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.

That’s not necessarily because they’re wrong. It’s because they are imprecise: the pundits won’t fully commit to anything. “The year ahead will be difficult for Boris Johnson,” that sort of thing. Whatever happens, it’ll be hard to say whether that prediction came true or not.

What’s much more worthwhile is making clear, well-defined, falsifiable forecasts, with fixed timetables: forecasts that commit you to say “OK, I got that wrong.”

I had a go here, here and here during the pandemic (an embarrassing number of which have been wrong). But since it’s the new year, I thought I might stake my own reputation on a few forecasts for 2022.

To do so, I’m going to use the Phil Tetlock “superforecasting” model, of giving lots of forecasts with levels of confidence. So I might say it’s 60% likely that Boris Johnson will have another child in 2022, or that there’s only a 10% chance that Keir Starmer will be prime minister by the end of the year. At the end of the year, I’ll look at all my forecasts. Ideally, about 60% of my 60%-confident forecasts should have come true, and about 10% of my 10%-confident forecasts, and so on[1.  Ideally ideally, I’d have made hundreds of forecasts and you could get a really good sample to see how well-calibrated I am. But unfortunately that’s not going to happen, because calculating these takes ages.].

I’ve used the prediction site Metaculus for my questions. When the site had a good question on it already, I’ve used that; when I needed to make up my own, I’ve done that. I’ve linked to the questions so you can make your own predictions and see what the wider Metaculus community thinks.

Coronavirus

I think that this year will see things return pretty much to normal in Britain. Every so often there’ll be a bit of a flare-up, and some people will call for an immediate return to mandatory masks and closed pubs and all that. But 90% of the population aged over 12 has now had at least one jab and 60% have had three, and most people have probably had the actual disease as well (13 million confirmed cases, which is likely an undercount by at least 60%). So the actual risk to British people is low.

That said, about 100 people are still dying every day with Covid. That sounds bad, and it is, but it’s only about one in every 16 deaths in the UK. Still, if it carries on at that rate for the whole year, we’d expect another 35,000 to 40,000 deaths this year. It may not carry on at that rate all year, but I can’t imagine it’ll drop so much that we see fewer than 20,000. So I’d say it’s 75% likely that we see 20,000 or more deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test in Britain in 2022.

Also, I think we’ll get a few scares from new variants. The WHO has announced five “variants of concern” since the pandemic began, the most recent being Omicron. Given a base rate of about 2.5 a year so far, it’s pretty likely that we’ll see more this year. Whether any of them will be as devastating as Delta or Alpha is a bigger question, but I’d say it’s 90% likely that the WHO will announce at least one new variant of concern in 2022.

Relatedly, if new VoCs do arise, will one of them overtake Omicron as the most commonly detected strain of Covid in the world? Again, I think this is pretty likely – I’d say there’s only a 30% chance that Omicron will be dominant by next January. Six weeks ago we’d never heard of Omicron and Delta was dominant; the original Covid was overtaken by Alpha only eight months or so after it was declared a pandemic. So far no variant has remained dominant for more than a few months and Omicron appears to be petering out in South Africa.

Predictions:

More than 20,000 people will die within 28 days of a positive Covid test in the UK in 2022 (75%)

The WHO will add another variant to their Variants of Concern in 2022 (90%)

Omicron will be the globally dominant strain of Covid at the end of 2022 (30%)

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Vaccinations

The UK’s booster campaign has rolled out with impressive speed since it was announced in September. But there have been suggestions that we will need to do annual Covid jabs, as we do for flu. So I predict it is likely (65%) that we will offer fourth jabs to healthy British adults before the end of 2022.

Not that I think we should do this. I think the vaccines we’ve already had will probably protect people very effectively against severe disease and death even once the measurable antibodies have declined, and I think each new jab will do lots more good in the arms of unvaccinated people in lower-income countries than they will in the arm of a triple-jabbed pensioner in Reading. But given that governments have a duty to look after their own citizens, and, more pressingly, a need to curry favour with those citizens to avoid being voted out, I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll do it. Metaculus forecasters think it’s likely in the US, as well.

The important thing will be whether we vaccinate the world, and especially the poorest countries. It should be said that despite a widespread and understandable feeling that the West has hoarded all the vaccines, almost 60% of the world’s population has received at least one jab, and even lower-middle income countries (which include places like Bangladesh and Egypt) have vaccinated more than 50%.

But the truly poor countries – places like Afghanistan, Sudan, North Korea and many sub-Saharan nations – are lagging badly behind, at only about 8.5% coverage. It’s been speeding up, and in richer countries vaccinations have followed an S-shaped curve – slowly, then quicker and quicker, then slowing down again. But looking at the curve on the Our World in Data page, it looks like the low-income countries are taking off at about a quarter the speed that the rich ones did.

It took rich nations about six months to get to 50% coverage: the world makes vaccines faster now, but also there are still huge logistical and incentive problems for getting those vaccines to poorer countries. I’d guess that between 30% and 60% of inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries will have had at least one jab by 2022. I think it’s also pretty likely (75%) that at least one country will still have fewer than 10% vaccine coverage, just because there are a lot of poor countries, some of which have basically no working health infrastructure.

Predictions:

The UK will authorise fourth doses of Covid vaccines for healthy adults in 2022 (65%)

What percentage of people in low-income countries will have had at least one dose of a vaccine by 2023? – between 30% and 60%

At least one nation will have less than 10% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose by 2023 (75%)

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Climate

The world will continue to warm, on average, over the next few years. There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere already for that to change.

But there’s a lot of variability from year to year. Most years are somewhat hotter than the one before, but not always: of the 20 years leading up to 2020, 13 have been hotter than the previous year, and seven have been cooler, according to the Met Office. So the base rate is that it’s about 65% likely that 2022 will be warmer than 2021.

That said, 2021 has been a relatively cool year, due to La Niña, an atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon that brings cold water to the surface of the oceans. La Niña finished some months ago, so it shouldn’t affect 2022. I think it’s therefore very likely (85%) that 2022 will be hotter than 2021, when the data eventually comes in.

Prediction:

The global average surface temperature in 2022 will be higher than it was in 2021 (85%)

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By Tom Chivers

Energy

There’s a cruel joke that goes to the effect that “fusion energy is 30 years away and always will be”. That said, in the last few years, there’s been a lot more excitement about it, and several new companies have started up, with nearly two billion dollars of funding backing them.

It’s very unlikely that fusion energy will reach any of its milestones – “ignition” or “breakeven” or profitability or anything – this year, and pretty unlikely that they’ll do it this decade. But I do think that the excitement will carry on building. According to a survey by the Fusion Industry Association, there are “at least 35” fusion companies around the world, most of which have been founded in the last 10 years. I think it’s likely (65%) that number will go up in 2022, as the technical questions continue to be answered, and as investors and entrepreneurs get more excited about the possibility of a viable, profitable industry.

Also, the cost of solar energy has plummeted over the past decades. It will almost certainly continue to do so, but since it is already cheaper than any form of fossil fuel, cost is no longer the sticking point. Now, the bottleneck for renewable energy is making it available when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing – having loads of sunshine in August is no good for heating your house in December.

There are various ways of doing that, such as installing cables between countries, so the UK’s offshore wind can supply Spain when it’s windy, and Spain’s solar can supply the UK when it’s sunny. But the most obvious is storage, and the most obvious form of electricity storage is batteries.

The cost of electricity storage has also dropped enormously – according to Bloomberg, it’s gone from a global average of about $300 per megawatt-hour in 2018 to $138 in 2021, mainly driven by the electric car industry. Despite supply chain issues and increased cost of various raw materials, mainly metals, I think that’s probably going to carry on – I think it’s 80% likely that the next Bloomberg report will find that the global average drops in 2022.

We’ll still rely on fossil fuels for some years to come. But I think in 2022 we’ll see some of the pieces of the zero-carbon future start to come together.

Predictions:

There will be more fusion companies at the end of 2022 than there were at the end of 2021 (65%)
The cost of battery storage will be lower per megawatt-hour at the end of 2022 than it was at the end of 2021(80%)

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Have we seen the end of Covid?

By Tom Chivers

Medicine

The biggest thing in medicine this year has been the Covid vaccines. And they’re pretty astonishing things. Remember that at the start of 2020, there were zero approved mRNA vaccines in the world: now billions of people have been given one, and millions of lives have been saved.

You can use mRNA vaccines for pretty much any disease, and in the next few years we’ll doubtless see them for all sorts of things. One that really interests me is cancer. Cancer “vaccines” aren’t like vaccines for measles or Covid – they’re treatments, given to people who have already been diagnosed with the disease, rather than prophylactics given to people at risk of contracting them. As I understand it, it involves presenting the immune system with the RNA sequence for a protein specific to that patient’s cancer, which will help the body fight that cancer. It’s a sort of personalised advance on existing immunotherapy, which has already turned various previously fatal cancers into largely manageable chronic illnesses. So this could be a really big deal in coming years.

Lots of drug companies have plans to make cancer mRNA vaccines. For instance, BioNTech has four ongoing Phase II trials. I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll hear good news from at least one of them, and that a Phase III trial with thousands of participants will be announced. Let’s say 55%.

Prediction:

A Phase III trial of at least one of BioNTech’s cancer mRNA vaccines will be announced in 2022(55%).

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Football

Until a week or so ago Liverpool were one point off the lead and looking good: then they drew with Spurs, lost bizarrely to Leicester after missing a penalty, and then drawing with Chelsea despite being two-nil up after half an hour. And Man City should have lost to Arsenal but Arsenal decided to be Arsenal and gave away a penalty and had a man sent off within 10 minutes and threw it away.

So now Liverpool are 11 points off the top (albeit with a game in hand) and let’s face it the title race is over in January. I reckon only about a 10% chance of turning it around. Still, there’s always the Champions League.

Prediction: Liverpool will win the league this year (10%)

Conclusion

I wanted to add another couple of questions, but they’re hard to do good data on. For instance, I bet that global extreme poverty will be lower in 2022 than it was in 2021, as it has been almost every year for the last 40. But we won’t get good data for a few years. I also bet that even though the world will get better on most metrics, such as life expectancy, wealth, etc, an increasing share of people will still think that it’s getting worse, because that’s how we work. But that’s hard to get into a straightforward question, and again, even if we could, the data for 2022 won’t be around until 2025 or something anyway. Still, I think those things are probably true.

My final prediction is that these predictions will not be very accurate. I’d love it if you would have a go and see if you can do better.