[jakobnissen]

I work as a scientist. I'm not sure I agree science is a strong-link problem. Rather, it contains both strong- and weak-link problems.

A lot of science work consist of what my scientist mother calls "bread work" - validation of existing techniques, building a general corpus of knowledge, maintaining databases with useful information and so on. These is weak-link work. A bad quality database will undermine any research which is built on it and not aware of its limitations.

A good recent example may be the stem cell research field, which was (and perhaps still is?) bogged down by being built on bad fundamentals.

But yes, more broadly speaking I do agree that science funding should be built to encourage more risk of failure, more elitism, and more consolidation of large project to be able to "punch through".

[currymj]

agree strongly. in the long term, for society, it’s probably true that bad science will just be forgotten.

in the medium term, those “weak links”, whether due to mistakes or fraud, can derail an entire area and prevent the strong link papers from being written.