Imagine the impossible: the ability to reform America’s patchwork of science agencies into a single agency that would fund basic, applied, and translational research for academic institutions and teaching hospitals. That same agency would conduct intramural research at all US national labs and the current NIH Bethesda campus. The waterfront would extend from particle physics to cancer to planetary probes. What characteristics would it have in an ideal world?
First, it would have a high tolerance for scientific risk (this is quite different from business risk). So, we would want decision makers to have excellent scientific taste and some mix of advisory counsel from the community on both the quality of the investigator and the proposed work. Notably, there would be no pay line or algorithm against which to use game theoretic approaches. If the review was project-based, the philosophy would be to fund the entire project, not some a la carte menu-picking.
Second, the intramural component would have an explicit mission different from the extramural component: perhaps a higher tolerance for risk or a willingness to fund investigators and trust them to find suitable projects.
Third, we’d want to explicitly encourage and reward the dissemination of negative results and confirmatory studies. Perhaps we’d have a national lab dedicated to this mission alone?
Fourth, we’d want to prime the STEM labor pipeline with evidence-based approaches that explicitly track individuals through their training and into their careers. So think ORCID on steroids, from k-50+, in combination with adjusting to what works based on the data.
Finally, we’d want to vigorously promote science that breaks with groupthink, particularly in biomedical fields where progress has been unsatisfactory. The idea would be to create an ecosystem where progress is not measured in the funerals of senior thought leaders. This would require altering the US academic promotion and tenure architecture because that system currently kills off novel ideas through tenure denial or self-censorship.
Where would this agency live? As an independent agency, I think–one that would merge NASA, NSF, and NIH with DOE’s science operations. Its director would be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. There would be no NSB or PCAST; the National Academies would provide advisory oversight to complement Congress, OMB, and the GAO.
And the budget: it would ideally be provided in multiyear chunks analogous to the way the US procures submarines and aircraft carriers: the goal to provide stability, even at the cost of growth.
Vanevar Bush imagined such an agency in Science the Endless Frontier. Politics created the patchwork we have.
Discoverers and Discoveries 