Why We're So Damn Good At Science

The latest round of Nobel Prizes are being announced and once again American names or non-Americans at American institutions pop up on the list. The US dominates the sciences.*

We, the US, are good at science. Damn good. This dominance has been going on for a long time and has its roots in research funding during WWII. Unlike basketball at the Olympics, no one seems to be able to catch up to the US. Other countries might catch up in 20 years or so, but somehow I doubt it.

I don't know the numbers on how much we spend on scientific research in comparison to elsewhere. I know we waste a lot of money funding projects of no value, but so do other countries. Where we do better is that we have the guts to work on the big problems, the hard to solve problems.

It's really part of the American ethos at work. We are an incredibly optimistic people. We tend to be doers. Great science requires you to work on "long tail" type of problems, the ones that are way out there. We as a nation seem to gravitate toward the long tail nature of things. Sometimes it gets us into trouble: trying to save those with one in one hundred thousand kinds of diseases costs us a ridiculous amount of money, which is one reason why our heath care costs are so high. But in science this desire to tackle the most difficult and risky problems pays big dividends.

Our system for research is formidable. On the minus side we are awful at training undergraduates. We basically ignore them. But on the plus side, our research programs push our graduate students. Everything is oriented toward the upper ten percent of the student body, the ones that have the smarts and drive to pursue graduate study. We bring in undergraduates from all over the world for graduate study partly because we ignore our own undergraduates and partly because American students just don't want to work that hard. We train them well. The energy level in scientific labs at top notch universities is excellent. The competitiveness between labs generates the kind of sparks that you need to excel.

My exposure to science outside of the US suggests that the drive I see in American universities is rare elsewhere. Plus there is an inherent caution in the work overseas. The emphasis is on small scale problems. In science, there are those that paint with a broad brush and start entirely new canvases. Then there are those who take those canvases and fill in the missing spots. In the US we tend to have the bravura to make new canvases and leave the finishing touches to others.

I do want to express one significant note of caution. Since the 1980s, funding for science in the US has become tighter and tighter. This means that typically only one out of ten to twenty proposals for research gets funded today. You would think that at this level of competition, only the great ideas would get funded. Strangely, that isn't the case.

With so little money available, funding agencies have become very cautious in the type of work they are supporting. They want "proven results" with a "high probability of success" for their money. If someone is proposing to do work where the possibility of success is close to 100 percent, the value of that work is probably negligible. Great work takes risks.

For over twenty years now, the US has been increasingly funding work that is small in scope and risk free. This trend is widely known. In an effort to turn away from safe inconsequential science, many funding agencies have been pushing "big projects" organized around large consortia of scientists. But the tendency is to demand "high probability of success" for this work as well, which means that these "large projects" are usually a bunch of small, low risks projects bundled together. It's a little like Wall Street bundling junk securities. The repackaging doesn't change the fact that they are of little real value.

Without risk there is no real reward. If we continue to emphasize funding of low risk projects we'll start to look more and more like scientists overseas. Twenty years from now, we may see others take the lead in science and dominate the Nobel prizes. I am optimistic that this won't happen, but it will take a renewal of our commitment to blue sky research for us to keep our lead.