Why take risks in science and who should pay for the work of scientists and their failures, says Marina Lipetskaya, Director of the North-West Center for Strategic Research Foundation
Interdisciplinary locomotive
The main races of the last century are space exploration and the nuclear project. Thanks to them, today we use satellite communications, treat cancer with radiation therapy, and much, much more. Although now it seems that the peak of scientific and technological progress has been passed, and emerging new technologies are an improvement on what is already known, in fact this is not so. Currently, scientists are trying to solve at least one of the ambitious tasks for humanity:
- Unraveling the mysteries of the human brain, and in the future, consciousness. Without them, the emergence of a strong artificial intelligence, the very one that science fiction writers describe, is impossible.
- Reproduction of life. This super-task, according to the foresight report of the North-West Center for Strategic Research, gave impetus to the development of synthetic biology. Its technologies, for example, depend on the emergence of drugs that are delivered exactly to the target, the ability to grow organs for transplantation, the emergence of biofuels, and even the ability to synthesize products, as the heroes of Star Trek did in the replicator.
- Improving the quality of life of the population in the context of global problems. These include: a pandemic of new infections, the emergence of superbugs, against which all existing antibiotics are powerless, the consequences of climate change. Modern chemistry develops around these solutions.
The solution of the listed supertasks is impossible only within the framework of one specific direction. It is necessary to combine two, three or more different disciplines – mathematics, chemistry, computer science, biology, artificial intelligence and others. In science, this approach is increasingly called inter- or interdisciplinary. It is at the intersection of different areas that the future and the most breakthrough scientific discoveries are located.
The emergence of applied technologies is impossible without fundamental research, otherwise all the works of scientists will only be an improvement on what is already known. But the contribution and significance of such research is visible in retrospect. At the moment, some discoveries seem fantastic, and the scope is so non-obvious that tens, and sometimes hundreds of years pass before specific products appear. For example, in order for us to use an MRI machine today, it took the discovery of the principle of nuclear magnetic resonance in 1938 and another half century for the development of related technologies.
Guarantee trap
Science requires significant investments, and although the front of research tasks today is huge, resources are limited. To solve the problem of efficient and fair distribution of funds, the system of grants is used all over the world. They are usually issued for two to three years, with an annual project review by a commission deciding what the next round of funding will be and whether it will be.
In our country, the state remains the main source of funding – it accounts for 67,8% of all funds allocated for R&D, and this share continues to grow. In other countries, on the contrary, business occupies a comparable share – in the USA it accounts for 66,3% of spending on science, in Germany – 64,5%, in China – 77,5%, in Japan – 78,3%.
When choosing which project to allocate taxpayer money, the fund distributing public funds looks not only at the idea, but also at the already existing successes of the team. For example, the presence of publications in journals included in special databases – Scopus and Web of Science. It is impossible to publish in them all in a row, since the articles must pass a mandatory review. For example, in one of the funds there is a requirement that the leader on the subject of the planned research has at least 10 such articles. They also look at the presence of awards and prizes, experience in leadership and participation in other projects. In fact, the foundation is trying to find the best performer.
But what if the scientist decided to move to another field? All his life he was a physicist, and a promising project for which he is looking for funding is in the field of chemistry. Whether the project will receive funding in this case is a big question. There will only be more such examples over time. Young researchers, who do not yet have regalia, but only ideas, often find themselves outside the main stream of grants.
With reports, too, not everything is so simple. The main and main result of the work of a scientist is, again, scientific articles that are accountable for funding. Fueling the fire is the scientific journals themselves, whose editors ignore studies with negative results. When choosing, preference is given to bright results, the discovery of something new. But in science, you don’t know for sure what you will get in the end, you can only build hypotheses. It happens that research is at a stage where one failure after another follows. Does this mean that the scientist has ceased to be effective, and the work is no longer promising? Hardly. Science develops not only on achievements, but also on understanding which directions lead to a dead end. However, the scientist received funding, and must report success – otherwise not provided. Otherwise, the question arises of the appropriateness of expenses and the risks of obtaining funding in the future. Therefore, in new areas and research projects, traditional scientific KPIs are poorly applicable.
Assessment of prospects
In an effort to make science economically profitable, investors – the state and business – give preference to scientists and scientific schools that have already proven themselves. After all, the investment has to pay off. Scientific ideas that have not yet been developed, or ideas that at first glance look frivolous or unrealistic, seem to be outside the perimeter of their interests.
It is unlikely that anyone would agree to fund research on windshield squashing insects today. But this is a real study from 1997, the findings of which 10 years later will be important for the safety of unmanned vehicles, and Ford will order its author, Mark Hostetler, a special device for testing cars.
Big science, which today is financed by the state and in which it stakes, is impossible without the support of science driven by curiosity. In the world, this format is also called Blue Sky Research. These studies do not follow a momentary agenda, but are guided by frontier directions in the development of science, the application of which in the future of several years or even decades may not be obvious.
Thanks to such support, for example, today we have a new technique for DNA sequencing. Now it takes one day instead of 10 years and costs about $1 instead of hundreds of millions. This gives patients the opportunity to receive a personalized approach to the treatment and prognosis of diseases. It all started with the fact that young scientists from Cambridge – Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman – in the late 1990s “wanted to find some fascinating subject for research.”
New heroes
The emergence of breakthrough ideas cannot be solved by increasing funding alone – new names must appear in science. The total number of researchers in the Russian Federation directly involved in R&D, according to the HSE Institute for Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge in 2021, is slightly more than half a million people – 662,7 thousand people, which is 2020% less than in 2,4, and according to the results of 2012 compared with 8,8 – by XNUMX%.
Universities play their role in the emergence of new scientists. Over the past couple of years, leading universities – MIPT, ITMO, MISIS and others – have begun to initiate support measures at the earliest stages for their young researchers – undergraduates and graduate students. Someone is introducing a system of one-time microgrants, someone is doing an open call, inviting students from other universities to participate. In any case, higher education institutions are trying to solve the problems of early funding for scientific projects that will never be supported by large foundations and businesses. But the problem of scale remains at the country level. Universities finance such grants from their own sources, so they can cover from hundreds to several thousand students, while there are about 4 million of them studying in the country.
Businesses, individuals and various non-profit foundations are ready to invest in high-risk developments when it comes not to science, but to a specific business idea and future product. When it comes to science and support for young researchers, foundations are mainly engaged in creating educational programs and supporting promising personnel through scholarship programs, as is done, for example, by the Sistema Charitable Foundation within the framework of the Lift to the Future – Science program or the Vladimir Potanin Foundation.
But only a few are engaged in supporting risky scientific projects. For example, the Fund for Support of Innovations and Youth Initiatives of St. Petersburg. In 2022, they launched an experimental competition for young researchers with new scientific ideas at the intersection of chemistry, biology and AI – Blue Sky Research. Reporting has been rethought here, and researchers are asked not so much for articles as for understanding that the project is moving, perhaps even towards a negative result. But their scale is still small – 30 finalists from 5 regions of the country. For the systemic development of high-risk research, funds and the state must support thousands of scientific projects in all regions.
Risky investments in new scientific teams and bold informal projects provide an opportunity to discover previously unknown names in science. Now it is very difficult for novice researchers or scientists who are changing their field and therefore do not yet have an impressive scientific background to get a grant. They have nothing to show in the summary, although the scientific idea may be promising. Therefore, an intermediate link is required – new players and mechanisms that would support high-risk ideas of scientists with criteria for evaluating results that are not typical for science. When scientists have a legitimate right to make a mistake and a zero result, scientific progress will gain new momentum.