Tag Archives: nobel

Noteworthy, Philosophy

Successful methods

Why was the Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology so successful?

It was not by increasing administrative staff or new programme oriented funding research as many German research managers believe. It was by scientific (not primarily cultural) diversity

The LMB sets a coherent culture by promoting scientific diversity among its staff, encouraging the exchange of knowledge and ideas and valuing scientific synergies between different areas of research… It encourages the recruitment of groups with diverse but aligned interests that are complementary.

What did we do instead in Germany? We increased competition among groups and develop more hierarchical structures while the LMB is

promoting shared values and common aims helps researchers to feel part of the LMB community and proud to belong to it, fostering long-term loyalty. The LMB has always had a non-hierarchical structure — one in which emphasis lies in the quality of the argument, rather than in the status of the proponent.

So, indeed the incentives are different… While we laudate the number of external EU grants a group leader has been securing, LMB does the opposite

… resources are allocated in ways that encourage innovative collaboration between internal teams and divisions. For example, limits are set for research groups to bid for external grants, because these tend to have short-term, results-oriented requirements that might not align with the LMB’s longer-term ambitions.


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Noteworthy

At what age do scientists tend to produce great ideas?

It took me some time to relocate the paper that was discussing this topic. I first thought of  PNAS back in 2011 but the plot that I was looking for is in  a Scientometrics 2019 article.

Take home message: It may be the your first or your last paper in your career that will have the biggest impact  while the overall probably is highest at age 44.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-019-03065-4

Another paper (with different source data) moves the curve to the left but unfortunately methods are not clearly described.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2389203

For example, in contrast to Einstein, 93% of Nobel Prize-winning scientific breakthroughs have come from individuals beyond age 26, and even geniuses who emerge early may bloom more fully at more advanced ages. Einstein’s theory of general relativity, perhaps his greatest contribution, came largely in his early to mid-thirties. Copernicus completed his revolutionary theory of planetary motion around age 60. Mozart’s most famous operas came in his thirties, and Steve Jobs produced by far his most commercially successful innovations in his late forties and early fifties.

And here is a third paper, that shows that the interval widens at 65 while the mean performance remains stable.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006653117

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Philosophy

Postdog

As our government now even pays us to write applications for European collaborations instead of putting this money directly into grants – here comes another quick post on what a Nobel says:

There is a notion favored by some that individual scientists need to be corralled to work together under a more rigid, directed framework to solve important problems. We disagree. Real innovation comes from the bottom up, and good science policy requires promoting the free market of ideas rather than central planning.

BTW the postdog is sitting at the Kornberg site.


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