Why Is Biomedical Research So Conservative? - Issue 37: Currents

How do scientists decide what research to do? One would like to think that they take a suitably scientific approach to this question by thinking about important problems that need to be solved, and asking which of these problems could be solved given the time and money available. But are research projects actually proposed and funded in this way, or are there other forces at work? Particle physicists and astronomers realized decades ago that they needed to take a coordinated approach to planning so that they had accelerators and telescopes to work on. This "big science" approach involved agreeing on the long-term scientific goals in a given field and then getting the relevant funding agencies in different countries on board. This approach has been remarkably successful, as demonstrated by the recent detections of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves.