We are all aware that scientific research sometimes leads to unexpected discoveries. Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin is a well-known example, when he noticed that bacteria were being killed in a neglected petri dish in which mold had been developing. A study recently published in Research Policy has tried to quantify the occurrence of such serendipitous discoveries by going through 1.2 million publications produced from 90,000 NIH grants. Not by the research group that produced the study actually reading all these papers, but by training a machine learning algorithm to analyze them.
The conclusion was that a third of the grants yielded a significant discovery outside the research goals of the project funded by the grant. That may or may not be a surprise (though it is certainly welcome news), but there is more that can be learned from this study. Large grants more often yield serendipitous results than smaller grants. Presumably, research teams that are financially less constrained are more likely to notice, and follow up on, unexpected results. And projects with a narrow, specific focus on producing a desired result are less likely to do so. This, of course, argues in favor of broad academic freedom and support for basic scientific research. Pressing for quick results and telling researchers not to waste money on “irrelevant results” is counterproductive. Another category of fewer serendipitous results: PhD theses. Why? PhD students are generally very focused and time constrained. And they are, let’s say, inexperienced.
That rang a bell for me, personally. And I realized that I had been guilty in this respect. While working on my doctoral thesis, my mentor Morton Roberts (although not my thesis advisor) and I published a very short paper in 1973 on galaxy masses. My thesis project was on the distribution and kinematics of neutral atomic hydrogen gas in the spiral galaxy M81, in Ursa Major. We noticed that in M81, as well as in two other galaxies (M31 and M101), and our own galaxy, the rotation indicated that there was much more mass, especially in the outer regions, than could be accounted for with observed matter. I put that aside, as I was focused on the distribution and motions of the gas associated with the spiral structure. Several years later, Vera Rubin was intrigued by the conundrum posed by that surplus mass and was smart enough to follow up on it. Thus, we now know about dark matter—and even though we still don’t know what it is, we do know that there is a lot of it: more than five times as much as “normal” baryonic matter (i.e., the kind of matter that makes up stars, planets, and living organisms). And then there is Dark Energy; but that is something for another story.
The history of science is at risk of being rewritten
Vera deserved a Nobel Prize; no need to guess the reason why she didn’t get one. But her name also came up recently in another context. Science faces an uncertain future in the U.S. these days and there are many reasons to be concerned—alarmed, even. But what I had not expected was that, in the name of ideological compliance (after banned books we now have banned words), the history of science is also at risk of being rewritten. Yet here it is. Vera Rubin’s biography on the website of the Vera Rubin Observatory has been changed to remove any language that could be interpreted as supporting DEI1https://www.propublica.org/article/vera-rubin-astronomer-dei-trump. It’s another low point. Vera faced many challenges in her career. She was a strong (and kind!) woman and she is a perfect role model.
A postscript on a different subject. The State of the Nation Project has issued a national progress report2https://stateofnation.org/. That report card is not pretty. I recommend the executive summary. Three of the top-level conclusions:
- We are a nation of extremes—extreme successes and extreme failures.
- Our national trends are improving in more areas than we are declining. However, relative to other countries, the opposite is true—we are declining in more areas than we are improving.
- Our rising incomes are not translating into greater perceived well-being and social relations.
More depressing news to ponder in these chaotic days…
I apologize.
