Most outsiders to big academic science might be surprised to learn that one of the most problematic constraints on scientific innovation comes from the federal agencies that pour many billions a year into the system.

What’s the problem? Groupthink.

Science funders wield an enormous amount of influence—usually unacknowledged—over what kinds of research will get done. They can bias an entire scientific field towards unproductive ideas, away from innovation. After all, in a highly-competitive academic market, if scientists know that a grant is even slightly more likely to be funded if it aligns with the current fad, then they are going to hitch their work to that fad.

In their granting methods, science funders should logically bend over backwards to avoid groupthink—to encourage a diversity of viewpoints and theories. But that’s not what’s presently happening.

“The fact that you have to work on the current paradigm is a huge problem,” a former president of the National Academies observed to me. “The fundamental problem is you have to work on whatever you’ve already worked on. So if you have to have preliminary results, you just have to keep plugging along in the same vein. And universities won’t hire you if they think you have a low chance of getting NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding.”

As one top scientist at Stanford said to me, on condition of anonymity, “Everyone tends to cluster on certain areas, which means there are lots of things people aren’t studying. When I first started working on [X], everyone said I was wasting my time. Now everyone is crazy about it. But that goes to show that we need to study new ideas.”

I’ve come across evidence of the troubling cycle of idea-constraint routinely in my work as Executive Director of the Good Science Project (a think tank focused on improving science), in researching a book about the NIH, and in running a major research initiative for a multi-billion philanthropy (Arnold Ventures). To be sure, groupthink is a danger anywhere—finance, politics, the military—but is a particular danger when it comes to science, as science underlies so much of our lives.

The misdirection of great minds can have serious consequences.

It’s worth consciously recalling major scientific discoveries that were unpopular or ignored at first; heliocentrism, the germ theory of disease, continental drift, the viral origins of some cancers, and the bacterial origin of some ulcers. Yet today, we can point to many cases where science funders intentionally embrace groupthink—“following the zeitgeist,” in the words of Dan Alkon, an entrepreneur who spent many years as an NIH-funded scientist and who sees the problem.

The misdirection of great minds can have serious consequences. For example, science journalist Sharon Begley has tracked how scientists studying Alzheimer’s were forced to adhere to the so-called amyloid hypothesis—a theory about how protein fragments ultimately kill brain cells—even when their intuition told them to look elsewhere. Begley explains, “This stifling of competitive ideas, say a growing number of scholars, is a big reason why there is no treatment for Alzheimer’s” even after decades of research and billions in funding.

How bad is the constraint? A survey of top scientists working on Covid research found that nearly 80% of them would “change my research program a lot” if given unrestricted funding, whereas only 1.2% wouldn’t change their research at all. But if your publications, financial support, and even your job is on the line, why tempt fate by going in a different direction than the rest of your field?

The level of government waste from enforced groupthink can be downright startling.

Jim Woodgett of the University of Toronto told me, “A lot of science is like watching seven-year-old kids playing soccer. They just run after the ball. They all follow the bandwagon. But when you look at where breakthroughs come from, Nobel Prize-winning work often wasn’t published in a high-profile journal, because it was going against the grain. People who were the most productive in the past had small labs and were able to do work outside the spotlight.”

The level of government waste from enforced groupthink can be downright startling. At NIH, there’s one institute solely focused on mental health: NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health. How has that research institute done at addressing mental illness in the U.S.?

Here’s what Tom Insel, director of NIMH from 2002 through 2015, told Wired magazine in 2017: “I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

Why would this be the case? Under Insel’s strategy, NIMH was intensely focused on genetics and brain imaging, while downplaying studies on behavior, social programs, and interventions. As science journalist Benedict Carey put it in 2021, “Government agencies, like the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health, continue to double down, sinking enormous sums of taxpayer money into biological research aimed at someday finding a neural signature or ‘blood test’ for psychiatric diagnoses that could be, maybe, one day in the future, useful—all while people are in crisis now.”

Responding to Insel’s admission of failure, Eric Turkheimer, a prominent behavioral geneticist, wrote, “I find Insel’s late career revelation that neurogenomics may not be the answer to mental illness profoundly infuriating. How many dollars were wasted while behavioral models were ignored at NIMH? Careers? Patient lives?”

The problem extends not just to what’s being shut out through narrow funding choices, but to the failure to fund confirmation research that could help weed out groupthink.

For his part, John Krakauer, professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, noted, “the neglect of behavioral research is a source of great shame. This belief in genes and magic bullets is a cult.”

As with Alzheimer’s research, it didn’t have to be this way. The NIH should have been focused on creating structural alternatives so that an individual or small group’s view (however enlightened and wise it might seem) could not dominate an entire field of research.

And the problem extends not just to what’s being shut out through narrow funding choices, but to the failure to fund confirmation research that could help weed out groupthink. When at Arnold Ventures, I funded a major international project on the replicability of psychological research, where it turned out that only around 40% of studies could be replicated. Replication can be boring, but without it, we may be stuck building expensive castles on sand.

The high-stakes game being played is made particularly vivid with the case of COVID.

The first COVID-19 vaccines were developed using what’s called messenger RNA (mRNA), first discovered some 60 years ago. In essence, mRNA provides a set of instructions for how the ribosomes in a cell should build some particular protein. In the case of COVID-19, scientists constructed a new form of mRNA that basically tells the body’s cells how to construct some of the proteins involved with the virus. Once those proteins are constructed, the body’s immune system responds and starts to build immunity to COVID-19 itself.

COVID vaccines were developed with remarkable, unprecedented speed. In part this was because of Project Warp Speed and the federal government’s willingness to guarantee billions of dollars of support. But all the funding in the world wouldn’t have mattered without prior decades of scientific advancement, especially research on mRNA. And one of the key leaders of that research was Hungarian immigrant Katalin Karikó, who came to the United States in 1985 and worked at the University of Pennsylvania starting in 1990.

A major challenge to using mRNA for therapy or vaccines was that the human body typically would reject injected mRNA, seeing it as a foreign invader or pathogen. With her colleague Drew Weissman, Karikó published a game-changing paper on this subject in 2005: they traced out how to change mRNA ever so slightly such that it would survive the body’s typical response and still work.

World-class, history-altering science—yet Karikó faced many obstacles in pursuing mRNA research. As Wired put it, “By the mid 1990s, Karikó’s bosses at UPenn had run out of patience. Frustrated with the lack of funding she was generating for her research, they offered the scientist a bleak choice: leave or be demoted. It was a demeaning prospect for someone who had once been on the path to a full professorship.”

It’s high time for reform in the federal systems that fund academic scientific research.

Karikó told STAT News, “Every night I was working: grant, grant, grant. . . . And it came back always no, no, no.” As she told another interviewer, “I keep writing and doing experiments, things are getting better and better, but I never get any money for the work. The critics said it will never be a drug. When I did these discoveries, my salary was lower than the technicians working next to me.”

Karikó’s bleak situation was perhaps best described by Dr. David Scales, who recounted his experience as a young scientist working with Karikó at Penn after she had been demoted for failing to score enough money in NIH grants: “It’s hard to describe what this moment means to people who have never worked in science at a university, but it is more than the frustration of an experiment not working or laudable work going unrecognized. It is an existential career threat.”

Ultimately, Karikó left academia for good. Since 2013, she has worked at BioNTech RNA Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed what became the Pfizer Covid vaccine.

It’s high time for reform in the federal systems that fund academic scientific research. Across all of today’s R&D enterprise, we have a funding system that is too obsessed with groupthink and too unwilling to take a gamble on outlier views, even as the history of scientific breakthroughs shows that we need less of the former and more of the latter.

Article Image “Astronomer Copernicus (Conversation with God)” by Jan Matejko is under public domain.