February 25, 1990 Risky Science by Tom Siegfried Dallas Morning News 02/12/90 Scientific research is often risky. Experiments with poison gas, for example, are not exactly free from danger. But there's another kind of risky science that is not at all dangerous in the ordinary sense. It's science fiction on the edge, on the frontier, where the most productive course isn't clear. The risk is in the odds against success. The danger is in the damage that unsuccessful high-risk science can do to a scientific career. On the other hand, the payoff from success in risky science can be great. But there can be no payoff unless somebody is willing to invest in such risky research to begin with. A growing number of scientists have begun to express concern that federal funding agencies are not interested in giving money to scientists who take risks. Funders prefer "safe" science, mainstream research that is all but guaranteeed to deliver some small increment to knowledge in a specific scientific field. Grant proposals that stray too far from well-trodden scientific paths seldom survive. It is the common practice in Western countries - the United States and Great Britain, for example - for scientists seeking funding to send a grant proposal to an appropriate funding agency. The agency seeks judgments on such proposals from scientists who are themselves experts in the field - peers of the people proposing the research. If the peers give a proposal a favorable review, it stands a good chance of getting funded. Of course, bad reviews can scuttle a project. That can be good - nobody wants to wast money on bad research. But sometimes, a good idea can get bad reviews - especially an idea on the frontiers of research where experts disagree on what the next best step should be. Ironically, in the Soviet Union - long known as a country afflicted by a lot of bad research - some innovative, risky projects are more readily funded. At certain research institutes, the institute itself gets research money and its own members decide what staff scientists are allowed to do. Some of the benefits of such an approach were described recently in the journal NATURE by earth scientists George Fisher, Priscilla Grew and Bruce Yardley, following a visit to the Institute of Experimental Mineralogy at Chernogolovka. "The Soviet and Western styles of supporting science are very different," they wrote. "In some respects, the Soviet system is effective and flexible. As the West rethinks its funding practices in this era of serious budget constraints, there are important lessons to be learnt from the Soviet Union." In particular, the funding of institutes instead of individuals has clear advantages. "The Soviet system tolerates some routine work in hopes of nurturing a new and unexpected discovery that will open up a totally new view of a subject," the scientists wrote. "In the West, on the other hand, we are so preoccupied with ensuring that no funds are wasted on unpredictable...research that we often fail to support truly innovative work." At the mineralogy institute, many innovative projects were under way. "We saw several innovative projects that would almost certainly fail to survive the peer-review process in the United States or Britain," the earth scientists reported. "During the 1980's, increased competition for a diminishing budget has meant that proposals need almost unanimous approval from reviewers. In the process of weeding out pedestrian projects, the system eliminates almost all of the really innovative projects, which are often too controversial to generate universal approval. Most proposals that attract funding are those which take just one small step down a path that is currently recognized by the community as 'opportune', 'important' or 'timely.'" They might have added "cheap." Sometimes expense is a critical aspect of evaluating how risky research is. Computer scientist Alison Brown of Ohio State University, for example, points out that the high expense of supercomputer time squeezes out a lot of important "high-risk" research. "That's clearly a big impediment to advances in science, just plain raw power available cheap enough," she said in a recent interview. "The problem is, if you can't get cheap computing at the high end, you stop letting people do risky projects. And it's usually the risky projects that pay off. But when computing is really expensive, it gets rationed very carefully, and since it gets rationed by peer review....you end up funding mainstream stuff. "So the guys at the edges who are probably the guys that are going to win the Nobel Prizes and make the breakthroughs, they just don't get it. You can no longer afford adventure, and that's a real bad thing in science." Of course, not all risky science is good science, nor does all of it pay off in revolutionary discoveries. In fact, most risky science goes nowhere. But well traveled roads rarely lead anyplace new, either.