Universities and research institutions should create propitious environments for groundbreaking research

Editor in chief of Science magazine Bruce Alberts, during a lecture at FAPESP, challenges institutions to foster innovation.

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a rotating group of 50 professors representing different university departments meets for lunch on Fridays to debate research underway in different areas.

Periodically, pairs of UCSF professors also give intensive two-week courses for groups of up to 12 students to look at the gaps in knowledge in their respective areas of research.

The two initiatives are just the latest in a series of measures put into action by UCSF in recent years to promote a random collision of people and ideas in their day-to-day activities, thereby creating a propitious environment for the emergence of innovative research. The university even designed the buildings and research programs on its new campus with this goal in mind.

The information was shared by Bruce Alberts, professor emeritus of the UCSF Biochemistry and Biophysics Department and advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues, during a lecture in the FAPESP auditorium on August 3 titled “Scientific excellence: ways and means of diffusion.”

According to Alberts, who is also editor-in-chief of Science magazine, universities and research institutions must structure themselves and organize research programs to promote innovative studies and excellence in scientific discovery

One of the ways to do this—based on Alberts’ over 30 years of experience in dealing with universities and research institutions as well as scientific and technological policy—is to fund a group of small laboratories with 12 researchers maximum, each led by an independent, “excellent and innovative” researcher.

Alberts said that these laboratories should be situated together and immersed in a cooperative environment in which technology and equipment are freely shared—the way they are at UCSF today.

“Our research compensation systems should change to promote originality and risk-taking and accept failures, which are part of the process,” Alberts told an auditorium full of students and researchers at FAPESP.

At the end of the event, members of the audience lined up for a signing of their copies of Molecular Biology of the Cell, written by the biochemist in 1983 and used by biochemistry students and researchers the world over.

Alberts said that when he presided over the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) at the beginning of the Clinton administration in 1993, proposed legislation required that research proposals should demonstrate the practical applications of their results to receive public funding. “That measure was seen as a threat to basic research,” recalled Alberts.

In response to the measure, the NAS produced a series of flyers and a website aimed at politicians, policy makers and the general public showing case studies of how basic research can result in unforeseeable discoveries.

One case study cited by the scientists was that of the global positioning system (GPS), where it was the incidental  research in physics that led to development of the technology.

“Many times, it’s the basic research that has no practical application in the beginning that leads to unpredictable pathways to the most important discoveries ever in science,” Alberts stated.

Research strategies

In Alberts’ opinion, there is an excess of studies on determined topics not leading to innovative studies, while there are other experimental areas of study still unexplored that could result in new and surprising applications.

One of the ways to get out of this state of irrational inertia—which Alberts claims affects all large systems, including universities and other research institutions—is through financial resource incentives to carry out research at the cutting edge of knowledge.

“One urgent challenge to universities and research funding agencies is to develop special mechanisms to select the best young researchers and provide them the resources they need to start new lines of research without demanding preliminary results," he affirmed.

Alberts mentioned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and the creation of the New Innovator Award. This funding supports innovative approaches to high-impact scientific problems without requiring preliminary results. Researchers who have finished their doctorates within the last ten years are eligible to apply. .

“We need to give incentive to scientists to take the leap from areas of research that are already overexplored to others that still have many gaps and can result in innovative studies,” said Alberts.

Nevertheless, he says, there are many experiments that could be carried out in still-unexplored areas of research, and financial and human resources are always lacking. Strategies must be developed to decide which scientific problems should be tackled..

“My advice to young scientists is that they work on problems that need to be resolved and that haven’t yet been thoroughly explored. They should be problems also being worked on by other qualified scientists with whom they can interact,” he recommended.

Alberts said that some strategies that have worked well in carrying out research in different areas are to identify an important scientific problem that is still unresolved and invent or seek out new methods or approaches to resolve it.

One of the strategies that has not been successful is to perfect a particular method or approach and then look for a scientific problem to use it on. “Strategy is everything in research,” said Alberts.

Alberts has been editor-in-chief of Science magazine, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) since 2007.  He said that one of the actions implemented by the magazine to promote innovation in research—to help the scientific community move forward on critical questions such as data availability and management—is to publish not only scientific articles but also news and technical commentary on research carried out in different parts of the world.

“There are sections of Science dedicated to weekly news, reports on scientific events, editorials, letters and book reviews. These are ways to try and contemplate what is happening in many areas of science,” he said.

“Scientists need to know what is happening outside their own areas of study in order to become more innovative in their fields of research,” affirmed Alberts.