Who do we science for?

On obligations and audience

Today’s post was inspired by this Open Water post, and is related to the last few discussions we’ve been having about the “ends” of scientific research, and all the reasons to study plants.

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Anyone who says “in academia, you have the freedom to work on anything you want” is probably a tenured white guy working on cancer at a coastal R1. For everyone else, thinking about the audience for our research is practically (as well as ethically) necessary. There are plenty of reasons for this. Just a few:

1. it helps us get funding

2. it helps us publish our papers

3. it helps us recruit students and postdocs

4. it helps our personal career advancement

5. we are obligated to funding agencies, fields, academic institutions, and society

There’s so much that could be said about all of these points! Today, let’s discuss how a sense of obligation to funding agencies can create distorted thinking.

Obligations

Most life science research requires money to make it happen, and most of that money comes from funding agencies, either run by the government or by private foundations. So, funding agencies are one audience scientists pitch to, and it makes sense that they feel an obligation to those agencies once the money has arrived.

However, in most cases, once you have secured funding for your research, you are not obligated to do exactly what you originally proposed. Grants are not contracts, and most funding agencies build in some leeway. It’s generally understood that the best way forward will change once you are doing the work (it can be as many months between the writing of a proposal and the arrival of the funds). New information or tools will come to light, or you might make an unexpected discovery that begs to be understood. I once inquired about changing aims from what I had proposed to NSF, and my program officer said, “we just want credit for the most high impact work you do.” Some private foundations can be even more flexible (“we fund people, not projects”) and others can be very focused on milestones and “deliverables.”

That said, it’s not cool to agree to do one thing to get the money, and then turn around to do something completely different. This bait-and-switch is not as rare as you’d think, especially with larger collaborative grants. It’s pretty tempting to take money intended to move a large consortium project forward, and then use it for work that is more interesting to you. But the money we use for research is given us for a reason, and we have obligations to our funders to do what we were asked to do.

None of this seems problematic, at least on the surface. It’s reasonable to ask that there be some accountability for the money scientists get to do research. There’s usually flexibility in the practical aspects of spending that money. But still, things can get a bit twisted. Scarcity in funding and attention create a situation where linking your work to something practical seems paramount. In fact, it often seems more important than making the argument that you can’t translate something you haven’t discovered yet, or that simply understanding the world a bit better is worthwhile.

As a result, researchers end up doing two things that I think are harmful:

1. Overstating how applied the work is

As I was starting to weigh out the pros and cons of leaving my faculty position, I did consider trying to make my work more applied. Maybe I could pivot to working on an agriculturally relevant plant, or try to get plants on the moon, or study carbon capture by plant roots. But I had become so deeply cynical about the ways in which plant biology research was justified that I couldn’t make myself do it.

I was particularly conflicted about the argument that genetically engineering plants is the solution to hunger. We already produce enough food to feed the world if we all go vegetarian. Seen this way, hunger isn’t an agricultural issue; it’s a political or a climate or a sociological problem. And how does one justify all the plastic involved in molecular biology research, the constant jet travel for researchers to promote their work? When “energy-saving crops” are developed, the energy that was used up in the research and development process are rarely taken into consideration.

I should say that I don’t really feel quite so jaded about GMO development these days. It’s not a zero-sum game; we can try to address hunger politically and sociologically AND by developing new crops. And there’s no doubt that some crops and many livelihoods have been saved by GMOs—a great example is transgenic papaya in Hawaii.

We know that translational work relies on discovery-based science, and we know that understanding the world a bit better is worthwhile even if it’s not pegged to curing disease or hunger. But few scientists will formally define the goal of their research in this way, instead leaning into the argument that they are protecting or advancing human health—no matter how absurdly tenuous the connection is. Ask me how I know.

2. Underestimating “the public”

When scientists behave as if all our work must have a practical or translational role, we are not just failing to communicate the importance of discovery science. We are also underestimating the capacity of “the public” to appreciate it.

A few years ago, I was part of a group of plant scientists working together to write a white paper that articulated a set of goals for the next decade of plant science research in the US. The hubris of a few people doing this on behalf of an entire field notwithstanding, it was a fascinating exercise.

I saw my role at this “plant summit” as advocating for the value of basic research, and I’m sure I annoyed almost everyone there with my constant reminders to include this point. The weirdest and most crazy-making conversation I had was with a senior plant biologist who does purely fundamental plant biology research in their lab. This eminent researcher insisted to me that “the public” would not be interested in any plant research that wasn’t justified by its potential to help us produce more or better food, and that we would be selling ourselves short if we didn’t make all our work revolve, at least publicly, around this one goal.

My view is the mirror opposite; I think scientists are selling other people short when we assume they will never be interested in any work that’s not justified as leading to improved health for humans. Astronomy and deep sea ventures and trips to the moon are clear examples of research that grab attention purely on the basis of discovery and curiosity. Everyone’s imagination could be similarly sparked by understanding plants and animals better.

In fact, one of the biggest splashes in plant biology around the time I attended the summit was the visualization of wound-induced long-distance calcium signaling in plants, shown by Simon Gilroy's group. An article in the Science Times didn’t mention a single thing about how this new knowledge could be exploited to make better crops or other plant products. It was simply thrilling science, done beautifully.

More of that, please.

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Discussion Section

I would be so interested in your answers to these questions:

• If you are a scientist, how do you justify your work?

• What are other reasons to feel obligations around our research topic?

• If you are not a scientist, how do you think about academic research and what should drive it?