Research - Is it benefitting mankind to the extent that it should? A curtain raiser!
This question sounds very utopian, but being in this field of Biological Sciences for the last two years makes me ponder over scientific research being a boon to mankind. NIH and other government funding organizations need scientists to work relentlessly on something which is of immediate concern. The researchers, living on a meager stipend, are expected to address to impending scientific questions. This also includes controlling the damage caused by natural and man-made hazards to human health and living. Biological Sciences and Medicine go hand in hand, where scientists hypothesize various phenomena governing diseases at the molecular level and unmesh the bewildering signaling complexes that wreak havoc in a body in the diseased state. The current scenario is, or rather should be, to apply all possible scientific knowledge available to us to date and design the best possible systems to address these hypotheses.
Everything in scientific research seems so cutting edge and sometimes it makes us feel as if we are very close to unraveling the causes, and engineer the treatments for cancer, AIDS and other lethal diseases which were under no control a few years ago. However, on the other hand, it also seems that we all are living in a bubble where medical science has progressed but it could have progressed much more if the 'publish or perish' quote wouldn't have been misinterpreted.
After studying in a few research institutes and understanding the ways in which scientists pose questions, write grants and do 'basic' research, it seems that only 40% of the actual effort is probably benefiting mankind in some way. I am not expressing any doubt about the potential of these scientists or the questions that they pose, they have every right to do that and that is why they are scientists. But what concerns me is, whether the efforts put in answering these questions truly benefiting mankind to the extent that they should! I often hear about data getting scooped and that several years are spent in just proving or disproving published studies. As such, the scientific Journals are categorized within a wide range of impact factors which explains that mediocre research is still rampant or encouraged by lower end journals.
Just when I had decided to start my journey in this seemingly satisfying, noble but often frustrating field, I had imagined myself being a part of the family of scientists working endlessly towards a cause. My mental picture was that of sharing ideas, exchanging tools and letting the excitement be contagious and uniform for everyone answering those questions and hypotheses. Again, it was very very Utopian! What I see now is that questions are posed for the survival of the lab, for getting grants and publishing more number of low quality papers and lastly but very sadly serving as the daily bread for both the advisor and the budding student scientists.
At the level of a lab, which is the heart of where everything should happen, there is often no spirit of 'working towards a cause' or even the slightest intention of 'cracking the unknown!' the way it is elaborately stated in grants. In fact, unhealthy competition, authorship issues, tenure track necrotize the progress of science. Why can’t all the labs in the world collaborate, study cancer or AIDS together? Why do grants get rejected completely dampening the spirit of the researchers making them resort to use of inexpensive reagents for experiments to redeem themselves? I think that if a 1000 scientists are working towards finding a cure for a disease, eg: breast cancer, and if each one of them poses a 100 questions, the time and effort invested in answering these questions will not be 100*10 years (10 years per question per scientist) of work for all the 1000 scientists if they all collaborate on a weekly or a monthly basis. It will instead be a 1000*100 questions together, but 100*1000/1000*10 no. of years spent in doing research to answer those questions. This is a simple equation taking into consideration the number of post docs, graduate students and technicians that every scientist (PI) will contribute at the same time. There will be no ego, no competition for publishing the same thing and a lot of efforts would be saved in terms of designing or creating things compatible for the system answering the questions eg. creating mutants, clones, primers and knockdowns. There will be ample discussions and thus all possible controls for an experiment will be taken into consideration without making haste for a publication.
These experiments would be more repeatable amongst labs because of the transparency in communication between fellow scientists. Animals will not be slaughtered just for getting a 'Nature' or 'PNAS' publication but they will be true martyrs towards mankind and human health.
This ‘cut throat’ competition in the 'cutting edge' research is actually 'cutting down' the quality of research performed! We need to utilize funds carefully, plan well so that long term problems of immediate concern can be tackled appropriately. Every research paper published should be translational, at least in the near future or else it would be squandering away precious grants and the most important reagent, 'time'! Otherwise, we can still spend another few hundred years trying to figure out how different cellular pathways work (or rather made to work under different conditions in different labs!!) and still remain as intrigued as we are about the mechanisms of these fatal diseases bothering us since years.
The 'Publish or Perish' principle shouldn't be a curse but a motivation for publishing only the best!
