00:11
アメリカ式研究開発リスクの取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ～
英語でサイエンスしナイトを取り方 ﰞ
English Brilliant
03:09
changing in how, like, research is funded and how sort of the scientific research sort
of industry, sort of organization, sort of structure in the United States developed and
became, as you said, this powerhouse, right, in the States.
And that's really fascinating.
On top of this, there is sort of the comparison with the UK that they give, historically speaking.
And then they dip into how the sort of research and funding things actually work.
So this is sort of targeted at how I think the NIH's particular, like, drop in what they
call an indirect reimbursement rate, right, is they're expanding on some of this stuff
here.
So that's the overview, right?
Like, that's what this is going to, and it ends on a note of what is kind of going to
happen as a result of current situations.
Yeah, that's true.
I should sort of put a scope of this article, as I understood, as so it mainly wants to
talk about indirect research costs, this, like, very ambiguous term, and what it means
for U.S. universities to have it cut down from 50% to 15%, and why that's a big deal
for the ecosystem that U.S. universities live in.
So in order to do that, the author went back to World War II era and compared that with
the U.K. research funding scheme with U.S. modern research funding scheme, and the history
and why this indirect cost has a massive impact in our day-to-day research activity, and ultimately
the research industry that U.S. university partakes in, in a very massive and high-prominence
way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So if you were reading around this, you know, topic and came across indirect cost cut, and
wasn't exactly sure how to think about it or what to think about it, this is the article
for you.
This, however, does not go into every potential aspect of impact that this kind of slashing
of the cost in a very abrupt way can do to various different stakeholders of research
world, be it grad students to professors to grant agencies, and how the business runs.
06:08
It doesn't do that.
So just putting a limitation there.
Yeah.
It's not doing that.
Yeah.
It's just trying to bring attention to what the indirect cost means and why this sort
of...
And the sort of like historical background of it.
Right.
Because it's complicated, right?
How you fund research is not just you give money to the person doing the research.
You have to pay for a lot of things that are involved in making sure the research can get
done.
Yeah.
And that's complicated, right?
Research is an expensive business and it takes a lot of human capital, it takes a lot
of infrastructural capital, and it's a huge gamble in terms of whether it have a return
on investment, so to say.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yep.
And sometimes you don't, right?
And some of that is required as well.
Many times you don't.
Right?
Yeah.
It's hard to specify.
Many times, right?
Many times it doesn't amount to much and yet we need to keep doing this in order to get
that some occasions, rare, rare occasions that it does become useful and fruitful because
without trying, we will not get there.
I'm having this memory in my mind that I wish I could like hunt down.
I think there's probably more than just one, but there's definitely a great visualization
of these types of indirect costs.
There are some flow charts and stuff in the article that we'll link, but if I can find
the one I'm thinking of, then I'll also try to share that because I think sometimes it's
hard to see what they mean by this money, right?
And that would be useful to have.
But I don't know.
Too many types of various media for us to hunt down what this was by chance.
So regardless, yes, that's what's going on there.
What stood out to you in this article?
Yeah.
In short, what an indirect cost is, is that it's a cost that would be, that's required
to do the research really.
And it's not, and the universities are allowed to take a cut from that in order to use that
to operate the university itself to conduct research.
And it's called indirect because it is kind of unclear what they go into, but every little
aspect of research, including things like AC, having enough water to cool your equipment,
having enough compressed gas and things like things that you kind of take it for granted
09:01
if you are a researcher, those don't appear magically in your lab.
Somebody needs to buy them and procure them.
And those also are part of the cost.
I remember being in a laser lab, our laser was not tolerant of temperature fluctuation
more than plus minus two degrees.
So summer times in Rhode Island, not exactly a temperature or humidity controlled space
in the world.
And that was a difficult thing.
I am pretty sure I was on a blacklist of the facility management, like, oh, it's Asami again
from that chemistry building complaining about temperature being one degrees outside of the
range.
And it's like, yeah, well, it's really important, but it also requires a ton of work and overhead.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So many people, so many costs that are not very visible, but is extremely essential to
conduct research.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So it just costs a lot more than you think, or I think, you know, to do research.
A lot more than most people think, which actually I think gets to the part of this article that
I can't quite remember exactly, I'm looking at it trying to remind myself of this part
of how much Steve Blank touches on the way that people perceive research funding.
And I think in what I'm aware of, and in the ways that these types of mentalities that
exist and are negatively permeating the US governmental system, is that these are like
bloat.
You'll hear that word a lot, right?
And this is not what those are, right?
Even if some of it is more than you might expect for something, the costs do have to
be paid in some of them.
And even the tiny fragment, right, that might be perhaps a bit more expensive than it should
be, right?
Yeah.
Or something is the case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This type of value is necessary to run those things, but it's hard for people to grasp
at that.
And I think it gets tied up with these narratives of a lack or a lowering of trust in these systems,
a lowering of the general trust in people being responsible with the money that's involved.
And this lacking and lowering of trust in particular regions and groups has also made
this much more pronounced, right?
And then you get stronger actions to get rid of it without knowing exactly what it means,
right?
It becomes a message.
Right.
12:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that perhaps is a legacy effect from having to innovate super quickly during the wartime.
They didn't have time to track down dollars to figure out exactly where it's going.
They needed to innovate and beat the enemy.
That was the priority.
So having this indirect cost way to pool enough money to just keep the operation going
for research, that enabled that kind of fast innovation and not just innovation, but taking
the innovation to market, to the industry and scale things up.
That wouldn't have happened if it was for extremely rigid funding style, which is what
sort of UK system went with.
Sort of more traditional way of funding basic research, which worked fine in the peacetime
and they were ahead of the world in terms of scientific research, but the war changed
the game as it often does.
And this kind of very aggressive funding scheme that Vannevar Bush from then MIT, who was appointed
for the scientific advisor to the US president at the time, Roosevelt, and successfully managed
to convince enough people to get on board with it and made it possible.
And people saw that there is an economic opportunity in this way of funding because it was able
to accelerate research and innovation and then taking it into the practical world much
more quickly than a traditional funding of a basic research would enable.
So the comparison of that was really interesting to me, actually, and it sounds like at least
a really good foresight for Bush and Roosevelt's part.
I guess it's a little bit of caveat saying foresight, like foresight for them to get
through the war because they saw that whoever beats the technology game will win the war.
They were convinced by that, right?
And they were right about it.
And they didn't just stop when the war ended because they saw that this is a way to make
a huge business out of US resources.
This was not something the US had prior to the war.
I mean, they always had the higher education, but it was kind of scattered around and not
centralized.
15:00
Like a lot of universities had the talents, but not enough money to scale up into industry
level things.
It also, yeah, it wasn't necessarily the purpose, right?
It was not the purpose, right.
This was, I think, to add to what you're getting at here, there's a quote down in sort of the
facilities cost section of this article, which mentions that, where is it here, essentially,
there it is.
Quote, with a little modification, the US government asked researchers at universities
to do research, and if the research looked like it might solve a military problem, to
build a prototype they could test.
In return, the government paid the researchers for their direct and indirect costs.
So this was like, end quote, this was the baseline that you're talking about and that sort of
way of saying, hey, I know that everybody at these particular institutes, and of course,
you'll have to set up military approval on some of these things.
But we want them out there.
We want more people on these tasks.
We want the people that are already really expert in the fields on these tasks, and those
people are at universities.
We have the funds to support you if you have the sort of push to look into it.
And they also can take not just the, what's the word for it, the government sort of subsidizes
the risk as well as the money, right?
Which means that they absorb any of the loss to some degree, to quite a large degree, in
order to allow you to just keep trying.
Right.
Because that's the kind of safety net that this type of high risk basic research needed
in order to continue and push at the speed that U.S. government required them to during
the wartime.
Yep.
And sort of like the big change is like they didn't just stop at the wartime, they continued
with this model after the war and strengthened the ties between industry and university and
that kind of collaboration.
And hosted by a military or national entity that would benefit also from these kind of
research.
Right.
It was kind of like a unique system of, like you said, absorbing the risk, enabling researchers
to take more risk without the fear of completely going into financial crisis.
And that's what made American research, at least in my opinion, very enticing, attractive
to the international researchers whose own government might not have had the same sort
18:02
of like risk management mentality as the U.S. government, such military did.
And maybe we're asked to be way more conservative, both in terms of the research sort of creative
risk as well as financial risk.
Right.
And at least if you go to America and if you can convince these people that your research
has some kind of national benefit that is possible, perhaps with throwing a lot of money at it.
It's kind of like a researcher's dream to be able to access that kind of risk taking
because it's not everyone's options, you know?
Yep.
If you have worked at a really, really like low budget lab and if you have also worked
at a very high budget lab, even the daily operations are so different.
Yeah.
The amount of washing that you do or reusing of equipments or parts that you do or things
like that.
And that's the difference of buying a new item as opposed to fixing what's broken.
And that could mean years of your graduate student's time added up.
It can start to add up, especially because in some situations the like way of cost saving,
right?
By like doing an extra cleaning on something, by even re-distilling some of your solvents,
right?
Like getting them out from your samples.
You can get a lot of that back.
However, you're also now risking things like contamination and you may end up with more
errors that you then have to fix and, you know, adjust later.
You're introducing more potential errors by sort of these cost cutting measures and
you may lose a lot of your own resources by doing this way.
So at least that's like what made the U.S. funding scheme unique compared to the other
parts of the world.
And certainly UK is not the only sort of...
In this article, this is the only comparison, but every country has...
Yeah.
Every country has a certain focus, right?
Right, right, right.
Every country has different, slightly different flavors to this.
But I think U.S. research is truly unique in the risk taking attitude and understanding
that this risk taking is necessary to beat the crowd, which is whether it's good or not
has become one of the values of science, right?
Being the first person to do X, Y, Z.
And that's where all the credit goes to.
But it aligned with that.
It worked with that kind of mentality and it serves that goal of being the first guy
21:00
to do it.
Right.
Yeah.
And maybe this is us as a researcher to think about what does it mean to have a contribution
in a field?
And does it always have to be the first person to do?
Is that the only contribution to the field?
Maybe this is like a way that we need to sort of...
It's a wake up call to think about it.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm expanding this way too much.
No, you're about to expand it way outside of this, but I'm with you.
I'm willing to follow this train of thought.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, let's not expand it.
I just kind of want to drop that bomb and let it be, perhaps.
Quite the colorful choice, seeing as we're talking about World War II timing.
But...
But because I'm just thinking out loud.
I have not thought through any of this, this past three minutes or so.
Yeah.
But, well, to maybe wrap some of that a little, you have a unique environment and you have
this question of whether the priority needs to be the first one to do a thing.
Yeah.
And this is a question on where and how money should, in quotes, be given to people to act
and engage and be part of the society that you happen to be in.
Yeah.
And this is a question that moves into an idea of social systems, society as a whole.
It moves into an ethical question, right?
I mean...
Yep.
What is the research for?
Yeah.
I mean, should we continue funding things that turn into weapons of mass destruction?
Yeah.
Should we continue the research that destroys this very planet?
Yeah.
Exactly.
Like these are, you know, I of course have an opinion and the opinion is that we should
do better.
Right?
Yeah.
Like we should be better with how we do this, which is a complicated direction to head.
Yeah.
The answer...
Yeah.
No.
It's a complicated thing.
Yeah.
Because we wouldn't be here without these kind of aggressive risk-taking that people
50 years ago, 60 years ago...
Yeah.
...decided to let us take.
You said this aggressive risk-taking.
Yeah.
So for many people, I'm not sure if the listeners will also know this, but there's the catchphrase,
right?
Of like the startup industry is, you know, go fast and break things, right?
And go fast and break things doesn't work in all cases.
It's a way to practice innovation, but you can see a lot of examples where this doesn't
work or where you end up with many more problems.
And honestly, some of the AI topics are part and parcel for this.
Definitely part of it.
And I think you shared with me another article that kind of touches on that, right?
24:06
Yeah.
So if we're pushing too much on this go fast part, we did break a lot of things and some
of those things probably should not have been broken.
Yeah.
Or it's only causing us to slow down sometimes in like a way that is harder to see.
But that's probably for another episode.
It's for another episode.
I'm leaving that as a possible drop thing.
Possible next topic.
Yeah.
And I also definitely have to go find that thing I sent you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, but I think, yeah, let's wrap this up here.
So yeah, look at the article if you want to find out the history of indirect costs, where
it came from, how does it function.
And I think it's a very sort of concise look at what it is.
Yeah.
It's a nice little insight into the US, UK overview of like history.
Not all the details, but enough to give you an idea of how they influence the scientific
fields in those places.
And it's really interesting that it really took very few people to decide on this kind
of like national scale ways of thinking and sort of philosophy in research.
Right.
Which is scary.
Yes.
Which is very, very scary.
I'll add a little teaser for anybody that listens to the entire episode here.
Turns out the PDF title is different from the online title of this article.
So the online article, at least at the date that we are looking at, says how the United
States became a science superpower, hyphen, and how quickly it could crumble.
The PDF is missing the and how quickly it could crumble part.
It's just how the United States became a science superpower.
The lowest non-conspiracy level thing is that it didn't fit well format-wise, and so they
cut it.
But it's a bit of an interesting drop, I think, in that piece.
Anyway.
So enjoy your teaser.
So yeah.
Go have a look.
And yeah.
That's it.
Thanks for listening.
Bye-bye.
That's it for the show today.
That's it for the show today.
Thanks for listening.
And find us on X at Eigo de Science.
That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E.
See you next time.
