SCOYENTIVE INSTITUTIONS are booming. No quantity of diplomacy or charity can interpret the modern moment as something other than an attempt to destroy the foundations of the modern scientific machine. Especially, dismissal to the centers for disease control and prevention (some of which were overturnedPerhaps temporarily, this week) are those who probably have the greatest immediate impact. We can no longer count on scientific interventions for threats of infectious disease. And if the wider changes proposed by the presidential decrees summarize in court, we, scientists, should say goodbye and make our peace with the old models. Funding will no longer exist in the amounts it has made. The scientific labor force will shrink. We should no longer operate by assuming that everyone believes us. We have to adapt or die.
What are we doing? There is nothing new to say that has not been said in other political calamities: despair only serves our masters. Arc of the moral universeand other aesthetic (and often bad) shots. And the naive optimism of many scientists – that he can’t Empire well, because yesterday it was good – is just as helpless. Nobody gets out of the sky to give you your subsidy. Your quotation wallet will not survive this market crash. Your identification information means nothing. Everything will change.
In response, we must quickly adopt a model for reducing misdeeds, where we use our ingenuity – motivated by the same mental muscle as we use in our science – to build a different profession which is always capable of defending and practicing science.
First, the slimming of resources would increase the workload on the survival scientific workforce. There would be much less administrative support, and because money would be more difficult to find, everyone will have to deploy more efforts to perform daily tasks. There would be Fewer junior scientists Training (or for some, exploiting), in particular foreigners, who are an important and underestimated part of this workforce. For example, as a former experimental virologist who has become a computer biologist, I may have to perform an experience with my own hands, rather than counting on one of my often younger and more cautious trainees. The direct consequences are clear: we will produce less data and make fewer discoveries.
We must quickly adopt a model for reducing misdeeds, where we use our ingenuity – motivated by the same mental muscle as we use in our science – to build a different profession.
But as bad as this result is, the indirect effects could be worse. As long as I am in the profession, science has led a series of strange cultural practices that are based on unpaid work. The one in my and many others ” reticle is the relationship between professional science and a peer examination process which is the jury and the judge of precious products. Ask any publisher in a newspaper: finding revisers to assess manuscripts is akin to staging. This problem will become a thousand times worse. No one will have time to read your work, restart your computer or pore scripts on your methods. There have never been great incentives to do so in the first place (the service to the large scientific community has always been part of our promotion files), and now this is not worth our efforts at all, because we are all striving to drive out the same shrinking basin of available funding, in the name of reaching professional benchmarks that take place in a world that no longer exists.
To fight against this, the leadership of each scientific institution must immediately do what it should have done decades ago: encourage service to scientific enterprise to a proportional degree of classic productivity measures such as publications and subsidies. What does it mean and how would it work?
Our new scientific celebrities should be those that facilitate the sharing of open data, work for information democratization, provide comments to colleagues and develop new publication models. As Data sets disappearpublic standards such as Genbank can no longer be taken for granted. And if there is less funding for publications, we will need innovative measures to ensure that scientific resources are available.
Currently, scientists who do these things live in a world where their efforts come from good will, often defying what a scientist is encouraged to do: accumulate the attention of powerful peers, find warm bodies to do work and bring money. Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects the participation of those who devote their efforts to support the work of others and to innovate on the way science is done. If this Titanic flows, they will be our rescue canoe.
Likewise, scientific results will be more examined than ever. And therefore along reproducibility The crisis will become at the forefront, and the concerns about their reinforcement will probably be armed as a justification for the continuation of the subversion of science. In light of this, we must enter an era of assessment of complete data in fundamental science, where we use our statistical talents to strengthen the results which are already in circulation, so that we can defend our conclusions more confident. Fortunately, there are models in place to meet this challenge. THE Systematic review and meta-analysisPopular in health sciences, must be raised in stature and become one of the standard products in all sciences.
At that time, we should vigorously defend even the most basic hypotheses in our field: the size of the effects of clinical interventions, diagnostic criteria for certain diseases and predictions for the effect of climate change. If you thought the creationists debate and flat earth was bad, I wouldn’t be surprised if even gravity is debating. And although the data alone will not stop this defamation campaign, we should be prepared with our most rigorous defenses of everything.
In this new normal, funding is another area that will require reimagination. In the old system, professional advancement was often linked to fundraising. Ask a junior biomedical scientist, and they will tell you about the advice they have been given in search of promotion: to have an active federal subsidy at the time of evaluation. This could have been presumptuous in a system with abundant funding, where effort alone was supposed to be sufficient to obtain subsidies. (In my opinion, it has never been true.) But in the new world, this advice clearly becomes stupid: there will not be enough to go around. And therefore the model of science of the Empire – in which the eminence of a researcher is linked to the accumulation of talents which produce in our name – will become less lucrative.
The reason why we prompted extractive practice is that it was financially lucrative for the places where we work. (The debate on the question of whether it is good or bad is for a Different forum.) Universities earn money on our subsidies from the National Institutes of Health, and not because we explain how vaccines operate on members of a Baptist Church or other non-scientific populations. But these people who pay for our research naturally raised their shoulders when the government moved fire A large fraction of scientific workforce. Scientists must rethink the targets of our scientific expertise and take up the intimidating challenge to fill the gap between science and society. Changes here must be made immediately.
Science cannot survive in a system that actively selects the participation of those who devote their efforts to support the work of others and to innovate on the way science is done.
Why didn’t the public evisation of science cause immediate political reaction? The authors of the slaughter have correctly recognized that the public has no idea of the functioning of science and has no connection with scientists who are not on television. Note that the game of blame is not relevant here: I am not saying that it is the fault of scientists. We do the work we have been trained to do, continuing the prices that our mentors have taught us to continue. In our new world, the expert who carefully engages scientific journalists and translates the results of our less educated parents will be just as precious as that which generates cargo data on the back of a dozen overworked graduate students. This communicative aspect, now embodied in the scientific communication The movement must become a formal technical border of the scientific enterprise, and not summarized with condescension as “awareness” or “activism”.
We do not mentor if we complain that some of these activities are not those for which we have been trained. We have spent our lives mastering the methods that allow us to discover the mysteries of the natural world. My only reply is that such pearl of pearls can reveal that some of us were not scientists in the first place. Because the most true test of scientific minds is agility; The ability to rotate on one penny. With impressive efficiency, we have built atomic bombs, cyclotrons and mRNA vaccines. We have sequenced the genomes of thousands species.
The good news is that what is necessary to reduce damage was not based on the development of the supply chain for a rare enzyme or the security of dollars of taxpayers for a new space station. The bad news is that it involves doing something that is just as ambitious: rethinking the very basics of what the work of a scientist is, why we do our job and what it means to do them well.