Should scientists and funders de-emphasize the “impact” criterion for research grants?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2530
National Science Foundation proposal instructions require summary claims not only about intellectual merit but about ‘broader impacts,’ defined as the potential ‘to benefit society’ and help achieve ‘specific, desired societal outcomes.’ This year in Science magazine, two distinguished biomedical research leaders have called for fundamentally rethinking the National Institutes of Health’s similar requirement. Almost no one in the scientific or general press has noticed.
Some press discussion this year has focused on the general question of forecasting practical, profitable applicability in research outcomes. The national media began to notice the Golden Goose Award, established to defend curiosity-driven science even when a research project’s title sounds trivial to a politician or pundit. A Wall Street Journal opinion-page discussion began when an op-ed charged that in some cases NSF and NIH ‘have shown themselves to be incapable of consistently discerning good science from bad.’ The WSJ headlined a collection of ensuing letters ‘It’s easy to mock research, but hard to predict success.’ One letter rebuked the op-ed’s author: ‘It is not that we fund stupid research. In many fields we have no way beforehand to know reliably what research is important.’
But even that sort of technocivic discussion presumes that any research project’s outcome should lead, directly or close to directly, to practical applicability—whether or not the project sounds arcane, and even if other scientists see it as a valid effort to expand human knowledge.
Huda Zoghbi and Marc Kirschner don’t buy that presumption. They urge science’s stakeholders to reexamine it.
For Zoghbi’s 18 January commentary , Science identified her as ‘an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; professor of Pediatrics, Molecular and Human Genetics, and Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine; and director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.’ She argued that ‘translation of scientific discoveries into effective treatments’ has often been much slower than expected because of ‘the complexity of human physiology, and our limited understanding of how the vast majority of genes, proteins, and RNAs work,’ whether or not they are disease-associated. She continued:
Traditionally, such fundamental knowledge has come from untargeted, discovery-driven basic research. In recent years, however, the pressure to develop treatments at an ever more rapid pace has attenuated enthusiasm for deciphering the language of life. Science, like most human endeavors, is susceptible to fads and fashions driven by money and status; and today many highly qualified basic scientists feel compelled to jump on the ‘translational medicine’ bandwagon. For quite some time, it has been apparent that biomedical research in the United States is more likely to get funded if it is tied to a practical outcome, such as a step toward a cure for some disorder. There is no doubt that such targeted and in-depth disease-oriented research is sorely needed. But it is at least as important to support investigators dedicated to discovery-driven basic research.
Specific outcomes from discovery-driven research are hard to predict, but they often surprise and delight us with their applicability in unexpected contexts. Who, for example, would have predicted that an apparently trivial notched-wing phenotype in the fruit fly would yield a gene that is important for so many developmental processes in humans and so many ills, ranging from cancer to stroke? Or that trying to trace how the brain develops the capacity for proprioception would suggest a potential therapy for deafness? When basic research is made to seem silly in public discourse, and when its usefulness is questioned during key points in federal budget cycles, scientists should not yield to the bullying. We should instead educate the public about how scientific knowledge actually grows. Not everything worthwhile can be justified by its market value; what is most meaningful may have no apparent practical impact. Yet we can be sure that human imagination will find applications for knowledge, if we are allowed to develop that knowledge in the first place.
Without first developing a generally ‘rich lexicon’ for the language of all of life, she declares, scientists are little different from a translator with a first-grader’s vocabulary trying to convey the the sophistication and depth of Shakespeare.
In the 14 June Science commentary ‘A perverted view of ‘impact,’' Kirschner—identified as the John Franklin Enders University Professor and chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School—offered closely similar arguments. He warned of ‘exaggerated claims of the importance of the predictable outcomes—which are unlikely to be the most important ones.’ He added, ‘This is both misleading and dangerous,’ since ‘significant science can only be viewed in the rearview mirror.’
Kirschner’s closing requires verbatim quoting:
What ails science today requires an honest diagnosis. Scientists are failing to live up to the trust society has placed in them. The scientific community must create leadership with the courage and independence to take control of the structure of its training, the peer-reviewing of its journals, the organization of grant review panels, and the overall priorities that are set. There are strong political, economic, and institutional interests that are not shy about asserting themselves. Scientists have to be equally assertive and even more persuasive.
I also believe, along with Huda Zoghbi, that scientists must challenge the assumption that translation, rather than fundamental understanding, is the choke point of progress in the application of science to societal problems. They should work hard to encourage risk and exploration, while at the same time rewarding careful, thoughtful investigation. And they should reemphasize humility, banishing the words ‘impact’ and ‘significance’ and seeing them for what they really are: ways of asserting bias without being forced to defend it.
Judging by a Google search on 8 August, Zoghbi has been mainly ignored except by Kirschner, and Kirschner has been mainly ignored except by a few online postings, a Boston Globe article , and a Facebook entry at Physics Today Online.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.