I have spent some time in biological science research and your comments about grants holds very true. The result is that a lot of money is funneled into inefficient laboratories producing safe and often not very useful research, that is when they aren't hording results for a Nature paper that will never come. Sometimes this benefits some truly terrible people who are ruthless in their goal of climbing up the ivory tower. There are still plenty of great people in academia who are doing well, but I wish medical research at least tried to be as meritocratic as it claims to be. Right now the grant committees are an old boys club.
You bet.
> biological science research
Yeah, similar dynamics play themselves out in all human endeavors. The Ford Pinto gas tank. The Corona Virus. Sub-prime mortgages. It's all examples of the bean-counters and the good-old-boy network overruling the technocrats. Welcome to the human condition.
Is any of this unique to JPL (or at least more extreme there) due its organizational structure that is somewhat different than other NASA Centers? I’ve sometimes heard of JPL being “quasi-NASA” and thus playing by a different set of rules
But you also have to keep in mind that this was all a very long time ago. I'm offering my testimony here not so much to inform current events as to vouch for the plausibility of what V_Terranova_Jr said in the root comment of this thread.
Even though it was a government agency, working at a national lab felt even more productive than the private sector.
The reasons are that the departmental leadership is 100% done by research scientists who are ruthlessly efficient at doing science and writing papers about them.
My department had approx. 4 senior scientists, a computer hardware engineer, a payload engineer, a CNC technician, a sysadmin, 2 technical consultants, and one administrative staff.
We did custom payloads for the Shuttle, balloons and rockets which did atmospheric measurements. The software was primarily custom in C for telemetry and HP Basic/etc. for plotting.
I highly recommend working for a national lab for a couple of years. Besides an unlimited budget, it's great having a sense of mission.
Factoid 1: We used Fidonet to copy data from launch sites to the lab for quick turnaround and to ensure the instruments were functioning and calibrated properly.
Factoid 2: Since this we pre-WWW, sample source code was often hard to obtain. So we had the world's shareware on a single optical disk with an index file so people could find sample code.
Factoid 3: But since it was a national lab, if we needed, we had access to SOTA civil and military systems that came with source code. I was familiar with those systems, but we never needed them while I was involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
What was more tractable about studying the ozone hole than climate change was that we could make direct observations and reducing CFCs had a fairly immediate effect. There wasn't an issue with "ozone hole deniers."
To see the lab's papers, do a scientific search for Dr. Hans Fast and his co-authors.
“I wrote proposals for work that I had already done, which insured that I would always be able to provide accurate predictions of the results.”
Also, in the case of the manned program, human lives are at risk.
What's the cost of NASA not going to the moon yet? Zero. What's the cost of NASA failing at going to the moon? Large.
Consequently: the organization optimizes to avoid failure at all costs, even at the cost of minimizing success.
On the other hand, what was the cost of 1960s NASA of not going to the moon? Large. The cost of failure? Large, but slightly less.
Result: we went to the moon.
Thanks.
> Can you say more about how the congressional district pork funnel works? I mean, how brazen is it?
That depends on what you mean by "brazen". In my tenure no one ever explicitly said, "We need to do X because we need to send money to congressional district Y." It was more like: "Your proposal will stand a much better chance if it's a joint proposal with institution Z." When I asked why, there was never any technical rationale for it. It was more like, "Look, I'm just trying to help you out here. Don't ask too many questions."
To be fair, sometimes those coerced collaborations were productive. But other times they caused some very serious problems in the case where there was really nothing useful coming out of Z. In that case we had to find a way to shoehorn something coming out of Z into the project, and that usually did not end well.
Hoo boy. How much time have you got?
The fundamental problem with NASA is that one of its main functions is to serve as a pork funnel to send money to key congressional districts. This goal is, as one might imagine, sometimes at odds with NASA's other mission of, you know, exploring space. When these are in conflict, the former wins. In the private sector there is a similar dynamic, but instead of the pork funnel tail wagging the engineering dog, it's maximizing profits that is the primary driver.
So what happens at some point in everyone's career is that they are given marching orders that serve the financial goal but not the technical ones and they have to decide what to do. If they raise objections they are labelled as "not a team player" and they don't get promoted. So the ranks of upper management are filled with people who are willing to play the game while the troublemakers are shunted off onto career sidings and turn into grumpy old men with no power or influence.
In my case I found myself in a very bizarre situation for two reasons. First, I had credentials that were visible outside the organization. I was a researcher with a pretty good publication and citation record (in fact, according to CiteSeer, I was the most cited CS researcher in all of NASA, and I held that title for about ten years after I left). That made it hard for them to fire me. And second, I had a patron, a senior manager who liked me and got me promoted over some pretty strenuous objections. So I ended up on the highest rung of the technical career ladder, essentially untouchable. But I had also made some powerful enemies. So what happened to me was that my funding dried up.
A small digression: the process of funding research is largely a sham, though I didn't realize it at the time. Ostensibly, people write proposals which undergo peer review on their technical merits (though of course what really happens is that the money is assigned based on which congressional district your institutional affiliation is in). One of the weird things about NASA research proposals is that you have to tell them what results you are going to achieve, which is kinda weird because if you know that ahead of time it kinda stops being research. Also, as part of this year's proposal you have to tell them whether you accomplished the goals from last year's proposal, and that goes into your score.
I came up with what I thought was a clever way to game the system: I wrote proposals for work that I had already done, which insured that I would always be able to provide accurate predictions of the results. It turns out that everyone does this, but I didn't realize it at the time. So one year my proposal was rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was too ambitious, that it could not be done on the budget I was requesting. Which, of course, I knew to be false because I had already done the work the previous year, but of course I couldn't say that. It was only many years later that I came to realize that the reviewer already knew it too, but that this was a not-so-subtle signal that I needed to toe the party line.
But I didn't, so I found myself being assigned to projects that had some extra money in their budgets to cover my salary but where I was essentially a potted plant. (I spent an entire year shepherding purchase orders for search appliances through the procurement system.) Towards the end I was spending my days in an enormous windowless office by myself with literally nothing to do. That's when I quit.