How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner by Elizabeth Dzeng.
From the post:
I recently had the privilege of speaking with Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. My original intention was to ask him about Professor Frederick Sanger, the two-time Nobel Prize winner famous for his discovery of the structure of proteins and his development of DNA sequencing methods, who passed away in November. I wanted to do the classic tribute by exploring his scientific contributions and getting a first hand account of what it was like to work with him at Cambridge’s Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and at King’s College where they were both fellows. What transpired instead was a fascinating account of the LMB’s quest to unlock the genetic code and a critical commentary on why our current scientific research environment makes this kind of breakthrough unlikely today.
If you or any funders you know are interested in fostering innovation, that is actually enabling innovation to happen, this is a must read interview for you.
If you are any funders you know are interested in boosting about “fostering innovation,” creating “new breakthroughs” while funding the usual suspects, etc., just pass this one by.
One can only hope that observations of proven innovators like Sydney Brenner will carry more weight that political ideologies in the research funding process.
I first saw this in a tweet by Ivan Herman.