How to Accelerate Science

The exponential growth in scientific knowledge, and the myriad technological innovations it has spawned over the past two centuries, has given rise to the expectation that scientific progress will continue to accelerate. Superficially, this remains the case—there have never been more journals, papers, and scientists. But a deeper analysis reveals that science, like technology and economic growth, exhibits symptoms of stagnation.

Scientific productivity has significantly declined over recent decades. Today’s scientific progress cannot be compared with past scientific revolutions. Even in fields where there’s still robust progress, current advances require far more research effort and funding than their predecessors did. Drug discovery in biotech, for example, is becoming slower and more expensive over time. The cost of developing novel drugs doubles every nine years, an observation referred to as Eroom’s law. In essence, the forces that govern scientific progress invert the dynamics that gave rise to Moore’s law in the semiconductor industry.

What explains this decline in scientific innovation? We identify three trends. First is the tendency toward scientific risk aversion and conformity: the current institutional system that organizes scientific research is structured in a way that rewards and instills orthodoxy. Second is the ever-expanding bureaucratization of science, which has resulted in the disturbing finding that researchers spend more than 40 percent of their time compiling and submitting grant proposals. These two trends are accompanied by an increasing drive toward the third: hyper-specialization. Researchers and academics have to become ever more specialized to make progress in an ever-narrowing field of study or research. Hyper-specialization is, to some extent, an inevitable consequence of the success of scientific progress. Due to the exponential accumulation of scientific knowledge over the past three centuries, specialization has become a practical necessity because it reduces the cognitive load that researchers in any given scientific field face.

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