Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Precisely.
An article on a fungus threatening the world chocolate crop starts with some horrible pictures of ants and other bugs and fungi all clustering on the stalk of a cocoa tree.... but down deep in the article is a hugely important truth that transcends fungus and ants.
‘The same bloody plant is in Brazil at the moment!’ said Evans, who cannot get funding to control it. ‘If you’re too successful, no one listens to you.’ It doesn’t help that the story is an obscure one. A different scientist might have milked a stream of high-profile publications from that kind of success, but Evans restricted himself to a few papers in backwater journals. He had more important things to do. ‘If I’d been cleverer, I’d have modelled the spread of the vine and got some papers in Nature and Science,’ he said. ‘But that wasn’t my brief. The brief was to control the spread of the invasive.’ Hughes toasted this do-first-publish-later approach, wishing more scientists shared it. ‘People are just interested in their CVs and keeping their labs running,’ he said. ‘We should assess people on whether they controlled problems, not where they publish. Did you control it or not? You did? Oh, well done.’AMEN, AMEN, AMEN. No more theories. Just action. Fix something. Build something. Cure something. Solve something. Engineering profs are judged this way, which is why engineering hasn't gone off the track into bizarre brain-destroying genocide. Most branches of science run solely on tenure and publishing and theories, which is why they have gone off the track into bizarre brain-destroying genocide. ¶ 2:40 AM
