| I don't know that the criteria you're proposing are all that different from the current situation. Domain knowledge and math skills are tested by your eduction. Motivation and leadership by committee work. Other skills by teaching. The only difference is your focus on proposals rather than results, and this is already the case in some fields. I come for a "search for physics beyond the standard model" background, where other than the neutrino mass (from the SNO collaboration, which I was part of) there hasn't been a positive result in decades. So there is already a good deal of focus on proposals rather than results, and yet almost all the issues I see in the biosciences (I jumped ship to genomics in the mid-00's) are also present in that area of physics. Ergo, empirically, I'm doubtful that focusing on proposals rather than results will make much difference. The difficulty is that science never makes economic sense for an individual. I spent a decade of my life measuring zero to higher and higher precision, and I know people who have spent entire careers doing so: putting new limits on branching ratios to exotic (which sounds so much better than "nonexistent") decays and so on. It was fun, although I took a year off in the middle to do some medical physics and imaging, which was even more fun because I actually got to measure phenomena that exist. So when I read things about the paucity of "breakthrough discoveries" I think that mostly the low-hanging fruit have been picked and genomics turns out to be a whole lot harder and more of a slog than people expected, with a vast amount of uninteresting material to be waded through for the sake of a slow accumulation of knowledge that we are still a century away from putting to any very good use. I don't know what an economically rational model for reward in such an environment is, and it's good that the article raises the issue and explores some alternative approaches, but I don't think there is any easy fix for the problem because I don't think science makes any economic sense. Just moral sense. |