species. But that can only continue if our peers truly behave
like peers: like scientists, not business people. The only product we
should be selling is the truth. Yes, the truth is often the hardest of hard
sells, but that’s what gives it such value. This value is bigger than any one
of us alone – bigger than a publication in Science, a federal R01 award,
tenure, or our spin-off company. More than dollars, it was the value of the
scientific process that purified water, eradicated diseases, put satellites in
space, developed the internet, and – most importantly – inspired us as kids to
risk our own investment in the bank of scientific discovery. Let’s take the
risk to be inspired again. The science will follow.
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