[新闻] “原创三大杀手：同行评议、短期考核、没有时间”再现顶刊论文

杰出教授 Peter 说：

“重复就是力量。重复就是强调。”

“原创三大杀手：同行评议、短期考核、没有时间”基本上算是我的观点，尽管大量的类似观点早就存在。

我是该观点在当代的最主要代表者之一：

“原创三大杀手：同行评议、短期考核、没有时间”。

外语由【机器翻译】成汉语，不知道翻译的对不对。我不是学生物的。惭愧！

图1  Model PI? Leonardo DiCaprio plays astronomer Randall Mindy, with Jennifer Lawrence as his graduate student Kate Dibiasky, in the disaster satire Don’t Look Up.Credit: Bluegrass Films/Entertainment Pictures/Alamy

PI模式？莱昂纳多·迪卡普里奥在灾难讽刺片《不要抬头》中饰演天文学家兰德尔·明迪，詹妮弗·劳伦斯饰演他的研究生凯特·迪比亚斯基。图片来源：蓝草影业/娱乐影业/Alamy

https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-024-02080-7/d41586-024-02080-7_27252842.jpg?as=webp

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02080-7

一、NATURE, 2024-07-24, Science must protect thinking time in a world of instant communication 在即时通讯的世界里，科学必须保护思考时间

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02381-x

Stop, drop and think

   Thinking time — the time needed to concentrate without interruptions has always been central to scholarly work. It is essential to designing experiments, compiling data, assessing results, reviewing literature and, of course, writing. Yet, thinking time is often undervalued; it is rarely, if ever, quantified in employment practices.

停下来想想

   思考时间——不受干扰地集中注意力所需的时间一直是学术工作的核心。它对设计实验、汇编数据、评估结果、审查文献，当然还有写作都至关重要。然而，思考时间往往被低估；在就业实践中，它很少（如果有的话）被量化。

   Is science really getting less disruptive — and does it matter if it is?

   科学真的变得不那么具有破坏性了吗？如果是这样，这有关系吗？

   Is science’s dominant funding model broken?

   科学的主导资助模式是否已经崩溃？

二、NATURE, 2024-06-26, Is science’s dominant fundingmodel broken? 科学的主导资助模式是否已经崩溃？

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02080-7

Creative block

   The team delved into the structure and outputs of academic research. To their horror, the researchers uncovered a system that, in their words, “ends up rewarding administrators and empire-builders, not creative scientists actively engaged in research and mentoring”. They have much more to say in their report, A New National Purpose: Leading the Biotech Revolution (see go.nature.com/3vvnpy5), but this quote demonstrates their shock over how academia is structured and how it operates.

创意街区

   该团队深入研究了学术研究的结构和产出。令他们震惊的是，研究人员发现了一个系统，用他们的话说，“最终奖励的是管理者和帝国缔造者，而不是积极参与研究和指导的创造性科学家”。他们在报告《新的国家目标：引领生物技术革命》（见go.nature.com/3vvnpy5）中有更多要说的，但这句话表明他们对学术界的结构和运作方式感到震惊。

   ‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

   “颠覆性”科学已经衰落，没有人知道原因

三、CELL, 2024-01-04, The innovation menagerie: New institutional structures are expanding horizons for early-stage research 创新动物园：新的制度结构正在扩大早期研究的视野

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867423013272?via%3Dihub

   Firstly, the reliance on project-specific grants creates a “funding problem”: projects need to be aligned with funder priorities, which can be highly restrictive. A recent study found that 78% of scientists would “change their research program a lot” if their funding were unconstrained.

   首先，对特定项目赠款的依赖造成了“资金问题”：项目需要与资助者的优先事项保持一致，这可能具有高度的限制性。最近的一项研究发现，如果资金不受限制，78%的科学家会“大幅改变他们的研究计划”。

3

   This suggests that existing government funders are too risk averse to fund very disruptive ideas. In addition, the reliance on trainees creates a “coordination problem.” Trainees need individual accomplishments to graduate and advance their careers. Thus, it is difficult for academic labs to take on larger projects that require major contributions from more than a few trainees, such as projects requiring coordinated engineering.

3.

   这表明，现有的政府资助者过于规避风险，不愿资助极具破坏性的想法。此外，对培训生的依赖造成了“协调问题”。培训生需要个人成就才能毕业并发展自己的职业生涯。因此，学术实验室很难承担需要少数受训人员做出重大贡献的大型项目，例如需要协调工程的项目。

6

   However, the reliance on competitive grants can disadvantage early-stage researchers, who struggle to compete for such grants,

6.

   然而，对竞争性资助的依赖可能会使早期研究人员处于不利地位，他们很难竞争此类资助，

7

   and recent evidence from European research systems suggests that competitive grants could even be associated with lower research efficiency.

7.

   欧洲研究系统最近的证据表明，竞争性资助甚至可能与较低的研究效率有关。

附录：

2024-01-25, A New National Purpose: Leading the Biotech Revolution, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change 新的国家目标：引领生物技术革命，托尼·布莱尔全球变化研究所

https://www.institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/a-new-national-purpose-leading-the-biotech-revolution#introduction

   The organisation of UK R&D has changed little in 70 years. It is highly dependent on an academic model whereby principal investigators manage and mentor laboratories of temporary trainees. While the UK is fortunate to have some of the world's historically great universities, as well as many with unique specialisations, globally this model of organisation research has come under increasingly serious strain, as the previous New National Purpose reports highlighted.

   The global challenges of this model are increasingly well recognised,[27]Link to footnote and are particularly pressing for biotechnology. There are at least three major and interrelated challenges.

   Hypercompetition: The default academic career path is under strain due to the number of trainees exceeding available positions by much more than an order of magnitude. This has created an increasingly pyramidal career structure[28]Link to footnote in which senior academics use limited grants to fund an ever-increasing number of early-career researchers, despite a scarcity of long-term positions or prospects for career development. This has serious negative impacts on research culture, leading to an increasing exodus of the best up-and-coming talent.[29]Link to footnote

   Poor talent utilisation: As biotech-related science has grown more complex, individual projects can require a combination of skills and methods from areas as diverse as AI, big data, materials science, genetics, virology, robotics and synthetic biology, with resulting growth of group sizes.[30]Link to footnote It is not possible for a single person, or even a small lab, to possess the required expertise in all of the necessary areas.

   AlphaFold’s work in protein-structure prediction, for instance, required a team of individuals with not only cutting-edge machine-learning expertise but also the ability to pair that expertise with a deep understanding of structural biology. Few UK-based organisations and institutions offer training or research positions at the forefront of interdisciplinary work.

   Furthermore, UK academia can often be so focused on studying biology as it is found in nature, rather than the design of new biological systems, that there are few people being trained in how to design and evaluate new biological designs at rapid scale. This can make it unattractive to start and scale a company working on the most novel biotechnologies in the UK, as opposed to in the US where the academic talent pool is more well balanced across the continuum of scientific discovery and technological invention.

   Globally, these changes are motivating the creation of new types of research laboratory and support that differ markedly from conventional academia, a topic that has recently been well explored by Sam Rodriques.[31]Link to footnote The recently announced UK Research Ventures Catalyst is a step in the right direction but is small in scale.[32]Link to footnote

3. Large and atypical labs are increasingly the only ones able to consistently compete internationally: A prominent structural change in biotech-related academia has been the growth of large groups working for a single professor. We could not find clear data on this, but it appears to be particularly prominent in elite US academia, with individual professors having groups of 50 to 100 trainees. There are also now some examples of such labs in UK universities. These large groups allow pooling of resources to bring a critical mass and concentration of diversely skilled talent, which can be especially important in technology-intensive areas of research such as biotech.

   However, such an approach to organising biotech research also fundamentally changes research in a way that cannot be sustainable nor to the collective benefit of science. Such a research environment can become increasingly hierarchical, with a career system to be gamed, incentivising resource acquisition and the exploitation of junior scientists at the expense of pushing the boundaries of human knowledge. It is doubtful, for example, that a professor with almost 100 people in their lab can be meaningfully involved in the mentoring or work underlying the research for which they take credit, collect prizes and hold patents. The system ends up rewarding administrators and empire-builders, not creative scientists actively engaged in research and mentoring. Gone are the days of the early LMB when Fred Sanger did the work for his second Nobel prize with his own hands at the bench.

   70年来，英国的研发组织几乎没有变化。它高度依赖于一种学术模式，即主要研究人员管理和指导临时学员的实验室。尽管英国有幸拥有一些世界上历史上伟大的大学，以及许多具有独特专业的大学，但正如之前的《新国家目标》报告所强调的那样，在全球范围内，这种组织研究模式正面临越来越严重的压力。

   这种模式的全球挑战越来越得到认可，[27]链接到脚注，对生物技术来说尤其紧迫。至少有三个相互关联的主要挑战。

   过度竞争：由于受训人数远远超过可用职位的数量级，默认的学术职业道路正面临压力。这创造了一个日益金字塔形的职业结构[28]链接到脚注，其中高级学者使用有限的资助来资助越来越多的早期职业研究人员，尽管缺乏长期职位或职业发展前景。这对研究文化产生了严重的负面影响，导致最优秀的后起之秀人才越来越多地外流。[29]脚注链接

   人才利用率低：随着生物技术相关科学变得更加复杂，单个项目可能需要来自人工智能、大数据、材料科学、遗传学、病毒学、机器人学和合成生物学等不同领域的技能和方法的结合，从而导致团队规模的增长。[30]链接到脚注一个人，甚至一个小实验室，都不可能在所有必要的领域拥有所需的专业知识。

   例如，AlphaFold在蛋白质结构预测方面的工作需要一个不仅具有尖端机器学习专业知识，而且能够将这些专业知识与对结构生物学的深刻理解相结合的团队。很少有总部位于英国的组织和机构在跨学科工作的前沿提供培训或研究职位。

   此外，英国学术界往往过于专注于研究自然界中的生物学，而不是设计新的生物系统，因此很少有人接受过如何快速设计和评估新生物设计的培训。这可能会使在英国创办和扩大一家从事最新生物技术的公司变得没有吸引力，而在美国，学术人才库在科学发现和技术发明的连续体中更加平衡。

   在全球范围内，这些变化正在推动创建与传统学术界截然不同的新型研究实验室和支持，Sam Rodriques最近对此进行了很好的探索。[31]链接到脚注最近宣布的UK Research Ventures Catalyst是朝着正确方向迈出的一步，但规模较小。[32]脚注链接

3.大型和非典型实验室越来越成为唯一能够持续参与国际竞争的实验室：生物技术相关学术界的一个突出结构性变化是为一位教授工作的大型团体的增长。我们无法找到这方面的明确数据，但在美国精英学术界，这一点似乎尤为突出，个别教授有50到100名学员。现在英国大学也有一些这样的实验室的例子。这些大型团体可以汇集资源，带来足够数量和集中的多样化技能人才，这在生物技术等技术密集型研究领域尤为重要。

   然而，这种组织生物技术研究的方法也从根本上改变了研究，既不可持续，也不利于科学的集体利益。这样的研究环境可能会变得越来越等级化，职业体系会被玩弄，以牺牲人类知识的边界为代价，激励资源获取和初级科学家的开发。例如，一位实验室里有近100人的教授能否有意义地参与指导或研究工作，并获得荣誉、奖项和专利，这是值得怀疑的。该体系最终奖励的是管理者和帝国缔造者，而不是积极参与研究和指导的创造性科学家。早期LMB的日子已经一去不复返了，弗雷德·桑格在替补席上亲手为他的第二个诺贝尔奖做了工作。

参考资料：

[1] EDITORIAL. Science must protect thinking time in a world of instant communication [J]. Nature, 2024, 631: 709-709.

doi:  10.1038/d41586-024-02381-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02381-x

[2] EDITORIAL. Is science's dominant funding model broken? [J]. 2024, 630(8018): 793-793.

doi:  10.1038/d41586-024-02080-7

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02080-7

[3] Samuel G. Rodriques. The innovation menagerie: New institutional structures are expanding horizons for early-stage research [J]. Cell, 2024, 187(1): 3-7.

doi:  10.1016/j.cell.2023.11.039

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867423013272?via%3Dihub

[4] Michael Park, Erin Leahey, Russell J. Funk. Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time [J]. Nature, 2023, 613(7942): 138-144.

doi:  10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x

[5] Wu Lingfei, Wang Dashun, James A. Evans. Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology [J]. Nature, 2019, 566(7744): 378-382.

doi:  10.1038/s41586-019-0941-9

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0941-9

[6] Rima-Maria Rahal, Susann Fiedler, Adeyemi Adetula, Ronnie P.-A. Berntsson, Ulrich Dirnagl, Gordon B. Feld, Christian J. Fiebach, Samsad Afrin Himi, Aidan J. Horner, Tina B. Lonsdorf, Felix Schönbrodt, Miguel Alejandro A. Silan, Michael Wenzler & Flávio Azevedo. Quality research needs good working conditions [J]. Nature Human Behaviour, 2023, 7(2): 164-167.

doi:  10.1038/s41562-022-01508-2

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01508-2

[7] Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2024-01-25, A New National Purpose: Leading the Biotech Revolution

https://www.institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/a-new-national-purpose-leading-the-biotech-revolution#introduction

相关链接：

[1] 2023-02-12，[新闻] “原创三大杀手：同行评议、短期考核、没有时间”被顶刊论文证实

https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-107667-1375905.html

[2] 2021-12-15，[复习] 原创三大杀手：同行评议、短期考核、没有时间

https://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-107667-1316730.html

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