AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology

Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by PaulDavisThe1st on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:04PM (#25272143)

The problem is that people in academia and outside of it were saying the same thing in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00's ... so if you really want to make the claim that "society is not getting return on investment for basic research", you need to claim with a straight face that this also applies to the last 50 years of academic basic research (at least). Alternatively, explain what has changed and when.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by softwaredoug on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @10:11PM (#25272847)

Citing increases in fraud and retractions, this article makes the case that as funding has increased, scientific quality has worsened. (Which is counter to what I guessed above!) Pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake replaced by obsession with grant cycles.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/01/the-intellectual-and...

But lots of other things have also changed that may or may not be causes:

- many fewer tenure track positions

- many more jobs in industry that require or value a 4 year or advanced degree

- obtaining a college degree as a right of passage seen as increasingly essential to you g adulthood

- the rise of data science: more jobs in industry that have access to lots of data and demand scientific rigor

- the rise of private cloud supercomputing (is deep mind) vs, say, a public university's cluster

- the obsession in some foreign countries of getting advanced degrees from American universities, creating essentially a guest visa workforce that is easily abused

- rise of Big Tech which has money to throw at things like protein folding

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in... by raxxorrax on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @07:02AM (#25275595)

I think while funding has been increased overall due to more people in academia, the processes to acquire said funding got more complex so that a significant part of work is actually making sure the next grant can be secured. Similar situation in publishing. The research might only get a backseat.

That said, this is primarily a computational problem, so the advances here might not be applicable to basic research.

[ Parent | on HN ]