Two trends

The NIH internal review of how it gives grants out is out: among the key ideas: funding paradigm breaking research, funding more first-time investigators and telling people honestly when they have no chance ever of succeeding (on the basis of their scientific creativity or lack thereof).

Additionally, there’s the notion of how funding small science is changing–imagine a future where big science (think National Labs and huge well-established research teams) create the data sets which are then mined by small-scale individual PI’s using computational tools.

Jim

Scientific writing

One of my students commented today in class on how hackneyed and boring scientific writing is (passive tense and all). I retorted that one might say the same thing about java code or C++, but we don’t because it’s understood that the rules and syntax are required to get the source code to compile. In fact source code that is considered aesthetically pleasing or beautiful gets its qualities, not from its “beauty of language” but rather from its clarity (documentation) and the underlying originality of the pseudo-code.

In the same way, scientific writing gets its beauty from an ability to convey scientific information (lit review, methods, results, discussion) in a clear fashion. The writing itself is not where the originality is. Rather, like iceberg lettuce (which is only a carrier for creamy salad dressing), scientific language is only a carrier for the underlying scientific expression.

Jim

Losing research dollars to overseas universities

Here’s an interesting piece by Carl Schramm, who is the president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He posits a slow decline in American research universities so that “it may be unwise, therefore, for regions to rely on universities as primary engines of growth and innovation. But local governments might pursue a strategy of urging universities to pool their commercialization efforts.”

The reason for the decline?

Money quote:

The likeliest reason for this worrisome trend is that many companies are tired of haggling over intellectual property rights—and in a world of globalized R&D, they no longer have to. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Baker Hughes, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Microsoft, to name just a few major firms on a growing list, are now shifting research funding to universities in England, India, Russia, and China, where they have access to top scientists and often face fewer intellectual property hurdles.

Memo to University IP operation: please take note.

Jim

Managing the economic cycle

Here in Virginia, the business cycle has turned “south” again….it does this fairly regularly, this time the culprit is the sub-prime mortgage fall-out. In Michigan, this same financial stress, shut down the state government for several hours early this morning. Here in the Commonwealth, Governor Kaine announced a series of cuts and the use of “rainy-day” fund dollars to balance his budget.

For public universities, like Mason, these downturns are always challenging. For an institute for advanced study, where the revenue-side is more sponsored research (as opposed to tuition increases), this puts enormous pressure on the science faculty to succeed in what is clearly already a very tough federal funding environment.

For this reason, private sector gifts and grants are ever more important. As our Advisory Board comes together this month for its regular meeting, I’ll be asking them all to step up their level of support for the Krasnow Institute so that in these budget-cutting times, the science continues unabated.

Jim

Three weeks into the Semester

I’ve been preparing a set of slides for a talk I’m giving on Monday about my vision for my second term as institute director. The process got me thinking about “institutes for advanced studies” in general and the one in Princeton in particular. The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study is someone different from the platonic model in that it’s an integral part of a university. But in other aspects, the model is appropriate, I think.

I also gave a guest lecture yesterday for a grad class on the “state of American science”. It’s something I know a bit about–I’m afraid I was a bit too pessimistic for the cohort of first year students–funding for American science is getting squeezed by non-discretionary funding in the Federal Budget, and that’s a structural problem.

Most enjoyable, I got to sit down with my co-author, Lee Zwanziger, on the neuroethics book project that we’re hatching. I think it’s got great potential and we came up with a structure that I think is going to work.

Jim

Networked Science

Diana Rhoten’s very perceptive piece in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education (on-line) really has it spot on about changes in the way science is being done here.

Money quote:

But Networked Science takes that idea a step further, using cyberinfrastructure to create a virtual hallway in which the doorways — wide enough to accommodate all the scientists who want to pass through — lead to labs and offices containing every discipline under the sun. By providing that space, unachievable in the physical world, being virtual can actually surpass being there.

Jim

Krasnow in 2056: II

My hope is that the Institute will have no more than perhaps 150 scientific staff. That’s just a bit more than twice our current size. The reason is that, at least in my experience, scientific research institutions when they grow larger than that, inevitably gain an intermediate layer of bureaucracy–the dreaded mid-level managers. I’m guessing that 50 years from now, interpersonal interactions between real people will still be crucial to maintaining a productive milieu for doing science. Hence, the current growth path (in terms of staff numbers) will have to slow.

On the other hand, I’m imagining that the scientific productivity of our staff will reach a level qualitatively different from what we do now. Part of that will be due to advances in technology which will allow us to finally ask (and answer) some of the hard questions about human consciousness, and part will be due to a new level of data-sharing between researchers around the world. Krasnow scientists will have access to primary experimental data (and therefore be able to test hypotheses) in an open access manner. My hope is that this data-sharing gives us a much larger bang-for-the research buck.

I am also anticipating that Krasnow scientists will be studying cognition and developing theories of neural and machine computation that are much more unified with the rest of our physical model of the universe around us. It seems to me that new hierarchical levels will be added to the ones we currently study (molecules to brains) that connect us both to the quantum world but also to the galactic scale. Perhaps, we will find new rules that constrain intelligence (or at least our complete understanding of the same). Alternatively, perhaps we will find traces of the emergence of human intelligence in the initial events of The Big Bang. These are some of the mysteries for the future.

Jim

What will Krasnow look like in 2056?: I

Over the next several blogposts I’ll imagine a thriving institute for
advanced study in the year 2056, a half-century from now. I’ll be long
gone of course, but my hope is that the Institute will be a world-center
for research, even more-so than it is today–perhaps with science
spanning the fields of astrobiology, anthropology, brain sciences and
new fields that we don’t even have names for today.

Will we be bigger? I imagine yes, but not by that much. Too many PI’s
and management starts to become unwieldy. But our tendrils will be
everywhere: summer school courses at exotic locations, Krasnow PI
authored books translated into many languages and perhaps intelligent
machines (robots) designed at Krasnow exploring the nether reaches of
the solar system.

This will be an optimistic look ahead: one that assumes we’ve got the
world’s current existential problems well in hand. There will be
problems of course–and Institute scientists will be at the forefront of
solving practical problems, but no apocalypse….call me naive.

So let’s look ahead….

Jim