Group leaders nowadays bear a huge individual responsibility for raising money. But what if it was departments, and not group leaders, that were the unit of selection?

Modern scientific research groups are essentially small businesses with the group leader installed as CEO, CFO, COO, and in junior groups, quite often the postdoc, technician, and lab manager as well. The number one reason small businesses fail has nothing to do with the quality of product or reputation: it’s when they run out of cash, and it’s a fate that befalls junior research groups as much as small businesses. To succeed in contemporary academic research, the thing that group leaders have to think about more than science is money.

That need to continuously raise money has become such a fixture of the scientific research ecosystem that it’s standard to regard (and lampoon, and bewail) group leaders as spending all their time away from the bench, sequestered in offices, writing grants. The ability to raise money – to sell your science, in the parlance of the trade – has arguably become more important than the ability to do top-quality research.

Where the analogy with small businesses breaks down though is what happens after the cash runs out. In the commercial sector, it’s not unusual to cease operations, and then leverage that experience into having another go somewhere else (“Fail to learn”, as the wonderful American business mantra goes). But academic group leaders can’t try and try again quite so easily. Unless they’re in a city with lots of institutions, re-establishing a group somewhere else will almost certainly involve a major relocation, and regardless of availability, it’s hard to justify giving a scientist a second chance when the pipeline is already overstocked with postdocs looking for their first chance. It’s not unheard of for group leaders to start anew and make a success of it the second time around, but it’s pretty unusual.

But what if the burden of getting cash was a shared responsibility for group leaders instead of an individual one? What if, instead of each group leader writing as many grants as possible and getting individually assessed for all of them, a department’s group leaders collectively applied for funding and were collectively assessed? 

It’s actually a setup not very different from how things used to run at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, where there was one central pot of money, group leaders wrote no grants whatsoever, and all resources were shared within the institute. The four divisions – divisions, not group leaders – were evaluated on a collective basis every five years. The payoffs from this setup were manifold: group leaders spent more time in the lab instead of the office, a collegial atmosphere prevailed with reagents and hardware being shared freely, and there was a high level of mutual respect. 

Conversely, so much of the backbiting that blights contemporary academia comes about because everyone is competing for scarce resources, and feelings of injustice at publication or funding decisions run high. The need for individual groups to raise money also inevitably creates hierarchies (again, often unrelated to research quality but strongly associated with research topic and marketing skills), with the potential for less financially successful groups within departments being unhappy at resources not being shared, while the more successful are resentful of perceived freeloading. These are the seeds for an environment that’s practically anathema to free-thinking, collaborative and creative work. Instead of a climate where colleagues are challenging one another scientifically and helping each other to improve, a more Darwinian survival of the fittest will gradually ensue. 

Shared resources and collective assessment not only create a stronger sense of community, they also help junior groups (often the weakest and most vulnerable) by encouraging more assistance and mentorship. There is of course the risk of a “weak link” culture in which groups attract criticism for letting down the collective, but it’s worth noting that the LMB’s “weak link” would have been Fred Sanger – a scientist whose low research productivity for many years would never have survived individual assessment, but who went on to ultimately win not one but two Nobel prizes. 

An additional benefit of assessing departments and not individuals would be in the assessment process itself, as it would cut down not only on the number of funding applications but also on the amount of assessment required. Instead of reviewing dozens and dozens of individual grants from individual group leaders, funding bodies and the scientists tasked with evaluations would only need to assess the performance of an entire department. Individual grants could be reserved for small starter projects to try something out. This isn’t even a particularly radical suggestion, given that program grants funding multiple thematically-aligned groups are already widespread – all that’s required is scaling up such funding approaches while reducing the number and availability of individual grants.

This would however require a dramatic psychological departure, given academia’s overwhelming focus on individualism. Individualism means people stand or fall by themselves, but in a world where science funding is being cut and science itself is being questioned as never before, standing together is becoming more important than ever. There’s a time-old debate about whether it should be people or projects that get funded, but perhaps that misses this third way – one in which teamwork and collective action are promoted, and communities can come together to secure funds. The collective, and not the individual, should be the unit of selection. 

Acknowledgement & disclosure: thanks to GW for insight and conversations on this topic; I was a PhD student at LMB from 2002-2006.