On publishing leading to additional grants:
“IMO, this is the root of the problem. Grants from the NIH are the lifeline of most academic labs, and they heavily weight prestigious publications i.e. Nature, Science, Cell. Many of the top journals are for-profit, so they are optimizing for getting the hot science stories first for readership (a la CRISPR), rather than reproducibility or commercialization. In addition the NIH is in reality, quite risk averse, and skews towards funding already established investigators that are proposing incremental de-risked science. We often put famous investigators on our grant because we knew it would increase our chances of getting grants. In my old lab (one of the most highly funded in California), our PI (boss) would actually get grants for work he had already done and in reality use the grant for other new work, which speaks to how risk averse the grant system is.”