The research funding singularity
What happens when there are many more researchers than there is money to fund their research?
You’re ten years old. Today is your friend Pat’s tenth birthday party. In a house full of children, full of friends, running, exploring, laughing — enjoying life, the exuberance of carefree play. But you’ve got a niggling feeling in your tummy that won’t go away. “Dread”, you decide. Because you’re precocious and read some Poe last night at bedtime. And because soon it will be time for the birthday cake. And the dividing of the birthday cake into the party bags.
Every year at Pat’s, the same cake. Sure, it’s delicious: chocolate and cream, lovely icing on top. But every year it’s the same size. And every year there are more children. And every year more mummies — like Dan’s mummy or Sarah’s mummy or Ishmael’s mummy — tell their darling children to get as much cake as possible into their party bags, so they can share it out when they get home. So now the cutting of the cake is a screaming nightmare of tantrums and meltdowns, of pushing and shoving, of hair-pulling and scratching. In the chaos, some kids get a bag full of cake and some get none. And in school the next day, and for many days after, no one is talking to anyone else, friendships shaken, bonds weakened, play-time a muted, quiet affair.
Welcome to research funding! Science should be one big, happy party. But we have more scientists than money to support their research: more friends than cake. Fighting over the funding cake is intense, and can only get worse. Worse still, our “mothers” demand it.
A current obsession in science is the extraordinarily leaky pipeline built in to it. For every thousand PhD students we train, only a handful will end up in a permanent job as a research scientist in academia. There are repeated calls to do more, to create more permanent jobs to capture this stream of talent [1]. But in the current academic world this will make things worse — much, much worse — for all researchers.
It is true that the growth in the number of PhD students has vastly outstripped the growth in the number of permanent academic positions. But, and here’s the important part, the number of permanent academic positions has grown, and grown by a lot (see Figure below for the UK’s growth).
What hasn’t grown is the amount of money for funding research. In the UK, for example, government research funding was frozen at £4.7 billion per year from 2010 to 2015, and is now fixed at that value, tracking inflation, until 2020. That’s 10 years with no increase in funding. At all.
The National Institute for Health (NIH) in the USA has been in the same position, frozen for a decade. Worse, the National Science Foundation (NSF) — which funds all basic science in the USA — has been frozen for a decade and already had a tiny amount of money relative to the sheer number of quality researchers it must sustain.
It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that more people and no more money means: less money per person. Or, as we cannot shrink the size of individual grants, what it actually means is: your chances of getting a grant to do your research are shrinkingly rapidly.
Can these chances get close to zero? Yes. And in some cases they already are. The success rate at the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council is so laughably low, at 10%, that one wonders why anyone bothers. The international Human Frontiers in Science Program only assesses 10% of the projects is receives, and funds less than half those. That’s 3.5%.
And that’s of the people who applied. If instead we ask: what proportion of faculty scientists hold at least one project grant right now, large enough to hire one person and all the kit they need? What do you think the answer will be? 20%? Less?
We’re heading towards a funding singularity, the point where an individual researcher’s chances of getting funding are practically zero.
Yet university management are going in the opposite direction. They have “visions” (possibly brought on by mass digestion of hallucinogenics) and “mission statements” centred on increasing their income from research grants. They are using the ability to get grant funding as the basis for defining someone as “research active”.
And what happens when highly regarded researchers are unable to secure “sufficient” research funding, simply because there is not enough money? We already know what happens then: they will be removed from research; bullied by management; or fired.
There are two simple conclusions:
(1) Defining “researcher” by grant income is idiotic.
(2) Researchers in the same field, the same institution, the same building, desperately fighting over the same pot of money cannot, by definition, be working together at their best.
The universities’ response will be: what choice do we have? How can we grow without money? (Leaving aside the small issue that universities are non-profit institutions for the carrying out of research and the education of advanced students by experts, not profit-driven corporations with stockholders to appease). Here are some suggestions for what choice they have:
(1) Many researchers don’t need money to do research. Pretty much all scientific research depends on models and theory, both mathematical and constructed in computers. There are many specialists in this, who can run a whole research program without grant funding, so it would be seem bizarre to pressure these people to get funding. Incidentally, experimentalists can make substantial contributions here too — not least in defining the problem, and defining the answer.
(2) Experts in a field of research can produce valuable research output without money. At a minimum, they can do a valuable job of synthesising the existing research literature, making sense of it for others.
(3) Experts in research can lead research: lead scientific funders, lead journals, lead universities. Researchers setting the research agenda. They don’t need money to guide future science.
(4) Use university money to fund research, not build endless new buildings.
In other words: we don’t need cake to have a great time at a birthday party. A great party is about being with your friends, playing, exploring, coming up with new ideas — sometimes great, sometimes dumb, always exciting.
Ooo, and a bouncy castle — gotta have a bouncy castle. Jumping around all excited, falling over a lot, and tiring yourself out so much you have to have a nap. Or as we call them in science: conferences with an open bar.
(N.B. This isn’t about me. This is not a howl of anguish over rejected grants. I’m fortunate at the moment to have a good slice of cake; Bara Brith, if you’re offering. This is a view of the long game: other, potentially great projects did not get funded because mine did; soon, my projects will not get funded, because other potentially great projects did. Money does not make me more or less of a researcher).
UPDATE 2/10/16: just in case anyone was thinking “surely universities are not that dumb”, this should squash that thought. Cambridge University have just advertised a Lecturer post in Microbial Pathogenesis, that specifically states in the bloody advert the post holder must submit at least 2 grants a year, and bring in a minimum of £100,000 a year over a 5 year period. Idiots.
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[1] There was shock at polls in 2012 showing that 80% of final year PhD students didn’t want to stay in academia. But this is the rational response; it means our PhD students have a realistic view of the world. They take one look at the capricious nature of sustaining research and say “sod that for a game of soldiers”.
