Science in the age of selfies
The premise that scientific progress has been slower in the past 50 years than in the 50 before that, and incremental in a way that it was not in the past, seems untenable to me and consistent with the authors being nostalgic for an earlier time that perhaps does not exist. I’m pretty sure someone in 1965 would be impressed to hear that (1) we can engineer viruses that allow in vivo neurons to be controlled by light; (2) we can build robots that use reinforcement learning and ML techniques to drive around a city; or (3) we discovered that humans interbred with Neanderthal, by means of sequencing 40k-year-old bones. To me these projects seem as impressive as any of the past. They all benefited from massive collaborations and would have been impossible to do alone, even by a world-class genius with a plenitude of coffee, time, and tenure.<p>I also object to a few more minor points. Today we have <i>many</i> of yesteryear’s Bell Labs and new ones spring up every year. I think we might be in the most active time period ever for independent and industrial research labs — consider for example OpenAI, the Allen Institute, RAND corporation, Charles River laboratories, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Facebook, 2AI labs, Draper Laboratory, YC Research, IBM Watson Group, Communications Design Group, Xerox PARC, fivethirtyeight, New York Times R&amp;D lab, Microsoft Research* , Google* , Bose Corporation, and SRI, not to mention the hundreds of biotech startups and tech companies that do applied reseach (*s because they are acknowledged in the article). Interestingly, I think Nokia Bell Labs might itself qualify as a modern Bell Labs — it still exists, and in 2014 a scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize for work done there in the 1980s, which is after the authors’ cutoff.<p>Furthermore, I’d be interested in seeing evidence that discoveries of the past can be at least in part attributed to a lack of communication between the scientist and others, and that today’s levels of communication are greater and that it has a negative impact. I have evidence that at least one world-class scientist of the past, Francis Galton, spent a ton of time communicating with others and used what he learned from that communication as a core part of his most important works (see, in particular, his autobiography, which discusses his communication in detail). Similarly, at least some classic big discoveries of the past, such as Watson &amp; Crick’s DNA work, was possible only because there was more than one person involved — in fact, more than two.