Science Funding - It's A Miracle How We Got So Much Knowledge!

I knew there was an issue but Stuart Buck's insightful post is scary to say the least! 

I would like to add this is not just a government problem but it is an issue with private funding too. 

Science funding agencies feel political pressure to fund only research that is easy to explain and defend to lay members of the public and to Members of Congress, the vast majority of whom are not trained as scientists. And the kind of research that tends to be easier to politically defend involves incremental projects that follow a well-worn path and whose payoffs are certain and immediate.

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Unconventional, provocative, or even seemingly-irrelevant ideas often spark the biggest scientific breakthroughs, precisely for the same reasons that they are overlooked by cautious grantmakers: they're breaking new ground, often in serendipitous and unpredictable ways or in ways that are actively opposed by the existing scientific establishment at the time.

Congress and the public should embrace this fact about the source of scientific breakthrouths, and should give science funders more political leeway to take more risks and fund outside-the-box ideas to truly capitalize on American ingenuity.

That said, we have to deal with a central problem: even with the benefit of hindsight, there are probably too many cases where science funders passed over scientific work that should have been funded.

Consider the following examples:  

• Douglas Prasher’s work on cloning the gene for fluorescent protein was an essential contribution to Nobel-prize winning work. But as he told NPR in 2008, he couldn’t get NIH funding, and after a series of other jobs, he ended up driving a courtesy car for a car dealership in Alabama.
• Katalin Kariko’s early work on mRNA was a key contributor to multiple Covid vaccines. But she got demoted at the University of Pennsylvania because she couldn’t get NIH funding.
• Robert Langer at MIT got rejected on his first nine grant proposals, and even when he secured a position at MIT, he was rejected by the NIH many more times for grants related to biodegradable polymers.
• A recent story in Science: “In 2017, three leading vaccine researchers submitted a grant application with an ambitious goal,” but NIAID reviewers turned it down, because “the significance for developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine may not be high.”
• The same month that Ardem Patapoutian won the Nobel Prize in physiology, he tweeted, “I received another disappointing un-fundable score for my @NIH grant today.”
• The team that discovered how to manufacture human insulin applied for an NIH grant for an early stage of their work. The rejection notice said that the project looked “extremely complex and time-consuming,” and “appears as an academic exercise.”

This is a sad state of affairs but it's only a reflection of public interests and quest of knowledge. 

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

- Seneca