“Disgraceful.”
That’s how Willard Boyle—the Canadian-born physicist who shared in this year’s Nobel Prize for inventing the device that paved the way for the digital camera—described the bureaucratic ordeal that scientists today undergo to obtain funding. The global tide of discontent against this increasingly cumbersome process has reached a high mark.
“[The UK’s grant system] turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them,” said Peter Lawrence, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge, in a recently published article in the PloS Biology journal. “Applications have become so detailed and so technical that trying to select the best proposals has become a dark art.”
Lawrence charts the story of a young researcher—Lawrence gives him the name K—who spent almost a year to preparing, submitting, and awaiting his initial research grant. With the grant money, K took on a postdoctoral student, a graduate student, and a lab technician. K was able to obtain only short-term funding, which meant that his lab always depended on the next grant for its survival. K spent the majority of the next three years writing grant applications to ensure that he could pay his students and technician. Eventually the technician left to take a more secure job. The postdoc student, who had a family to support, gave up on her lifelong ambition of being a researcher, and took job in science publishing.
Lawrence says that K’s plight “illustrates how the present funding system in science eats its own seed corn.”
Canada’s grant system is far more generous. The Canadian government will spend more than $10 billion this year on scientific research and infrastructure. And government institutions, such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, do manage to provide research funding, from the undergraduate level to the full-tenured professor, without unrolling the debilitating red tape.
Last summer I received an NSERC research award and I didn’t find the two-page research proposal all that onerous.
“With each grant application that I write, I get a better understanding of my own research, in particular from a much broader perspective than I am accustomed to,” says Naseem Al-Aidroos, a fifth-year PhD student at U of T. “More importantly, I find it easier to explain my research at a level that is both accessible and interesting to the general public. The rest of the application process, however, is an incredible waste of time.”
Mr. Al-Aidroos has a point. The red tape associated with obtaining research funding can help motivate scientists by creating punishing deadlines, and by forcing them to put their research ideas in a neatly packed proposal that can be read and understood universally.
However, too much red tape can kill even the best research ideas. That’s why the federal government should not get more involved in the grant process. The idea of funding individual projects—instead of arms-length granting councils— is a dangerous one. It would give Canadian bureaucrats the possibility to eradicate “pointless” research studies and give favoritism to research with “demonstrable economic benefits”—something that UK bureaucrats have done for some time now, though so-called “pointless” research has given us many valuable breakthroughs that have led to such discoveries as x-rays or penicillin.
When it comes to scientific research, it’s better to err on the side of too little—rather than too much—red tape.
