Peter Lawrence on What's Wrong with Science

 
Peter Lawrence is a Professor at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK. He has worked on various aspects of fruit fly development for almost 40 years. Readers may know him as one of the authors of Wolpert's Principles of Development or as the author of The Making of a Fly.

Peter is a very smart guy. He thinks a lot about the "big picture" and not just the minutiae of day-to-day work in a competitive environment. That's why his article in this month's issue of Current Biology is worth reading. Lawrence writes about what's wrong with modern science [The Mismeasure of Science].

For most scientists, there won't be any revelations in the article but it's put together well and covers all the bases. The main point is that today's scientists have to worry far too much about "productivity" in order to get funded. The system is geared towards artificial measurements of research success that may, or may not, reward creativity and innovation.

Modern science, particularly biomedicine, is being damaged by attempts to measure the quantity and quality of research. Scientists are ranked according to these measures, a ranking that impacts on funding of grants, competition for posts and promotion. The measures seemed, at first rather harmless, but, like cuckoos in a nest, they have grown into monsters that threaten science itself. Already, they have produced an “audit society” [2] in which scientists aim, and indeed are forced, to put meeting the measures above trying to understand nature and disease.

The journals are evaluated according to impact factors, and scientists and departments assessed according to the impact factors of the journals they publish in. Consequently, over the last twenty years a scientist's primary aim has been downgraded from doing science to producing papers and contriving to get them into the “best” journals they can [3]. Now there is a new trend: the idea is to rank scientists by the numbers of citations their papers receive. Consequently, I predict that citation-fishing and citation-bartering will become major pursuits.

You need to read the full article to get all the details.

So, what can we do about it? It's an old complaint, one that's been openly discussed even since I first met Peter Lawrence back in the mid-1970's. If a bunch of (relatively) smart scientists can't figure out how to fix the problem then maybe it's unfixable.

Here's where I think Lawrence drops the ball. He proposes the same tired old "remedies" that we've never adopted in the past in spite of the fact that we all pay lip service to their benefits. He wants us all to pay attention to "quality" and "originality" over quantity. He wants us to be more careful about putting authors names on a paper. He wants a code of ethics for scientists. He wants to reform the peer review process in the leading journals. None of this is going to happen as long as money is tight and the granting agencies have to come up with defensible policies for turning down 75% of grant applications.

The short term solution is to put more money into the grant system and to stop hiring more scientists. The long term solution is to look for better ways of funding. I like the idea of giving large block grants to departments and letting the researchers divide it up as they see fit. This would have worked well in any department I've been in but I hear horror stories about other departments.

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[Photo Credit: The photograph of Peter Lawrence is from his website at the University of Cambridge (Peter A. Lawrence]

Lawrence, P.A. (2007) The mismeasurement of science. Current Biology 17:R583-R585.