how Risk Aversion Is Ruining Science

• any junior scientists are given roughly uniform advice, that their top priority should be incremental advances of their current research.
• Senior scientists also often, and quietly, concede that the tenure system, designed to give academics the freedom to explore new directions, rarely serves risky work.
• Some risk-aversion is to be expected in science: as research fields mature and scientists pick off more of the low-hanging fruit, the problems become harder.
• Competition for research grants has set the stage for a cultural shift from “What problems am I interested in?” to “What problems are likely to be funded?

Science is built on the boldly curious exploration of the natural world. Astounding leaps of imagination and insight – coupled with a laser like focus on empiricism and experimentation – have brought forth countless wonders of insight into the workings of the universe we find ourselves in. But the culture that celebrates, supports, and rewards the audacious mental daring that is the hallmark of science is at risk of collapsing under a mountain of cautious, risk-averse, incurious advancement that seeks merely to win grants and peer approval.

I’ve encountered this problem myself. Years ago, after I completed my PhD in physics, I began doing postdoctoral research studying cosmic voids, the vast regions of almost nothing that dominate the volume of the universe. A few collaborators and I were using voids to understand the evolution of the cosmos, and we were also fascinated by voids as objects themselves. However, as I was applying to jobs beyond that postdoc, I was told multiple times by senior (and well-meaning) scientists that I should focus on something else. Something more mainstream. Something safer. (Today, thanks to the dogged determination of my collaborators, cosmic void analysis is now a part of most major upcoming galaxy surveys.)

My experiences were not singular. I’ve met many junior scientists who were given similar advice, and senior scientists – now that I number among their ranks – confide that their top priority is in achieving deltas: a physics jargon word that they use here to refer to tiny, incremental advances of their current research. They quietly concede that the tenure system, designed to give academics the freedom to safely explore new directions, rarely serves that purpose.   

The first step is to reward risk. We need to allow scientists to make mistakes – to explore interesting research directions and find nothing of value. This goes double for junior scientists. They need the freedom to use their fresh perspectives to find new research directions that the senior scientists may have overlooked. We can reward risky bets by celebrating null results and non-results as much as we do great discoveries. After all, both paths lead to new knowledge, a fact that is not nearly recognised enough.

We can incentivise risk by hiring and promoting junior scientists who do something new, even if they weren’t lucky enough to have it pay off. As long as an investigator shows sound intent, effort and clarity of insight – the hallmarks of a great scientist – they should be considered for awards, positions and prestige.

We can also reward risk in the grant proposal process. According to the NSF merit review report, the program officers who ultimately make the recommendation to award or deny a grant proposal are expected to consider, among other factors, “support for high-risk proposals with potential for transformative advances” when weighing their decisions. (That itself implies that riskiness is something to be managed, not celebrated).

Indeed, the agency even supports some funding mechanisms that are specially designed to encourage research that is high-risk and high-reward, the most prominent being the Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research program (EAGER). In the past decade, however, EAGER grants have amounted to only 1% to 2% of NSF’s allocated research grant money. Why can’t it be 5%? Or 50%? What’s stopping us? A fear of failure?

But perhaps just as important, scientists need to manage the expectations of the public and policymakers. For several decades now, scientists and their advocates have played a dangerous public relations game, essentially billing science as an institution that can deliver society a guaranteed rate of return on a given investment. Science is messy and full of mistakes and blind alleys. Discoverers of all kinds don’t know what they’re going to get until they go out and look for it themselves. We need to level with the taxpayer that scientists shouldn’t be expected to always deliver promising new results. We need to celebrate – both internally in the scientific community and with the public at large – the so-called failures that also represent the growth of knowledge.

To give scientists the confidence and support they need to make truly great new discoveries, we need to get the public to see science as the daring act of inquisitiveness that it is. And that is a very, very risky thing, indeed.