[tsbischof]

The institution as a whole may have the incentive, which plays out on a 5-10 year timescale. Funding agencies in principle care, but no individuals are rewarded based on the results on this timescale. Industry, venture capital, and the like do care because they need reliable-enough results to build on, but they can filter for the good ones and scale from there.

The lifecycle for a junior PI is about 5 years, which really means they have about 3 years to produce a result sufficient to advance. This is enough for a bit of validation but unlikely anything beyond their lab, so the result is likely to be untested. But who in that lab cares? They just need to get the next job, so a 3-4 year timescale is fine. The PI cares long-term because a lack of new productivity means a lack of ongoing funding, which means they either improve the quality of their processes (which means herding the junior researchers through that system) or simply continuing to hack their way through.

There is a reason why people moan about scientific theories advancing one death of an old professor at a time.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

OK, I understand the individual incentives at play here. But the institution also has a governing body and other stakeholders interested in actual results, right? If they see that someone else has made a breakthrough and it looks like a very promising method, it seems logical you should check if it really works and if it does, improve it in order to make clinical studies possible and hopefully one day benefit the patients, no? Otherwise, what is the point of sharing cancer research if nobody is interested in replicating the important studies?

[tsbischof]

The governing body and related stakeholders care at varying levels. For government-sponsored research, the primary metrics are publications, impact factor, number and prestige of collaborations, diversity of staff, and velocity of money (see [1] for an example, pages 3-4). At the most cynical level it kind of reduces to welfare for educated people. The end result is that there are researchers producing good work, but you have to filter to find them.

For external industry funders, they have a strong and vested interest in identifying good output before it is public. The strategy here typically is a mixture of identifying good researchers and making them kings (consistent funding, direct lines of communication, access to nonpublic materials, etc), and of placing lots of small investments to get in the room for discussion. An example of this mixture is the BP deal at UC Berkeley [2].

As for shifting standard of care, this is a commonly-expressed goal but often the research is far enough away that the individuals doing the work lack close communication with the actual practitioners. Some institutes are trying to resolve this by close physical and social proximity (e.g. TU Dresden's medical campus) but this is far from the norm.

[1] https://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/fileadmin/Jahresbericht/Ja... [2] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi....