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 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

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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.

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