Abundance

by Ezra Klein

“So many really, really intelligent people are wasting their time doing really, really uninteresting things: writing progress reports, or coming up with modular budgets five years in advance of the science, as if those numbers have any meaning. Universities have whole floors whose main job is to administer these NIH grants. Why are we doing this? Because they’re afraid that I’m going to buy a Corvette with the grant money?”75 The rules exist for a reason, Doench acknowledged. Some scientists in the past probably abused their funding. But just as environmental laws passed in response to twentieth-century problems created a crisis of building in the twenty-first century, the paperwork cure in science is sometimes worse than the disease.