Quality and collaboration, not growth, should drive research institutions
Discovering new knowledge and improving human life, not driving up grant totals, should be the real missions of research institutions.
The $2 billion increase in funding for the National Institutes of Health that Congress recently approved reflects society’s great expectations for the biomedical sciences. I fear that three unproductive practices that the scientific community has slipped into will undermine this support unless we take action to address these self-inflicted threats.
The crux of the problem is that, over the years, many leaders of research institutions have treated research as a volume business and focused more on money and operational size than on the discovery of new knowledge. Success has
