Playing the Big Fiddle while Rome burns?

We've seemed to have forgotten the trust-busting era that was necessary to control monopolistic acquisition of resources.  That was over a century ago, and now we're again allowing already huge companies to merge and coalesce.  It's rationalized in various ways, naturally, by those on the gain.  It's the spirit and the power structure of our times, for whatever reason.  Maybe that explains why the same thing is happening in science as universities coo over their adoption of 'the business model'.

We're inundated in jargonized ways of advertising to co-opt research resources, with our  'omics' and 'Big Data' labeling.  Like it or not, this is how the system is working in our media and self-promotional age.  One is tempted to say that, as with old Nero, it may take a catastrophic fire to force us to change.  Unfortunately, that imagery is apparently quite wrong.  There were no fiddles in Nero's time, and if he did anything about the fire it was to help sponsor various relief efforts for those harmed by it.  But whatever imagery you want, our current obsession with scaling up to find more and more that explains less and less is obvious. Every generation has its resource competition games, always labeled as for some greater good, and this is how our particular game is played.  But there is a fire starting, and at least some have begun smelling the smoke.

Nero plucks away.  Sourcc: Wikipedia images, public domain

The smolder threatens to become an urgent fire, truly, and not just as a branding exercise.  It is a problem recognized not just by nay-saying cranks like us who object to how money is being burnt to support fiddling with more-of-the-same-not-much-new research.  It is an area where a major application of funds could have enormously positive impact on millions of people, and where causation seems to be quite tractable and understandable enough that you could even find it with a slide rule.

We refer to the serious, perhaps acute, problem with antibiotic resistance.  Different bugs are being discovered to be major threats, or to have evolved to become so, both for us and for the plants and animals who sacrifice their lives to feed us. Normal evolutionary dynamics, complemented with our agricultural practices, our population density and movement, and perhaps other aspects of our changing of local ecologies, is opening space for the spread of new or newly resistant pathogens.

This is a legitimate and perhaps imminent threat of a potentially catastrophic scale.  Such language is not an exercise in self-promotional rhetoric by those warning us of the problem. There is plenty of evidence that epidemic or even potentially pandemic shadows loom.  Ebola, zika, MRSA, persistent evolving malaria, and more should make the point and we have history to show that epidemic catastrophes can be very real indeed.

Addressing this problem rather than a lot of the wheel-spinning, money-burning activities now afoot in the medical sciences would be where properly constrained research warrants public investment.  The problem involves the ecology of the pathogens, our vulnerabilities as hosts, weaknesses in the current science, and problems in the economics of such things as antibacterial drugs or vaccinations.  These problems are tractable, with potentially huge benefit.

For a quick discussion, here is a link to a program by the statistical watchdog BBC Radio program MoreOrLess on antibiotic resistance  Of course there are many other papers and discussions as well.  We're caught between urgently increasing need, and the logistics, ecology, and economics that threaten to make the problem resistant to any easy fixes.

There's plenty of productive science that can be done that is targeted to individual causes that merit our attention, and for which technical solutions of the kind humans are so good at might be possible. We shouldn't wait to take antibiotic resistance seriously, but clearing away the logjam of resource commitments in genetic and epidemiological research to large weakly statistical efforts well into diminishing returns, or research based on rosy promises where we know there are few flowers, will not be easy...but we are in danger of fiddling around detecting risk factors with ever-decreasing effect sizes until the fire spreads to our doorsteps.

Reasons to support, or to oppose initiatives in science

It should be clear by now that we won't hold our tongues when it comes to editorializing about how money is spent in science. We hope to be constructive rather than destructive critics where we express opposition, as we have in regard to major lobbying for biobanks to bring about the miracle of 'personalized medicine'.

There are at least three basic criteria on which it is fair as well as realistic to judge proposed science projects:

1. Scientific merit: is the proposal justified by the known facts?
2. Social politics: is the project well-justified in terms of promised benefits to society, or primarily just good for the science establishment?
3. Social priorities: when resources are limited, and science is supported by the public, is the proposal justified relative to other things that might be done (or the funds used for something other than research)?

The World Bank, no bastion of liberal politics, is estimating that 200,000 to 400,000 people will die (in Africa alone) as a result of the loss of foreign aid (nutrition, vaccinations, health care, &c) due to the economic crisis the West is visiting upon them (Nicholas Kristoff has an op/ed piece about this in today's New York Times). If this is so, it seems immoral and even socially inexcusable to be gearing up for manned trips to Mars, spending money on 'astrobiology', or spending fortunes on large DNA-based 'personalized medicine' campaigns that will mainly feed the research and pharmaceutical industries -- at least for the foreseeable future, even if they are ultimately as successful as promised. And, even if successful, as long as health care funding remains as inequitable as it is today in the US, it would be mainly the rich who will benefit from having their medicine personalized.

So, we object to this kind of spending on ethical grounds. Even if we believed in the scientific merit of biobanks or voyages to Mars (will cages be brought to Mars, to return Martians to Earth in?), they are not justified in the face of widespread disease and other human problems that could be ameliorated with the same funds.

As to priority, these kinds of projects can hardly be claimed to be the most important problems we should be studying, or the best approaches to studying them. It would be easy to name many more justifiable projects -- starting with more stress on truly genetic diseases, more intense efforts in regard to potential antibiotic resistant infectious diseases, nutritional programs for the poor at home and elsewhere, research on neglected tropical diseases and so on. But these problems don't have constituents with lobbyists and vested interests.

It's inevitable that people will disagree on how their tax money should be spent, and various aspects of self-interest will always be a factor. But, when huge amounts of money are locked up in projects based on demonstrably questionable science, at the expense of issues with more likely payoff and better scientific underpinnings, it's especially frustrating.

And, if history is any guide, the most likely thing is that the Martians will carry some disease that'll wipe us out .... or else they'll die of our diseases as soon as they land, a real waste of money. And they probably won't even speak English (which would anger at least a substantial fraction of theAmerican public that pays for the expedition).