Phrases: work

we never let the committee assess individuals. ... We asked them to review the work of the group as a whole. Because if they went down to individuals, they would say, this man is unproductive. He hasn’t published anything for the last five years. So you’ve got to have institutions that can not only allow this, but also protect the people that are... See more

“If it weren’t for the near-total dominance of the idea that amyloid is the only appropriate drug target, we would be 10 or 15 years ahead of where we are now.”45

Seemay Chou, biologist and co-founder of the Astera Institute, writes: “In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. ... Scientists should probably be putting out shorter narratives, datasets, code, and models at a faster rate, with more visibility into their thinking, mistakes, and... See more

Another alternative to the principal investigator model is exemplified by DARPA. The DARPA model focuses on a program manager with a vision for an ambitious technological goal. The PM contracts out to labs to perform the work, but they control the vision and the budget. This model lends itself well to ambitious technological prototypes, and was the... See more

You’re all quite remarkably clueless and dishonest.

The PI model forces one person to play several roles: research, management, administration, and fundraising; at many universities, teaching is added, not to mention serving as a reviewer for journal papers or grant committees. More importantly, it means that each lab has to sell itself to the outside world, to funders who don’t know the researchers... See more

He also says that the lab has a collaborative atmosphere, since the success of any one researcher helps the entire lab do well.53

onomatopoeia

A modern biology lab applying some of these lessons is the Arc Institute, based in Palo Alto and partnered with Stanford, Berkeley, and UCSF. Investigators at Arc get their labs fully funded for renewable 8-year terms to pursue curiosity-driven research; institute co-founder Silvana Konermann says that they “want to take away the short-term demand... See more