[nextos]

Another crucial factor is the principal investigator (PI) culture which has, at least in most sciences, turned professors into rent seekers.

Nowadays, professors tend to play a middlemen role. Apply for grants, advertise results, and claim credit. Nothing else.

Most of the time, they do not come up with ideas, nor care about them or do any of the hard work.

Places like the Arc Institute have been born to cut PI middlemen out and get research out of this tar pit.

[jltsiren]

This doesn't make any sense. You get grants for having ideas (and enough preliminary results to convince the reviewers that you will be able to publish the ideas). Many junior PIs struggle precisely because they are better at doing research than at having ideas. You get a PI position for being good at reasearch, but the job you get is very different from what you are used to.

There is nothing special ahout the Arc Institute. It's a research institute that can hire professional researchers to do research, because it's not a university department that's supposed to train people to do research. The funders just are generous enough that the researchers don't have to apply for funding. Any organization could do the same with funders like that.

[sgt101]

The Crick in London is maybe a better example. As I understand it there you apply to work on treatment or understanding a specific human disease and you receive a one time 7 year grant which provides a stipend for you, two Ph.D. studentships and one lab assistant + a sum to equip your lab and access to a bunch of services (mice, bugs, fish, compute, chemicals...)

You can get a single renewal - but that's all. No matter what you are done after 14 years.

[nextos]

I have witnessed first hand how many old PIs use PhD students and postdocs to come up with ideas and draft grants. Obviously as ghost authors. After discussion with other colleagues, this seems much more common than what I thought.

Arc is indeed special because all funding is internal, just like it was at LMB or CSHL during their golden years. This encourages small groups where everyone does research, instead of creating a class of middle managers.

[jltsiren]

There are many research institutes in the world with all kinds of funding arrangements. Also, Arc is apparently attempting to recreate the usual "middle manager" structure:

> Phase 1 of the institute involves hiring 10–15 Core Investigators, each of whom may employ 10–20 trainees, researchers, or engineers.

Those are large groups by academic standards.

The middle manager structure itself arises from many causes. Funders like competitive grants, because that gives them more control over the research they fund. Universities are in the business of training the next generation of researchers. And universities save money by hiring dedicated teachers instead of professors, leaving a smaller number of research-active people in charge of the trainees.