I was preparing to write a post about how we gleefully tear each other down in the research community, rather than focusing on building, inspiring, and creating.
Then I read an article in The Atlantic, “The Business-School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger,” (Daniel Engber, January 2025) and realized the problem in our community is deeper—and different—than what I thought.
I thought our problem was that we don’t think big, that we don’t inspire and communicate enough as researchers, in large part because we’re afraid of how peers and reviewers might perceive us, or even work to tear us down so they can do their own ladder climbing.
While that may be true in some cases, Engber’s article would seem to contradict this idea. He writes about what appears to be an epidemic of falsification in business-school psychological research. This problem seems to have been swept under the rug, because it’s inconvenient and may tarnish the image of the schools involved. The people who discovered and uncovered the problems have said they get a lot of push-back, and that it does not help their careers to raise the issues—rather, quite the opposite: it can impede their career progress.
In this light, my original point feels less valid. Rather than gleefully tearing other researchers down, it’s more like such whistleblowers are taking out the trash, which is a duty nobody wants to do. Someone has volunteered to do it, without any certainty of a reward.
This left me with lots of questions.
What would cause some researchers to feel so much pressure that they would falsify data—and cover it up—to move forward in their careers? On the flip side of that, what would cause others to spend precious time digging through data to discover glitches, staking their careers on being a whistleblower?
More fundamentally, what prevents so many researchers from presenting a more inspiring and uplifting message of the power of science? What prevents us from dreaming big and doing big things?
The easy answer is: a culture of cynicism.
Ok, but there’s never an easy fix for changing something as big as culture. What can we do, as researchers, to move on from this kind of scandal in a positive way?
There may be many ways to approach this problem, but one I’ve been thinking about lately is the speed and currency of science.
Let’s start with the currency, and by that I mean the medium of exchange we use to show some kind of value or contribution.
Our currency requires impressing other scientists, wowing them with papers, talks, and grant proposals. What drives us is not creating value for the outside world that supports our work (though sometimes this happens, too), or in considering the impact we have on the people who support us.
No. We measure our value in how much we impress others in the club, using a secret code-language we’ve developed that’s opaque to outsiders.
Now, combine that with another factor that amplifies the problem manyfold: rush and hurry.
Gotta get those papers out to get tenure! Gotta show results, fast. Gotta get some data that shows some statistical correlation with the ideas, or the ideas are considered crap. Data is slow and messy, so you gotta figure out the shortcut. And round and round the merry-go-round.
All this ignores the basic fact of science and research: big, important ideas, are slow and hard and take time to develop and vet in the real world.
I once interviewed Nobel Laureate Oliver Smithies, and he described to me a process that took seven years from the moment of first insight—in the middle of the night—to the first real-world data he could generate in support his idea of homologous recombination, for which he eventually was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Seven years. For the first supporting data.
Given that the term of today’s average grant is no more than five years, is it any wonder that researchers play it safe, avoid the big and challenging ideas, and instead pursue small, easy wins supported by little bits of data that can be shown to be “significant?”
While funders like the NIH have tried to address this tendency with grant mechanisms like the R35, which supports a researcher more broadly in their work, simply providing a new award mechanism is not enough to change a culture whose currency creates all the wrong incentives, pushing us away from truly big, inspiring, and impactful work.
I know a researcher who had a new idea about the true cause (genesis) of Alzheimer’s disease. It was (and is) one of those big ideas. He spent many years in academia, sailing against strong headwinds of easy answers in his field, until he finally gave up on academia—but not on his idea. Through grit, determination, and support from a small group of people who believed in him and his ideas, he persisted, and now his idea is being hailed as “revolutionary.” He has achieved this success—a win both for himself and for humankind—despite academia, not thanks to it.
If this all sounds gloomy and doomy, I assure you that’s not my goal. I sat down to write something inspiring, but I had to outline the problem before suggesting a solution.
There may be several ways forward, but a lot of reflection has led me to the concept of SLOW SCIENCE.
The Slow Food movement inspired Slow Living and many other calls for slowing our culture down. As Cal Newport points out in his book *Slow Productivity*, these movements aren’t just an attempt to regress to some older, mythical time when everything was perfect. No.
They express a desire to take our time, focusing on what really matters and what produces quality results.
What if we were to do this in Science? What if—at least some of us—embraced a commitment to slowing science down, in the interests of quality and contemplation? Imagine the resulting impact and greater value for society.
As I mentioned above, science is not inherently fast. There are no good short cuts for figuring out how our world, our bodies, and our cells work.
Yet we keep rushing, trying to meet those deadlines, get the flashy results, impress others, and get the fleeting accolades of invited talks, high profile papers, or big grants.
What’s the real-world impact of such work? I remember getting those almost perfect scores on my R01’s. It was exciting. But as for most novelties, the excitement wears off quickly. Such recognition doesn’t have lasting meaning. It doesn’t have lasting impact on the self or the world.
Lasting impact comes from helping people. Making big new discoveries. Training the next generation. Those are the things that have true meaning, impact, and value.
And those things take time.
Those things cannot be rushed.
One little experiment and a few data points is not enough to create meaning, impact, and value.
We need to start a movement, a trend, a new thought form: Slow Science—where we take our time, focusing on quality and impact and shifting our culture’s currency to reward such work. The time is now for Slow Science. A movement, a call, a change to doing science the way it was meant to be done, with care, time, and thoughtfulness.
If these scandals or my response to them resonates with you as a researcher, if you’re frustrated by the current system as you struggle to get or keep the funding you need for your program, we can help. We’ll take a deep dive with you into your grant writing process, helping you overhaul it to produce better, more satisfying results, more consistently. We’ll teach you to slow things down and breathe again, but you’ll learn to spend less energy for faster, better results for your lab and career. If you want to learn more, just respond in the comments or a private message with “grants.”
