39 blurbs
Back in May I wrote about David Bessis’ essay “ The fall of the theorem economy ”. In it, he argued that theorem proving has historically been a reliable proxy for producing conceptual innovation and insight in mathemati…
Jordan Dworkin: Four years ago, in “ A Vision of Metascience ”, Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu asked the reader to imagine they were “ a science fiction writer depicting a scientific discovery made by an alien species. ”…
There’s been a lot of writing lately on what AI is going to do to the university. The most recent entry is from Kevin Munger, who writes in Asterisk that the threat isn’t that AI replaces universities or makes them obsol…
Last week the NIH released an RFI proposing a change to how it uses and reports peer review scores. Instead of receiving a numerical impact score and percentile, applicants would learn only which of three bins their prop…
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past week, it’s that people love quote round-ups. If there’s another thing I’ve learned, it’s that scientists have a lot of feelings about AI in science. With their powers combine…
Last week Refine announced partnerships with the AEA and the Econometric Society, both of which will now use its AI-assisted technical review in their publication process. The current implementation is narrow, only a “pr…
If you’ve been following the conversation around the design of scientific institutions and funding strategies, you may have come across a table breaking down how different characteristics map onto different mechanisms. F…
This week I’m at the NBER Summer Institute , taking in lots of new work on the economics of science and innovation. Two of the papers being presented have already made appearances on this blog (one on idea diffusion , an…
This Monday was the deadline for public comments on OMB’s proposed rewrite of the rules governing federal grantmaking. The response was immense, with more than 200k comments submitted over the past few weeks. As expected…
For America’s 250th anniversary, Brad Wible invited a trio of pieces for Science’s Policy Forum tracing the institutional shifts that built the modern US scientific enterprise. Ronald Daniels writes about the founding of…
There are a growing number of AI tools for various components of the scientific process, but there are rarely careful, public evaluations of how they perform and compare. Last week Refine, an AI-powered review tool for e…
It’s 2017 again: the Gorillaz are topping charts, Star Wars is in theaters, and the NIH is discussing a potential cap on the number of grants a single PI can hold at once. Last week the agency published an RFI floating p…
Last week the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a proposed revision to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance . It runs 412 pages, and carries significant implications for federally funded science in…
Earlier this month NSF announced its new X-Labs program , a $1.5 billion, decade-long initiative to fund independent, milestone-driven research teams working outside of traditional university and corporate structures. Th…
In other news, arXiv’s CS section chair Thomas Dietterich announced that authors who submit papers with “incontrovertible evidence” of unchecked AI content (e.g. hallucinated references or leftover chat content like “her…
Our scientific ecosystem often prizes outputs that, themselves, don’t necessarily drive scientific progress, but instead are useful proxies for the more intangible processes that do. Three reads this week have me thinkin…
Many leading science funders have a stated goal of supporting ambitious, “high-risk, high-reward” research, or at least specific programs dedicated to that cause — to give a few examples: “ ARIA was built to… go after id…
Jordan Dworkin: As Science Evolves, How Can Science Policy? Coming up in science, my peers and I enjoyed critiquing the institutions in which we worked, and occasionally used our computational skills to probe and quantif…
As AI drives down the time & effort cost required to produce scientific grant proposals, funders are likely to be flooded with eligible, reasonable-seeming submissions that strain an already overburdened review system. I…
In the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush famously posited that “ scientific progress… results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in a manner dictated by their curiosity. ” In a …
One thing I’m not reading this week: your writing about metascience policy. If you’d like to fix that, Emergent Ventures just announced a new tranche of grants for (1) metascience policy entrepreneurs and (2) science & m…
The legal fight over the NIH’s proposed 15% indirect cost cap is over (for now). STAT reports that the administration let the Supreme Court petition deadline pass without filing, ending 14 months of litigation. The court…
This week, there were two very different pieces on reforming how we fund science. In City Journal, Michael Gibson (former VP of Grants at the Thiel Foundation) argues that Jim O’Neill’s nomination as NSF director is a ch…
However you want to reform science funding, structural shake-ups require that there are functioning agencies to reform; to keep tabs on how things are going on that front, Grant Witness is now tracking NIH and NSF fundin…
How about one more from Asimov before they go: this week Alvin Djajadikerta published “ Designing AI for Disruptive Science .” In it, he explores the possibility that (current approaches to) AI-for-science might enhance …
Ryan Hill and Carolyn Stein have a new working paper on how AlphaFold has affected protein structure research in the five years since its release. They ask three primary questions: Did experimental (i.e., non-computation…
Got your guesses about Alphafold ready? Here’s what Hill and Stein found. Did experimental (i.e., non-computational) structure determination decline? The rate of experimental structure determination is unchanged, and the…
In a previous post , we noted that Congress largely preserved science budgets for FY26, rejecting large proposed cuts. Unfortunately appropriations are only step one. A few weeks ago Nature reported that OMB has been wit…
On a happier note: This week the Astera Institute announced Radial , a new division committing up to $500M over the next decade to experimenting with how life sciences research is organized, funded, and shared. Early pro…
There was a good back-and-forth on NIH funding in the Good Science Project last week. Aishwarya Khanduja and Stuart Buck first made the case that science funders would benefit from adopting some VC-style practices, then …
STAT reports on a growing number of state-level science funding proposals. Massachusetts’ governor has proposed a $400 million DRIVE initiative, a coalition of medical schools and researchers is pushing New York to creat…
A new NBER working paper introduces GABRIEL , an open-source library that wraps GPT for extracting, rating, ranking, and categorizing qualitative information from text data. Of note for innovation policy: they apply the …
This week I’m working my way through Asterisk Magazine’s newest issue on science, which has many excellent pieces relevant to folks working on innovation policy. Click for Jolie Gan’s exploration of the increased importa…
It’s admin burden week in the AGF Innovation Policy vertical. Let’s start with the good: last week the NIH announced that they will no longer consider “Basic Experimental Studies Involving Humans (BESH)” to be clinical t…
Now for the ugly: a few days ago the Council on Government Relations released a new report on research regulations ; they find that 66% of new or revised requirements since 1991 have been issued in the last 10 years, wit…
When drugs lose patent protection, the incentive for large-scale clinical trials of new indications dries up. A recent working paper estimates that hundreds of new uses for existing drugs have gone undeveloped as a resul…
Last week’s science appropriations news was encouraging, but a Nature feature this week documents the damage done over the last year: almost 8,000 grants were terminated or frozen (2,600 of which have not been reinstated…
Congress is pushing back on the administration’s proposed science cuts, as the NYT and Science report. The Senate’s bipartisan CJS package largely preserves funding across the board — science budgets at NASA and DOE are …
Market shaping. So hot right now. But for funders used to the simplicity of push funding, it can be difficult to figure out how to appropriately size a pull mechanism such that it sufficiently incentivizes innovation wit…