How not to fix science

ovid did science a big favor by proving unequivocally that science needs reform. Jay B and RFK Jr are good starts, but both are receiving strong pushback from the establishment. People who rose to the top in a corrupt system will do anything to resist any change. But science is approaching a critical point.

China has passed us in some aspects and is poised to take over entirely. This would be a disaster. Western scientists will be forced to learn Chinese to stay current. Publication will shift to the Far East, with nationalistic editors requiring perfect Mandarin typeset in PRC characters to make publication as difficult as possible. Science in the USA will become more parochial and the big breakthroughs will happen elsewhere.

We’d suffer economically as well. New technology coming mostly from overseas would mean our engineers would fall further and further behind. Our doctors would be relying on old information.

Some propose turning science into an incubator program like the one some investors use for scouting talent in industry. Picking the most promising projects on the basis of ‘young talent’ has already been tried by Hughes and it has mostly failed, partly because in the absence of credentials the only remaining criteria are social: what sex or ethnicity is the researcher, how enthusiastic they are, and how much charisma they can generate.

The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the reality of working in that hellhole called academia. I’ve worked there, as well as in government and private industry-affiliated institutions. Academia was by far the most corrupt. Treating it like a startup in need of seed money will not solve its problems.

Reform is needed in at least 3 areas: Equipment, Funding and program announcements, and Incentive structure.

Equipment

Science advances when somebody invents new equipment that allows scientists to measure new things. DNA technology was a backwater until PCR, automatic DNA sequencers and DNA synthe­siz­ers became available. But most of the activity in the cell is done by proteins and peptides. For that, all we have are UHPLC, which needs two orders of magnitude improvement to become useful; mass spectrometry, which is an absolute bear to work with in biology; and antibodies.

I’ll spare you the gory details of what we had to do to measure anionic lipids like eicosapentaenoic acid by LCMS. As for proteins and peptides, the technology is way too expensive, too unreliable, and not powerful enough.

Grant review sessions are now done like Zoom meetings, using special software that automatically hangs every few minutes. A typical Zoom session has three or more pages of participants, so it’s hard to tell who’s talking. No more meetings in Hawaii like in the old days—you do it in your bedroom wearing slippers. (Note: not an actual grant screenshot, they are prohibited. In a real Zoom screen, 1/3 the participants have an exotic fake background, 1/3 are out of the frame, and 1/3 are too dark to see)

The biggest problem is our inability to measure and easily identify anything besides DNA. Antibodies are hope­less­ly unreliable: journals won’t accept ELISA results, and Western blots are routinely accused of being falsified because certain laymen think they know how to analyze scientific images. So a major part of molecular biology remains stagnant. New technology is desperately needed, but NIH won’t fund it and scientists won’t invent it without funding.

Recommendation: Create a new institute dedicated to funding research on new technologies, and not just new DNA/RNA GWAS (genome-wide association study) techniques.

Funding and program announcements

I mention GWAS because NIH recently had a PA (Program Announcement) in my field asking for somebody to take GWAS results done by somebody else and test whether any of them had anything to do with Alzheimer’s disease.

A PA is a document specifying topics and techniques you are required to use to get funded. You must say you will do whatever it says or NIH tosses it. This GWAS one is typical. Often they have a long list of candidates we’re allowed to study. People go over the list; if they happen to have data on one of them, they’ll work it up into a grant. If they have data on something close, they’ll fudge and pretend it’s the same. If funded, they’ll use the money for something unrelated. This is SOP in academic science: get funded for what you already did, and use the money for something else.

Try that with a DoD grant, which is more like a binding contract, and you could end up in a bad place.

Many of the PAs were requests to generate evidence of systemic racism in the treatment of patients, sex discrimination in diagnosis, and other unscientific stuff.

In the end, I gave up on NIH altogether and got my funding from the DoD. Yes, the Department of Dropping Bombs on Things was more interested in finding the cause of Alzheimer’s than the nation’s premier health institute. In some fields, NIH dropped most basic research years ago and mostly funds drug trials based on random wild guesses. None of the drugs ever worked. That is a disgrace.

Recommendation: The PAs are written mostly by ex-scientists who are influenced by snazzy and usually-wrong articles in Nature. Eliminate this practice and have one single PA for each Institute. For instance, the PA for NIAID it would be one sentence long: find a cure for some infectious disease. Period. Scientists, not bureaucrats, are best suited to deciding the best path for science.

Incentive structure

Everybody knows that a scientist’s career depends on the number of papers he writes. This is because counting is the only thing academic bureaucrats, who are all bean-counters at heart, know how to do. But thanks to decades of being allowed to tack 55–60% extra onto every grant, they have grown powerful. They used that money to put new carpet in their office and terrorize us.

Example: when I was planning to leave one university, some bureaucrat in some office I never heard of sent me a nasty email demanding that I dispose of all my existing chemicals at once. If I didn’t, he said he would do this, that, and the other thing to damage my career. But I had already disposed of everything three weeks earlier. This bureaucrat could have easily checked that fact with his fellow bureaucrat, but instead just wanted to be tyrannical.

They would do things like this all the time. Most of the academics knew the bureaucrats could destroy their career on a whim and that they invented rules that let them do whatever they wanted.

Recommendation: Remove science from universities altogether. These bureaucrats will do or say anything to protect their power and money. The universities are not salvageable as long as the bureaucrats are in power. Academics will pretend to support them because they’re driven by fear. The solution is to invent a new type of institution dedicated to making discoveries rather than perpetuating a corrupt bureaucracy.

Einstein, by the way, did his great work at home in his living room, not at a university. He was unable to find an academic position until after he got his theories published. He’d find that even harder today, given the journal page charges and barriers against nonacademics even on sites like ArXiv. So if Einstein is the example, the solution again is to eliminate the universities from the equation altogether.

What not to do

It’s also sometimes said that young scientists are more creative. One common example is Einstein’s discovery of relativity at 26. It’s perpetuating the myth I see everywhere: older people are unable to think up any new ideas, their brains are deteriorating, poor dears, so let’s put them out to pasture and let the kids have a chance.

Sounds like a party! Unless you’ve seen the ideas that the kids come up with. One kid, who was obviously smart, came up with his own theory for Alzheimer’s disease. A did this to B, then B did something to C, and on and on up to M with pure raw speculation that had zero chance of being correct. Even our senior postdoc started smiling.

Part of this of course is the latest fad of people seeking out ways of dividing us. The boomers can’t understand modern technology! Gen-Zers are all lazy! None of that is true; it’s all politics designed to create intergenerational envy and hate.

Low productivity results from senior level people being forced to spend 50% of their time writing and reviewing papers and grants, 50% of their time teaching, and 25% of their time attending useless meetings, which the schools call ‘service’. Even an academic bureaucrat could calculate that this means less than zero time for the experienced, knowledgeable ones to do hands-on research, which is the only way to know what will and what will not work in the real world.

Example: A postdoc in my lab made a potentially exciting discovery. Unfortunately, because of the limitations of current technology, it would have taken over a year to prove it. The school bureau­crats were demanding 2 or 3 papers per year in addition to grants, each of which would be full time effort. We could either write the grants or make the discovery. We chose the grants and abandoned the discovery. Universities can either let scientists do research or make them write grants and papers. You can’t have both.

Most of that work is already being done by young people anyway. Their enthusiasm is not yet blunted by the bitter fact that most ideas that pop into one’s head, regardless of your age, are garbage. Maybe other fields are different, but in biology the young people can’t devise a viable research topic on their own. They need to be mentored, which means a senior researcher gives them a list of possible projects. Only a senior person knows the tricks that are never published and what to say and what not to say in a grant. Without mentoring, they flounder and often do experiments that make no scientific sense.

Putting smart kids in their own lab sounds like a great idea until you see what they do to the standard 50 μm i.d. nano LC tubing and the 600 dollar EUV lamps. It actually hurts to see them getting excited about a measurement you know they did incorrectly. It takes a decade to learn all the tricks they don’t teach you in grad school and another decade to learn all of Nature’s ways of deceiving you. We need both young enthusiastic people and old wise ones to mentor them.

Pushing the boomers off a cliff and taking their stuff, as some want to do, would be a disaster for the younger researchers—especially as they would have to look forward to being pushed themselves someday.

The idea is this, from SGOTI:

We should accept a higher risk of flubs, blind alleys, and dead ends in exchange for a better shot at major breakthroughs.

We have more dead ends and blind alleys than we can handle already. What we really need is the freedom to say that they are dead ends and blind alleys without being blacklisted by NIH or grant reviewers.

This guy also recommends a “renegade scientist” grant program to reward risky research. There seems not to be an awareness that this is what the R21 (“Exploratory / Developmental”) grant was for. It failed because grant reviewers kept hammering on it until it became a program for small, safe projects for beginners.

Renegade scientists are not the ones who pick outlandish ideas like studying ESP or some novel way of curing cancer. In academia, renegade scientists are the ones who write grants saying they plan to test a hypothesis after they had already published papers showing it to be false, and not mentioning that in the grant. They're the ones who make some spectacular claim, knowing it’s wrong, and then suddenly drop the whole project after they get tenure. They’re the ones who pick some random molecule like cholesterol and claim that it’s the sole cause of cardiovascular disease—and then ruthlessly stomp on any project that conflicts.

What we really don’t need is to hire people because they’re young and have charisma and entrepreneurial spirit and because it worked for Isaac Newton because he had an apple fall on his head at age 24. If you find a scientist, young or old, with oleaginous, car-salesman-level charisma, you’ve found a sociopath at best and a fraud at worst. Good scientists are always cynical and skeptical. They doubt everything. Even in academia there are a few good ones, but as in industry many only care about accumulating power because that’s how they got to where they are.

I know many government bureaucrats personally. Most have somehow managed to stay sane, and unlike academic ones most of them started out as fundament­ally nice, smart people. But what we really need is for both of them to stop telling us how to do our jobs.

Or we could just close our eyes, listen to the establishment magazines that tell us sex is a continuum, Covid came from space monkeys (or whatever species Nature finally settled on), and things are only bad because the bad Republicans are trying to destroy our health care system, and sit back and wait for the whole thing to collapse. You weren’t counting on somebody curing your grandma’s disease, I hope.

mar 28 2026, 10:26 am. minor updates mar 29 and mar 30 2026 Original version