OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, JANUARY 2015Sidney Farber is one of America’s foremost scientific heroes. The story of this pediatric pathologist, who birthed chemotherapy, is a perfect illustration of a struggle that has become a hallmark of the modern research enterprise: creation vs. caution. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Farber discovered that folate antagonists could help treat certain childhood leukemias and lymphomas, overturning the existing reality that cancer always killed. Farber worked with minimal funding, doggedly pursuing his holy grail of curing leukemia and other pediatric cancers, despite colleagues’ skepticism. But he often failed to obtain consent to test drugs that killed many patients and published only the subset of his data that showed the best results. Since then, the economics, sociology, and ethics of scientific research have taken a sizable cautionary turn. Indeed, Farber may not have succeeded in revolutionizing cancer treatment—with the unfortunate tolls paid on the road to the innovation—had he been working today.
Most science funders these days favor caution, seeking evolutionary (rather than revolutionary) advances that are quickly deliverable, tangible, and potentially marketable. The newest cancer drugs prolong life for a few months and make huge profits, but no tranformative treatments have been developed in a generation. Congress has put increasing pressure on funding agencies to attain quick wins. Cash-strapped academic institutions have accelerated this focus by turning more and more toward intellectual property–based revenue. Fundamental research, the engine of transformational progress, is in decline. This is the quandary I dissect in my newest book, The Creativity Crisis: Reinventing Science to Unleash Possibility.
Sociologically, science and its practitioners, too, are cautious. Science is hierarchical, insular, and slow to change. Thought leaders and policy makers are loath to ...
