Science Incentives

The experience of Katalin Karikó, who was initially not supported by most scientists in her field, is not uncommon.

After analyzing a large number of examples of key scientific advances, mainly from chemistry and physics, Thomas Kuhn concluded (1) that innovative work is frequently opposed by researchers following the prevailing scientific paradigm. Kuhn analyzes many historical cases, including the classic examples of the initially reception of the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. He made clear that his theory also applies to small-scale innovations in specialized fields (1). Kuhn’s point of view has since being cited by many successful scientists, like Nobel winners Baruch Blumberg and Sidney Brenner, and National Medal of Science awardee Carl Woese (2-4) as helping them to understand the opposition they initially encountered. Baruch Blumberg wrote that his paper reporting the discovery of the hepatitis B virus (which had later a very large beneficial effect on human health, leading to…

Summary of the first round of discussions

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The Cell-Cell Communication Prize has shown that incentives can encourage the sharing of ideas about future scientific projects, which are normally considered confidential.

The broader methods of biomedical science evolve slowly, even when well-known leaders strongly suggest the need for new approaches. For example, Paul Nurse (Nobel Medicine, 2001) recently reminded us that Sydney Brenner (Nobel Medicine, 2002) two decades ago had a warning for biology: “We are drowning in a sea of data and starving for knowledge”. Paul Nurse added that this statement “is even more relevant to biology today” because biologists often publish data but are reluctant to suggest new ideas (Nurse, 2021). 

A similar delay in methodological advances is shown by the difficulties encountered by Harold Varmus (Nobel Medicine 1989) when he started promoting open access publishing and the sharing of preprints (described in Varmus, 2009). In these cases,…