Grabbing pebbles out of my shoes: Thoughts of a grumpy old researcher on funding
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Grabbing pebbles out of my shoes: Thoughts of a grumpy old researcher on funding By Enrico Traversa
T
he job of a researcher is a privileged one; most of us are enthusiastic about the work we do. It involves a great deal of creativity, which means a lot of self-gratification. Unfortunately, these job characteristics enable a peculiar aspect that is now considered to be normal almost all across the globe. A scientific researcher is typically an employee, but if a researcher wants to work, one is compelled to raise the money by oneself through grants. Any employee, other than a researcher, is usually given the necessary tools to properly perform their routine job. A researcher, on the other hand, has to write proposals for raising the necessary funds for carrying on his job, which is often his pleasure. Writing proposals has become the main chore of researchers, more than performing the research work, which is now mostly assigned to junior researchers. This is true almost all around the world, except for a few blissful institutions, such as the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, where leading staff members are provided a budget to perform their research. The number of researchers continues to increase, but research funds are not increasing at the same pace. The result is that the success rate of funding applications is plummeting to unprecedented levels in many countries, including the EU and the United States. The system of funding of EU projects is such that you need a strong organization backing your proposal to succeed, and this is helping a small number of institutions obtain a significant percentage of the allotted resources. Is this the way to improve the total research productivity and output? I doubt it. Concentrating resources in the hands of a few will limit the creativity of the majority and may eventually destroy the connective tissue of research.
Despite 30 years of experience as a researcher, I am still young enough to foresee an additional decade of research in my future. I dare say that my most productive years were those in which I was not encumbered by stressing myself to write hopeless proposals. This happened for a few years while I was in Italy, in the remote golden age where national funding was still available and when writing an application was not a vain task. When I moved to the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Japan, I was provided with remarkable starting conditions, allowing me to focus my efforts only on research. Japan is not free from bureaucracy and administrative tasks, but I took advantage of the fact that I was not able to read and write Japanese, and received assistance with these duties. Unfortunately, the combination of tragic events of March 2011—the Fukushima nuclear accident— and the stiffening of working conditions due to changes at NIMS forced me to quit. In a quest for funding to continue to perform my research, I was next led to Saudi Arabia, where I fancied establishing a great lab with gigantic resources. It came close, but it turn
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