Experts disagree on what has been holding science back. A common explanation is that potential discoveries are fewer and harder to find, absolving scientists, and institutions, from responsibility. In reality, similar complaints have been made in nearly every era, for example by late 19th-century physicists on the brink of discovering relativity. And such explanations can be self-fulfilling: it’s harder to get funding for ambitious exploratory work deemed infeasible by your peers.

To understand the slower pace of discovery, it is crucial to understand the process by which scientific breakthroughs happen. It can be illustrated by a surprisingly simple three-phase model. First, in the exploration phase, if a new scientific idea attracts the attention of enough scientists, they learn some of its key properties. Second, in the breakthrough phase, scientists learn how to utilise those key properties fruitfully in their work. Third, in the final phase, as the idea matures, advances are incremental. It still generates useful insights, but the most important ones have been exhausted; much of the work in this phase focuses on the idea’s practical applications.

Scientists are quite willing to work on ideas during the breakthrough phase — after all, everyone wants in on a project with good prospects. They are also willing to work on mature ideas, to reap the social benefits of successful ideas. But working on novel ideas exposes a scientist’s career to considerable risk, because most of them fail. This bias against exploratory science is a critical driver of the field’s stagnation, because the greatest risks often come with the greatest rewards. For example, researchers who sought to first edit genes in mammalian cells in 2011 considered CRISPR technology a risky choice, because the technique was still in many ways undeveloped. Today, by contrast, it is one of the most celebrated advances in biomedicine.

The graph below shows the development of four hypothetical ideas — A, B, C and D — through the three stages of this model. Given sustained scientific effort in the exploration phase, ideas A and B will develop into important advances; idea A’s S-curve is steeper in the breakthrough phase, meaning it is of the most significance to the broader scientific community. By contrast, ideas C and D will never amount to much, no matter how much effort is expended on them. The problem for scientists is that, in the exploration phase, the potential impact of all four ideas could appear nearly identical.

This bias against exploratory science points to a critical driver of scientific stagnation: scientists are frequently reluctant to spend their time exploring new ideas and have increasingly turned their attention to incremental science. This is backed up by quantitative evidence. University of Chicago biologist Andrey Rzhetsky and his colleagues found: “The typical research strategy used to explore chemical relationships in biomedicine… generates conservative research choices focused on building up knowledge around important molecules. These choices [have] become more conservative over time.” Another paper by the same team (led this time by UCLA sociologist Jacob Foster) also reports: “High-risk innovation strategies are rare and reflect a growing focus on established knowledge.” Meanwhile, a recent analysis by University of Arizona sociologist Russell Funk and his colleagues tracks a “marked decline in disruptive science and technology over time”, and attributes this trend to scientists relying on a narrowing set of existing knowledge.

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And yet, the underlying risk of failure in exploratory research has always been a feature of scientific investigation. So why is it dictating scientists’ behaviour more than ever? In short, because of the change in the way their success is measured. The rule for research scientists used to be “publish or perish”. First articulated in the Forties, this notion designates a scientist who publishes many papers as “productive”. But in recent decades, the importance of this metric has faded. Now, the popularity of a given article trumps all, and popularity is measured by the number of times other scientific papers cite it. Like the sports statistics sites that report the batting averages of professional baseball hitters, services such as Google Scholar and Web of Science report the extent of a scientist’s influence, valuing their work based on the number of citations it has garnered. The new mantra is: be influential or be sidelined.

This fixation has decreased the incentive to engage in exploration. When a scientist ventures into an emerging area of investigation, the work is unlikely to garner many citations, because few other scientists will be working on related topics. By contrast, as a successful idea matures, the relative certainty of making discoveries — however incremental — attracts more scientists to the area, and if many people are working in that field, their work will receive more citations.

The figures below illustrate the shift in research priorities following this change in scientist incentives. Before the citation obsession, a healthy proportion of scientists was willing to engage in exploration. Today (right panel), scientists are less willing to play with new ideas, and instead pursue incremental advances. This swing in scientist effort has been costly, as fewer ideas have developed into breakthroughs.

Noubar Afeyan, a co-founder of Moderna, is one of many scientists to note that incremental advances are the norm in academia today. He urges reforms to foster a culture in which scientific leaps receive more encouragement — and are rewarded to some extent even when they fail.

One way to achieve this involves indexing the text of a research publication based on the words and word sequences that appear — a process that reveals a list of the ideas upon which an article builds. A paper that relies on more recent ideas is more likely to reflect exploratory science — and services such as Google Scholar should report novelty measures in addition to citation metrics. While those novelty measures are not perfect, they are no more flawed than citation metrics as a measure of scientific influence, and offer one more way to evaluate work. A sports page that reports only batting average would provide a very incomplete picture of the value of a home-run-hitting slugger who strikes out frequently. Scientific evaluation services should similarly avoid presenting an incomplete picture.

An alternative, and idealistic, response would be to stop measuring scientific impact at all — but in reality, this is infeasible. Scientists, like other high-status professionals, cannot escape today’s relentless performance quantification.

Moreover, when used correctly, metrics can serve a useful purpose in allocating limited research dollars. Here, too, scientific endeavour will require a shift. As well as university administrators, funding agencies should start using new novelty metrics when making hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. Doing so will greatly increase the incentive for scientists to pursue exploratory work. Science as a discipline would become more hospitable to people who might be staying out of academia for fear that exploration is punished rather than rewarded.

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Fortunately, at least in the United States, this goal enjoys cross-partisan support. The Biden administration’s first budget, for instance, included $6.5 billion for the founding of the ARPA-H funding model of biomedicine — which seeks to support “high-risk exploration that could establish entirely new paradigms”, by taking funding decisions away from influence-obsessed peer-reviewers. Still, this is merely an incremental step in the right direction; it directly affects the incentives of only a small subset of biomedical researchers engaged with the ARPA-H initiative. To truly reignite biomedical science, fundamental change is needed in the career incentives faced by a larger share of the research workforce.

The development of the mRNA Covid vaccines is an excellent example of what scientists can do when provided with the incentives to pursue novel work. It shows, too, that important discoveries are often the result of a sustained effort by a large community. Katalin Karikó, perhaps the most celebrated of the scientists who worked on the mRNA vaccines, credits hundreds of others for contributing to the effort. But these ideas only develop from infancy to breakthrough if many researchers are willing to try them out, develop them, and debate their merits. When many others are willing to take the risk of trying out new ideas, individual scientists are more likely to get involved.

The history of mRNA vaccine technology also provides evidence of the hostility offered to novel ideas within science. Key research papers related to the early development were time and again rejected by the leading scientific journals, which fear losing status if they publish too much exploratory science, because it’s less likely to go anywhere. Yet as we have seen, it is nearly impossible to understand the feasibility and significance of new ideas in their infancy, when they are still raw and poorly understood. And the rejection of innovative work by top journals renders negative judgments self-fulfilling: without the attention of other scientists, many ideas die in obscurity regardless of their potential.

It is time, then, to put science back on the path envisioned by the engineer Vannevar Bush in his 1945 report for President Roosevelt. Motivated by the loss of academic freedom during the Second World War, it emphasised the importance of open-ended exploration for scientific progress. His view that many valuable discoveries remain to be found was reflected in the title of Bush’s report, “Science: the Endless Frontier”. In the decades since, a monomaniacal focus on influence in research evaluation has fettered this exploration. If we valued it more highly, our frontiers might start to expand again.

He spoke exclusively to Freddie Sayers about that visit, what he and Musk discussed, and the wider implications of his suppression by Twitter.

What does being put on the Twitter “trends blacklist” actually mean?

What I understand is that my Twitter messages can reach people who directly follow me. But they have no chance of being put on a broader visibility setting, so that people who don’t follow me would see my messages. So I’m talking to my group, and I think everything’s fine, but my messages have an upper limit on how far and wide they go.

And this all began when you joined Twitter in August 2021, many months after you had signed the “Great Barrington Declaration” speaking against lockdowns and calling for an alternative approach to the pandemic.

That first day in August 2021 when I joined Twitter, apparently Twitter received a number of unspecified complaints about me. It’s not clear, from my time at Twitter headquarters, exactly from who. Their systems are not set up to answer that question very easily, although apparently people are looking into that. And that then induced Twitter to put me on this trends blacklist to make sure that my tweets didn’t reach a broad audience outside of my own network… It took somebody at Twitter — a human at Twitter had to think about it. The setting was then renewed repeatedly through 2021 and 2022.

Tell us about how Elon Musk got in touch and invited you to visit Twitter HQ.

So I get a Skype message from a common friend, someone who knows Elon and knows me. And it says, “Jay, I have an early Christmas present for you”. And then I’m on a signal group with Elon. And the first message from Elon is just “Hi”. And then he says, “Can you come this weekend to Twitter headquarters so we can show you your files, we can show you what’s what, what exactly Twitter 1.0 did?”

So describe the scene for us: what is Twitter HQ like in this new era?

You walk into Twitter headquarters in San Francisco and it looks like a five star hotel that’s been abandoned. There’s a very fancy restaurant, there’s all kinds of decorations and artwork… But nobody’s there, almost nobody’s there, everything’s empty, except when you go into the engineering area, with all of the cubicles, it’s filled with lots and lots of people trying very hard to make sure Twitter doesn’t explode. It’s Saturday, during the day, and they’re working hard.

You spoke with Elon for almost an hour. How was your conversation?

The topic, of course, was censorship. My sense is that he bought Twitter in part because he is deeply offended by the idea that something like Twitter, which is so important for public communication… had put their thumb on the scale. It wasn’t specifically about Covid. Generally, his sense was that one side of the conversation wasn’t being heard on many, many issues… I think he views this as: he’s in a very privileged position that allows him to restore free speech, allow for free discussion of ideas. And he wants to use what gifts he’s had for that purpose. He even made a joke: I could have bought an island with the $44 billion, but this was a much better use of the money.

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Was he a lockdown sceptic during the pandemic?

I think he generally was a lockdown sceptic… He famously, early in the pandemic, protested against being locked down when the shutdown orders came, and then moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas… He was very clear that he was aware of the harms of lockdowns. He mentioned the early days of the pandemic — that he had a number of plants in China, with tens of thousands of employees. He said: “Look, if somebody dies in amongst my employees, I find out immediately, because we stop paying them.” But he noticed that there were very, very few deaths on that metric early on. So his view was that it wasn’t clear that the case fatality rate numbers that were coming out matched reality in China itself, even from the earliest days of the pandemic… Certainly at this point, he was very sympathetic to my message about the harms to the poor of the world threatened by the economic dislocation caused by lockdowns, the closing of schools — all of that I think he opposed.

So then an engineer shows you your files. What did you find out?

An engineer comes to me, we talk in this little cubicle. And so it turns out that there are two major sources of information for the journalists that are looking at this. First, there’s this tool, which Bari Weiss made famous: for each person, they’ll have the status of the person and history of the status of that person… That includes some personal identifying information, which is why you’re not seeing a dump of those files for everybody, because they’re not supposed to share that… I had got permission to look at myself of course. And I asked for permission to look at Martin Kulldorff.

Was Martin Kulldorff also on the Trends Blacklist?

He had been, actually. His first placement on the trends blacklist was in July of 2020, when he was advocating for opening schools… He told me that what he was doing on Twitter was: whenever someone was mentioning that schools should close, he would post a link to the Swedish study that showed that when schools had opened in spring of 2020, no children had died and very few teachers had gotten sick relative to other workers in the population. He posted over and over and over, he said, and was more active on Twitter than at any other time. That’s exactly when the trends blacklist was applied on him, in July 2020. And then again, three more times in 2022. Although there was no active trends blacklist for Martin at the moment.

Is it still active for you?

It was still active when I was at Twitter. I hope it’s been removed. My tweets seem to go more viral nowadays.

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The engineers that were talking you through this, are they part of a minority of engineers that remain and are loyal to the new regime in some way?

The employees that are left are obviously very dedicated to making sure Twitter runs. The particular Twitter engineer that I worked with, he was moved over from Tesla. A number of the deputies of Elon were moved over from Tesla to help fight fires at Twitter… What they told me is that Elon is there ’til three o’clock at night… The people there are very dedicated to making sure that the site works and runs with a with a different philosophical basis, one of openness tied to free speech rather than suppression of ideas.

Do you think the pandemic response might have gone differently if voices such as yours were not suppressed?

Yes… I do really believe censorship kills, and censorship killed during this pandemic. The policies could have been so much better… The policies that were adopted were incredibly damaging to the lives and livelihoods of so many people. 100million people thrown into poverty worldwide: that’s the estimate from the World Bank. Just the consequences of that itself are going to have tremendous effects on the lives and livelihoods of people going forward. And of course, all these children were robbed of an education for years. Those are absolutely monumental outcomes of the policies we adopted during the pandemic, and they should have been freely discussed. My view of the scientific evidence is that it was so clear, even at the time, that we should not have been closing schools. And if we had been allowed to have a free and fair discussion, I think the schools would not have closed — if there hadn’t been this sort of demerit system for people who spoke up against these kinds of policies.

Do you worry that, with Twitter messages like “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”, Elon Musk is going too far and will imperil his project?

It’s not what I would do were I in his position. But on the other hand, I don’t have $44 billion to buy the company. The ideal person for this may not exist… we have to deal with the people we have in front of us. And Elon is, I think, a big step up from the previous ownership, who obviously weren’t that committed to free speech… I agree that it’s not the wisest use of his power. I think it would have been wiser to be more temperate in talking about, for instance, Tony Fauci. I think that Fauci made tremendous mistakes: he abused his power during the pandemic. And it’s led to a lot of problems. But I think the right redress is not to prosecute him, but for history to remember him having made those mistakes, and that in fact, although he may have committed his life to healing, the prescriptions he gave during the pandemic made the lives of so many people worse. 

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Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here.

“This is the saner approach, the more scientific approach,” the authors tell Freddie Sayers

Coming from both the left and right, and around the world, we have devoted our careers to protecting people. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice. 

Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.

Fortunately, our understanding of the virus is growing. We know that vulnerability to death from COVID-19 is more than a thousand-fold higher in the old and infirm than the young. Indeed, for children, COVID-19 is less dangerous than many other harms, including influenza. 

As immunity builds in the population, the risk of infection to all – including the vulnerable – falls. We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity – i.e.  the point at which the rate of new infections is stable – and that this can be assisted by (but is not dependent upon) a vaccine. Our goal should therefore be to minimize mortality and social harm until we reach herd immunity. 

The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection. 

Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent PCR testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. 

Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts, 4th October 2020

To sign the declaration, follow this link (will be live later today):
www.GBdeclaration.org