In this interviewer Craig Venter says that sequencing the human genome has had “close to zero” medical benefits so far. I thought this comment was even more interesting:
The human genome project was . . . supposed to be the biggest thing in the history of biological sciences. Billions in government funding for a single project — we had never seen anything like that before in biology. And then a single person comes along and beats scientists who have been working on it for years.
The government-funded people used inferior methods, said Venter:
Initially, Francis Collins and the other people on the Human Genome Project claimed that my methods would never work. When they started to realize that they were wrong, they began personal attacks against me.
The government-funded research was high in quantity (“billions”) but low in quality.
A similar story emerged from the Netflix Prize competition. Netflix had in-house researchers who had tried to do the same thing as the competitors for the prize: predict ratings. The algorithm they’d developed took two weeks to run. According to my friend David Purdy, one of the competitors for the prize managed to compute the same thing in an hour, the same sort of speed-up that Venter is talking about. The in-house research was high in quantity (it had been going on for years) but low in quality.
From my point of view, a similar story comes from my self-experimentation. Working alone, with no funding, I found several ways to improve my sleep — avoiding breakfast, standing a lot, standing on one foot, eating pork fat, etc. In contrast, professional sleep researchers have found nothing that has helped me improve my sleep. There are hundreds of sleep researchers and they’ve received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Why such big differences in outcome? I think it has to do with the price of failure. When the government-funded genome researchers used inferior methods, nothing happened. They’d already gotten the grant. In contrast, Venter’s group got nothing until they succeeded. In the case of the Netflix in-house researchers, use of inferior methods cost them nothing; they still got paid. Whereas the prize competitors didn’t get paid unless they won. Use of inferior methods would cause them to lose. In the case of the sleep researchers, lack of practical results cost them nothing. They could still have a successful career. Whereas to me, without practical results I had nothing.
Thanks to Paul Sas.
as far as the netflix prize goes, i’m sure if you counted the quantity of research from the losing teams, you’d far, far exceed the amount that a single in-house group could produce.
‘Medical’ researchers aren’t even *trying* to make people better; they are trying to get funding.
Most know nothing about medicine, even from their personal experience (because they are young and healthy) – and, BS aside, couldn’t care less about medicine, only ‘models’ of disease.
They want to, need to, impress the big names in their field – the people who decide who gets published, gets grants, gets jobs, promotions and prizes; but why should they want to impress sick people, or make their lives better? Where’s the career advancement in that?
Indeed medical researchers typically have no involvement with sick people in any way (except, maybe, to use them as experimental animals).
Teams with a grant or contract may feel that there is a stinging price of failure out of sheer professionalism if nothing else, but most workplaces are demoralizing enough to dull those kind of ethics and sensitivities. Especially in large companies.
Some other possible reasons for Venter’s success might come from relatively unique attributes vis a vis other contemporary scientists (from his autobiography):
“Of all my memories, the most vivid is my total and absolute freedom. […] During my childhood in California, my parents simply told me to “go play.” Given this heady license, I discovered that I loved taking risks and facing challenges – a side of me that I have not yet outgrown.” (p.5)
“Every day of my childhood was a day of play and exploration that had a bigger impact on my development than anything I was taught in school […] I think that one reason I was able to become a successful scientist was that my natural curiosity was not driven out of me by the education system.” (p.7 – Venter says he was not very engaged in schooling, and often received poor grades)
“I can also recall only too well how my folks constantly rewarded my better-behaved older brother, a mathematical prodigy. I, on the other hand, was threatened with visits to the juvenile detention home to scare me into better behavior.” (p.9)
Venter likes taking risks and isn’t too interested in what other scientists think. He also had an unconventional education (when he graduated from high-school, he didn’t go to university, he went surfing, and so on).
q makes a good point. The quantity of work in the netflix contest was enormous.
I just read the Venter interview…everyone should read it, it’s terrifically entertaining. Venter is a piece of work.
Ever notice how in the discussion section of most scientific papers, you almost always read “further research is warranted”? If it weren’t, the scientists who wrote the paper would be out of work.
That’s right, Dennis. The usual paper published in a scientific journal answers all the questions in its field of study, but its authors routinely denigrate their own work by dishonestly suggesting that the field needs further study. They do that because suggesting your work is lower quality than it actually is happens to be a brilliant carreer strategy.
Does a dermatologist/oncologist/etc. who does research at a university ever see patients? It would seem like an easy side business. Just an outsider wondering aloud.
The “further research is needed” phrase irks me, too. I try to avoid it in my scientific publications, though sometimes a statement like it is needed to convey how preliminary a conclusion may be given a limited data set. It is probably more accurate and genuine to point out when an important, perhaps fundamental issue has so far received scant (inappropriately insufficient) attention. Seth and I have said something to this effect in our publications on behavioral variability.
@bjk. I believe clinical faculty for the most part do see clients in a professional applied manner. I know the clinical psychology faculty in the psychology department at UCLA do have clients in addition to their own research programs. I think the faculty in the medical school do as well, though I don’t know if this is the case for all clinical faculty or only some.
bjk: Sorry, what planet are you writing from?
Read Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto” to get a real sense of many of the systemic problems in Amerian medicine, and the challenges real physicians face. The problems are not that physicians don’t know or care much, it’s that knowing and caring way more than you do are nowhere near enough to overcome the problems, which are many, varied, deep and, frankly, terrifying.