The NIH policy response to the aging pattern has been quotas for younger grantees.
While the motive for this policy - encouraging entry into scientific entry careers - may be well
founded, the quota response itself raises serious questions. To the extent that it is increasingly
difficult to produce key ideas in the early life-cycle (as suggested by expansions of foundational
knowledge, increased training duration, and by observing Nobel Prize winners, great
technological inventors, and ordinary patent holders through time), such quotas divert resources
to projects with less innovative potential. Increasing wage support for students, post-doctorates,
or researchers, or accelerating training, as discussed above, may all act to attract talented
individuals to basic research careers without redistributing scarce grant dollars away from top
quality proposals.
V. Rethinking Science Policy: Collaboration
Science is shifting universally from an individual to a team production model. This shift,
and the associated mechanism by which teamwork can aggregate expertise, raises challenges for
how ideas are evaluated by government institutions and, more broadly, how scientists are
rewarded for their work.
A. Individual Rewards
There is a storied tradition in science of rewarding particular individuals for remarkable
contributions. This tendency is evident in the nomenclature of science, where celebrated
achievements historically often carry the scientist’s name - Euclidean geometry, Newton’s laws
of motion, Mendelian inheritance, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to name a few.
Furthermore, there are numerous prizes, often with financial and status rewards, that typically if
not exclusively tend to emphasize individual contributions, including Nobel Prizes, the Fields
Medal, and the A.M. Turing Award, among many others.
To the extent that individual scholars produce great ideas, incentive mechanisms that
reward individuals appear to mirror the inventive process. However, as documented in Section
II, there has been a ubiquitous shift toward teamwork in science, both as the common format for
research and as the organizational locus of the most highly cited work. It does not appear that
the reward system of science has caught up with this shift. While individual contributions may
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