Why do scientists science?

Why do dancers dance, doctors doctor and sellers sell? Is service to others always a prime motivator or is there something more fundamental in each of us to nudge us along a professional path?

To survive is fundamental.

Survival is a necessity. Individual choices made to this end are why we all develop and acquire survival skills, knowledge and assets.

To thrive is aspirational.

Once survival is secured, choices and efforts are made based on what will make one happy. Dr. Abraham Maslow depicted the aspirational hierarchy of needs to which most humans aspire instinctively.

Some people give up.

A once happy and prosperous couple I know now live lives of victimhood because their past dreams were never realized. Now, seniors, the path ahead seems less rosy, even hopeless at times.

Why do so many Canadians find happiness so elusive at the time of their life when retirement should allow them to find it?

Science marches on.

Scientists discover new ways to help others to survive and thrive.

Gone are the days of Alexander Graham Bell when research could be conducted independently and inexpensively. Apparently, all of the “low hanging fruit” of scientific discovery has been picked.

The “fruits of traditional science” are elusive. Their “trees” are unable to produce more “fruit” without increasingly sophisticated and expensive methods.

BING Copilot explains:

Bringing a new drug to the public involves several rigorous phases of scientific research. Here’s a breakdown of the key stages:

1. Discovery and Development: This initial phase involves identifying potential drug targets and developing compounds that might interact with these targets. Researchers conduct extensive laboratory research to find promising candidatesAd1.

2. Preclinical Research: Before testing on humans, the drug undergoes laboratory and animal testing to evaluate its safety and efficacy. This phase helps determine whether the drug is safe enough to proceed to human trialsAd1.

3. Clinical Research: This phase is divided into three stages:

   • Phase I: Tests the drug on a small group of healthy volunteers to assess its safety and dosage.

   • Phase II: Involves a larger group of patients to evaluate the drug’s efficacy and side effects.

   • Phase III: Conducted on an even larger group to confirm its effectiveness, monitor side effects, and compare it to commonly used treatmentsAd1.

4. FDA Review: After successful clinical trials, the drug developer submits a New Drug Application (NDA) to the FDA. The FDA reviews all the data to decide whether the drug should be approved for public useAd1.

5. Post-Market Safety Monitoring: Even after approval, the drug is continuously monitored for any long-term or rare side effects that might not have been evident in clinical trialsAd1.

As for the costs, developing a new drug is extremely expensive. The estimated cost to develop a new drug, including the costs of failed trials, ranges from less than $1 billion to more than $2 billion23. Some estimates even suggest that the cost can exceed $4 billion, depending on various factors such as the complexity of the drug and the length of the development process4.

These high costs are due to the extensive research, lengthy clinical trials, regulatory requirements, and the high rate of failure in drug development. Despite these challenges, the goal is to ensure that new drugs are safe and effective for public use.

Public funding for medical research.

Needless to say, research has become ‘big business’. Few can participate without deep pockets. The deepest of those pockets are those in governments.

Governments “invest” in science for “the greater good” without expecting a measurable ROI other than perhaps votes for the politicians who are aligned with product makers and other obscure beneficiaries.

The scientists themselves are, for the most part, paid through public funding. Salaries, benefits and subsidies for research are the norm for scientists working in medical and public health research.

Given the enormous cost of research projects, the number and type of research positions would likely be very small if the sources of funding were solely non-governmental.

Enter Elon Musk

I was struck recently by a statement made by a former employee of Space X who offered his insights into why Elon Musk and his business enterprises are so successful. One important factor was that Musk hates any administrative obstacles to solving the problem at hand.

Elon Musk is well known for addressing problems directly and quickly. He will side-step the established chain of command in order to assign the best people to solve the problem as soon as possible. Nothing is allowed to unnecessarily stall progress.

Musk is also not afraid to take risks, or makes mistakes from which to learn, so long is no one is hurt.

Musk’s Engineers make progress rapidly.

By comparison, risk adverse administers within large organizations will often fear to go when political consequences might arise if established authorities structured are not respected.

The Rule of Seven

A Vice President of American Express Canada I met in the 1990s taught me his Rule of Seven. I was an IT Recruiter and he needed to hire a PL1 programmer who had experience working on a specialized line of IBM System 88 fault-tolerant computer systems. He applied his Rule of Seven to ensure that his software engineering team never exceeded seven members. He understood from experience that the eighth (and beyond) brought diminishing returns in overall team productivity because internal communication and administrative bottlenecks begin to creep into teams that grew beyond seven in size. Based in this Rule, he hired only the very best talent available to get the highest possible output from his tightly-focussed team.

In the public sector, the Rule of Seven appears not to be a consideration in building teams and organizations.

Command & Control by fiat & procedure.

Large organizations spent much time and money focusing on optimizing their internal department, teams and operations to achieve results. The larger the organization, the more policies, processes, procedures, checklists and chain-of-command decision making authority inevitably exists.

Professionals whose careers were built within such large corporations are typically unable to relate to the more “seat-of-the-pants” approaches to business undertaken by small business entrepreneurs. The reverse is also true. As a serial entrepreneur, I also struggle to understand “institutional ways”.

As discussed above, the Musk approach to problem solving is also foreign to corporate and institutional officials. The very idea of side-stepping the chain of commend to take direct and immediate action to keep operations humming will likely lead to anxiety for some. On the other hand, if for example, a labour union launched a labour strike to cripple a major transportation node like a marine port, Musk would surely direct all manner of fire and brimstone at the perpetrators.

Erosion of bureaucratic soils.

Government and corporate landscapes are infested with weeds of productivity destruction in otherwise ‘farms of wealth creation”. Endless forms, reports, planning tools, and the like are familiar features within corporations and government institutions. These are the infestations that the AMEX VP sought to avoid with his Rule Of Seven.

Scientific progress in medicine has continued in spite of the fact that it comes primarily from large organizations.

Would it occur faster and better if the Amex VP and Elon Musk methods were applied?

A Dream Team?

A friend recently regaled me with her reasons why Donald Trump’s “Dream Team” of high profile supporters, like Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr, bode well for the future of America under a Trump 2.0 government.

She may be right in the long run, but only after they “drain the swamp” in Washington.

Whole layers of the overpaid administrative bureaucrats have proven themselves to be unable or unwilling to fix the problems that plague America today.

When I think of the size and power of America’s top public health agencies and their cozy relationship with corporations within the Big Pharma and Big Insurance sectors, the World Health Organization, and others, the swamp to be drained is vast and the creatures within it move ponderously and confidently backed by their enormous weight and legislative inertia.

Canada has a comparable swamp in Ottawa funded through taxes and public debt.

Government payments are rarely made without unpopular STRINGS ATTACHED which largely benefit obscure stakeholders who are not always made known to the paying public.

So, let’s get back to Elon Musk.

Musk has offered Donald Trump to join his efforts to increase the efficiency of government institutions. To me, this ambitious undertaking is comparable to settling a human colony on Mars.

With all of his talent, knowledge, resources and expertise, how will Elon directly address the root cause of public problems like those in Health Care?

Will Elon be able to “engineer” solutions in a timely way? Will he be allowed to cut through the red tape, internal politics, and fiefdom barricades?

I don’t want to underestimate what this Dream Team might be able to achieve, but I don’t want to underestimate the size of the problem to solve either. It is nothing short of remaking America to become great again.

“Why do scientists science?

This was my original question. Allow me some conjecture as follows.

• For a pay check. Generally, a paymaster expects a return on payments. A government paymaster will likely expect something different than a corporate paymaster, like Pfizer, which funds research to create or support a product for profit. I will leave it you your imagination to figure out the various ways that those payment expectations may differ by sector.

• Prestige and career advancement. Scientists are ranked in importance a

  by the number of papers they have published and the frequency of their citations. Of course, no scientist can conduct and publish any research without sources of funding. This is particularly the reality for scientists who specialize in the types of scientific research that require tens of $millions. Logically, scientists with be best reputations may readily attract finding, especially when their expertise is in the fields of greatest interest to the funding sources. Inevitably, however, personal and systemic bias also exists whenever decisions to spend money, especially OPM (other people’s money), are concerned.

• To inform the public. PhD researchers often work in universities where they also teach undergraduate courses and advise postgraduate students. When a research paper appears in a respected journal:

  • the primary audience is typically any other scientist whose work aligns with the subject of the paper.

  • journalists occasionally write about a published paper but their handling of the study may be amateurish or, worse, biased to promote an ideological agenda.

  • industry entrepreneurs with often publish magazines and other promotional materials to promote their products and services. Some do this well based on sound science and peer-reviewed research papers, but many other less qualified actors promote unsubstantiated claims that give well-informed consumers pauses for concern and distrust.

  • university students will benefit from their professor’s lectures and recommended reading list, but they do not represent the greater public’s appetite for such educational content.

  • Science conferences are events where researchers present their work to conference attendees, but only so much can be presented in an hour lecture. Besides, the kind of citizen who may attend science conferences is not your average John Q. Public or girl next door.

My point is.

Scientists do important work. However, I wonder how often the fruits of their work actually reach and benefits society-at-large to offer citizens a return on their public investment. It appears to me that be beneficiaries of most scientific work are limited almost exclusively a very small and selected group of citizens with special interests.

Do scientists, especially in the Health and Medical fields, have an ethical obligation to write and speak to Canadians in a manner that reaches them at an educational level that they can readily understand?

Should such content be delivered using the modalities that are most broadly in use across the Canadian public?

Who should pay for their efforts? Can government sources be trusted to do so without bias?

To their credit.

A group of scientists and public health professionals have been volunteering their time and expertise to bring their knowledge and perspectives to the public.

Down the Covid-19 Rabbit Hole serves as an expertly informed look at the recent pandemic from the perspectives of people who worked within the system and who, in some cases, suffered personally from the highly questionable policies that we all experienced.

Kudos to these brave souls for writing and promoting this history-making work.

I expert this book to stand the test of time as an import historical record of the experiences endured by far too many silenced professionals and citizens who dared not speak out for fear of reprisals.

Critically, Rabbit Hole will cast much-needed daylight on the reasons why so many Canadians have lost their faith and trust in the government as a direct result of its many pandemic mistakes.