Can science be crowd-funded?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, peer review, public engagement, social mediaLeave a comment

Joe Mason

£1 Billion. That’s the total amount raised by the top two crowd-funding (CF) websites over the last four years. That’s the GDP of a small nation being given to around 100,000 projects by regular people. Government spending on basic research sits at about this amount every year since 2011. That these figures are even close suggests that if science uses CF, we could see some amazing discoveries.

CF works by people buying into someone’s idea for a product. They see the idea on social media and with a few taps they can pledge amounts to back the project. The inventor then receives the money they need to get going and, hopefully, they’ll be successful. I like this because there’s nowhere else where a consumer can be involved so organically with the creation of their product.

By crowds of people paying the cost upfront, with some risk, everyone wins. Companies finance most research but for them there is a need for it to be product oriented. It must
be ultimately sellable. Governments also have agendas. They answer to voters and what voters think should be invested in. This allows for open minded research but it is still restricted to what the public are interested in. Charities are also concerned with public opinion and they have to be seen to be investing in the right things. Charities can’t finance things which aren’t relevant to their cause.
Overall, I think there is little scope for passion, imagination or enthusiasm in today’s scientific community. For sure, scientists love what they do but gone are the days of the explorer, free to chase the stars. Could CF liberate science? Kickstarter has a failure rate of 60% which I think indicates a community not entirely driven by success. This promises research without fear of failure. But why would people CF research?

CF is no altruistic act. People invest for the product or for what the product says about them. If researchers can get people to emotionally buy in to their research then CF could work for them. Making this possible is the fact that everything people do and say on social media is all on some level to project a persona. Companies get exposure by having a brand which people want to align themselves with. Alignment with brands is behind all viral advertising and therefore the success of CF. So if research can be branded compellingly I think people will buy into it because they will want to look however that brand makes them look.

CF is growing. From feature films to AI headsets. Why is this? Partly because people want great products but also because they want to be a part of something. CF won’t solve the problems science has with money. What CF will do is make people care about science. It’ll make science more present on the timelines and news feeds of the world. And if there’s one thing Companies, Governments and Charities pay attention to, it’s what everyone is talking about.

Is ‘Carrot on a stick’ funding the future for science?

November 9, 2014November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, impact, politics, public engagement, scientific methodLeave a comment

Mitchell Guest

This year is the three hundredth anniversary of the passing of the Longitude Act, and David Cameron’s Tory government is glamming up the archaic principle to impose on 21st Century researchers. The Longitude Prize, first introduced back in 1714, is intended to inspire armchair scientists to become more active in the direction science moves in; instead of letting academics and business leaders govern the flow of science funding.

There are, of course, benefits to the act. Supporters note that it will accelerate the development of crucial drugs, intended to prevent anti-bacterial immunity. Whilst I’m sure this will be the case, I believe that funding for science is not simply an investment into a later technology. However, with the Nobel Prize for physics being awarded to a discovery with ‘significant commercial potential’, arguably for the third time in ten years, maybe the way that the general public perceive science funding is different to mine. In an age of continuing austerity, it is right that all government spending is scrutinised, however it should not be the case that all taxpayers’ money is judged using the same materialistic criteria.

Ultimately, I like to think that science has moved on since the last time a British government offered a reward-for-science incentive. Scientific research is now a team sport, requiring expensive materials, high-tech laboratories and knowledge well surpassing that of a hobby scientist. Whereas in 1700’s, well off statesman could dabble with a little science in their spare time, the explosion of knowledge that we have witnessed in the previous few decades has all but guaranteed that the era of part-time researchers is well and truly behind us.

Finally, I feel like the big PR campaign around the award is being used to distract the public about the severe lack of government funding into scientific research. No amount of television time or large, corporate judging panels can plug the funding hole left by successive Westminster administrations. Whilst the prize money, set at an ambitious £10m, is by no means insignificant, I cannot help but wonder if it will be ‘money well spent’. Universities are having budgets slashed, and are expected to produce the same level of outstanding work that has become synonymous with British scientists, without the help and support from the ruling parties. In conclusion, I feel like the prize is no more than an expensive gimmick, with little chance of engaging the public with the complicated web of science funding. I can only hope that the incentive will lead to some good breakthroughs in one of sciences biggest challenges.

Do politicians use science as a pawn for their own political gain?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, impact, politics, public engagementLeave a comment

Matthew Christopher Whitehill

Political landscapes are constantly changing particularly in the United States where the President’s 2015 Budget proposes an increased $135.4 billion Research & Development fund. While this is promising for science, the lack of actual scientific evidence sometimes used by politicians to gain votes and popularity is worrying. The involvement of Science can be a valuable asset to a politician and play a significant role in many aspects of decision-making.

Traditionally scientists have been thought to be the cornerstone of fact and rational logic which when used correctly can produce life-changing results. Politicians don’t have this luxury so have mastered the art of ‘framing’. This plays upon people’s inherent desire to make the most rational choice and therefore influences the way voters make their decisions by presenting only desirable ‘frames’.

This has led to a storm of competing claims that may be economical with the truth and can be manipulated to highlight the leading scientific pros or cons to change a voter’s mindset. These may also be ‘sugar-coated’ to strike a chord with the masses. Recently topics such as climate change and stem cell research have been at the forefront of conflicting interests.

President J.F. Kennedy proposed the ambitious objective to send an American to the Moon before the end of the 1960’s. This move was supported as much by the politicians as by the scientific community. There was extreme pressure to reinstate the USA as the dominant force in the Cold War. In 1969 his aspiration became reality and subsequently reached out to American voters’ sense of national pride. There is no denying that the by-products of their work have led to significant technological advances throughout modern society that could not have been foreseen.

Politics is a competition for the allocation of resources and can put extra strain on governments to decide where available assets should go; consequently this has created a need for scientific organisations to use lobbyists and large public relation campaigns involving high profile public figures.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) have issued a report named ‘Scientific Integrity in Policymaking’ to challenge the way in which George W. Bush’s administration had apparently distorted and disregarded scientific evidence to support its’ own political agenda. Furthermore there have been bills and amendments, which passed the review process, but were quashed and never gained a recorded vote. This begs the question what other deals and back channeling take place behind closed doors at the expense of the science.

Science through no fault of its own has been brought into the political arena. Scientific advice can and should be used for effective policymaking; unfortunately the democratic system has a vast array of political influences and self interest which reign supreme, keeping science in ‘check’.

When should scientists go public with their results?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, impact, peer review, public engagement, scientific method, social mediaLeave a comment

Laura Jane Fox

Scientific research can often be laborious, repetitive and in many cases inconclusive. However, as many researchers will tell you when a moment of insight and clarity arises its hard to hold back from ‘going to the presses’. With only new, ground-breaking science finding its way onto the pages of newspapers and the most prestigious journals, it may seem like a race to tell the world of your findings.

As important as it is to tell the general public about the discovery of a new particle or breakthrough in medicine it is still important to go through the right channels to do so. Scientific publication and peer review should remain a vital part of this process.

In March last year a group of astronomers using telescope Bicep2 claimed to have found evidence of gravitational waves, a giant scientific discovery, they published these results without peer review. It has since come to light that these findings may not be as they appear when astronomers using space telescope Planck tried to reproduce the data, find out more here.

Some may argue science is about discussion and debate, but without scientific rigor and validation we end up with a large pool of wrongly interpreted data that is essentially obsolete.

Francis Bacon, father of the modern scientific method, insisted that we must doubt everything before assuming its truth. This can be a hard task when we like to be right and hate proving ourselves wrong. Failures to confirm a hypothesis are rarely submitted to publication either, these negative conclusions can be as important as positive ones, they can prevent scientists wasting money and time treading down the wrong path.

This problem is caused not just by a need to publish for the sake of our careers but also in being human. Subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions take place as researchers make sense of their results; as we are more inclined to find fault in our own experiment than in the already published literature. It has become undesirable to repeat experiments to validate the findings of others because publication in esteemed journals is not achieved this way. I find the problem isn’t when to tell the public but how sure we are of what we’re telling them.

Should scientists have to justify their research in terms of its socioeconomic impact?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, impact, peer review, public engagementLeave a comment

James Gibson

Ask a scientist, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, no. Ask a politician, and the answer is yes. Ask an engineer, and they’ll laugh that the question is even being asked, and go back to making something useful.

Of course, this is a simplification. Many scientists fully believe that it’s proper for science to offer a return on its investments. There may even be some politicians that make rational, scientific decisions on policy based on available evidence (there’s certainly a calling for it among the Behavioural Insight Team in the Cabinet Office ^[2]), though we see few of them here in the UK. There was, in April 2010, a “Science Party” who stood for election in Bosworth, but nothing much came of it.^[3]

On the whole, especially in the UK, there’s a perception that science has no place in government; the zeitgeist is that science is cold, clinical, detached and incapable of appreciating the human element to the problems we face today. This attitude has led to the current government shrinking the science budget for the first time since 1986.^[3]It’s an easy target, and one that some people won’t miss. So, the rather trivial answer to the question of whether science should justify itself is that it had better shape up and do so anyway if it wants to get its pocket money.

Science, despite what new-age hippies and “Big Pharma” conspiracy theorists say, is generally regarded as having a positive impact on economic growth, regardless of individual experimental outcomes. The question, as is often the case in politics, is whether the return on the investment is a net positive once funding and subsidies have been accounted for. Many scientific , once the recent academic cuts were announced, came out in favour of science, ^[4] and no further real-term cuts have been made.^[5]

Still, the fact remains that the UK scientific spending lags, at 0.65% GDP, behind the G8 and European averages of 0.8%,^[5] putting increasing pressure on scientists in Great Britain to either get funding from private sources, or to squabble for resources within growing fields offering ever-more avenues of interest. Whilst scientists may believe that the pursuit of knowledge is a goal in itself, economic return has, and will continue to be, a carrot-on-a-stick for those who have a more pragmatic view of governmental spending.

Other arguments aim towards pointing out that scientific funding leads to very real benefits. Usually these benefits are medical in nature – who doesn’t love new methods of noticing and battling cancers? – but other applications appear, from 3-D printing to quantum computing. These new technologies appear as if from nowhere, in fields that couldn’t have predicted them even a few years beforehand. Whether this is a sign that we need more funding to spot them sooner, or less to avoid unnecessary dead-ends, really falls down to personal analysis.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/04/tories-and-lib-dems-set-out-sc.html

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/62529/TLA-1906126.pdf

[3] http://scienceogram.org/blog/2013/03/uk-science-budget-2010-2015/

[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8052735/Science-funding-cuts-will-cost-UK-economy-billions.html, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23065763, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bob-ward/science-funding-cuts-british-antarctic-survey_b_1931681.html

[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23065763

Can science be crowd-funded?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, impact, public engagement, scientific method, social mediaLeave a comment

Ryan Jones

Applying for funding in science research is becoming an increasingly arduous task. An ever increasing number of graduates are left to battle over a dwindling amount of government money. There are an increasing number of articles such as Amaya Moro-Martin’s recent column in Nature, crying out to governments in an attempt to secure the future of scientific research. But what can we do in the mean time?

In recent years, crowdfunding has proven itself to be a major innovation, and has an increasing number of success stories in the world of independent business. Here’s how it works: crowdfunding services (such as indiegogo and Kickstarter) allow individuals and groups to advertise their ideas and concepts to the public. Users can then choose to pledge an amount of money to the realisation of the idea, usually with some incentive. Since its launch in 2009, Kickstarter has funded over 70,000 projects, with a collective worth of over one billion dollars. The concept is neat. The corporate middle-man, and any associated tainting and agendas, is cut out and the inventor and consumer are connected directly. But could this work in science? Platforms such as experiment.com have tried to use this approach in science, with smaller success. Why is that?

Let us compare the conditions of the battlegrounds. Are there many similarities between scientific research and for example, the independent gaming industry? The progress of science depends on the production and testing of new theories, in order to obtain the best possible description of the universe and everything within it. Sadly, the success of these experiments are not guaranteed. When an independent game is funded there will generally be a finished product, in spite of any flaws and bugs which may be present in the final game. Science offers no such promise, as a flawed theory quickly loses its value. It must either be rewritten and tested again, or scrapped entirely. It’s a sad truth that gives me the impression that science has less crowdfunding potential than other areas, because of the lack of guaranteed return it can offer.

Whilst I doubt the successor to the Standard Model is likely to be crowdfunded, I believe that it has a place a little further along the science chain, in the area of developing new technologies. Some of the more successful technology based Kickstarter projects include a publicly accessible space telescope, a low cost 3D printer, and a pen which uses conductive ink to allow users to ‘draw’ functional circuits. It seems like consumers are willing to part with their money when the projects benefit them directly. Whilst scientific research is crucial to the development of new technologies, the immediate return is considerably smaller, which I think places a severe limit on the crowdfunding appeal of science.

Can science be crowd-funded?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, impact, peer review, public engagement, social mediaLeave a comment

Samuel de Kare Silver

QALY – the Cost to Live

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, healthcare, NHs, public engagement1 Comment

Emma Warren

How much is your life worth? How much would you give to wake up tomorrow morning in good health, and continue to do so for the next year? Most of us would place a high price on our own and loved ones’ life and health.

However, each year NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) refuses funding for drugs which would improve and extend the lives of many patients, on a solely financial basis. NICE calculates QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) for each new drug by weighting the quality of a person’s life aftertreatment, from 0 (death) to 1 (perfect health). If a treatment costs more than the threshold of £30k per QALY, NICE is likely to refuse the treatment being implemented within the NHS.

Many people would suggest this is not fair, stating that their life is surely worth more than that. (As an aside, if I were to be unfair to the NHS and NICE and perform a crude approximation, my life so far has been worth a maximum of £655,890…)

Despite this, all things must be considered in the context of the NHS as a whole. If a treatment for one patient group is recommended, another group will inevitably suffer due to re-allocation of resources. This is not to deny the pain and trauma that not having a drug will cause patients and their loved ones.

Imagine being elderly and in a hospice which is only affordable because treatment has been held back from a cancer patient.

Imagine being a mother whose child who can receive treatment for a disease because a terminally ill Grandmother has been denied the drug she needs.

Now imagine being the family of, or the patient who has been denied treatment. It’s heart-wrenching stuff.

£95,873M was the allocation to the NHS for 2013/14[1] which seems like huge amount of money, but however much or little it is, books must be balanced. Those on the NICE committee making the decisions about whether drugs should be recommended may appear to have cold hearts, but they have to see the bigger picture. One family needing a treatment for a loved one will have tunnel vision on that; anyone would. But the budget is set and there has to be a committee to delegate funds.

Unfortunately, those do not go where we might sometimes wish they would. Hopefully it is not impossible to see at least some of the bigger picture.

[1] National Health Service Commissioning Board Annual Report & Accounts 2013-14 (pg 21)

For a summary of NICE appraisal decisions, see https://www.nice.org.uk/news/nice-statistics