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Independent Science

In a post earlier in the year I talked about the independent scientist and how very experienced people were stepping out of their careers with sufficient income to engage in science as independents, assuming that they could find ways to reproduce the networks and tools that they needed. In a somewhat plaintive cry from a commenter, I was asked how that might work if you didn’t have a made-up pension or other income following a well paid career but wanted to continue working in research. Roughly translated, I think that means “this may work for you old gits, but what about us that still have our hair and eyesight”. Having confidently said I would reply soon, it has taken me 5 months to think of an answer. Hubris.

Because I am not sure you can. At least, I can see ways to make an independent living as a young scientist, but it may not be end up being research and it may mean that you do a lot of things that you don’t want to do. It depends a lot on what your research area is, what motivates you and how committed you are. So how could you do this?


Big Switch, Small Apology

A number of interesting comments have been left over the last few days, but I owe an apology to the posters in being so slow to approve them. I have an excuse, which I will offer further down the page, but it gives me an opportunity to write about something I am interested in. It comes out of another book which I enjoyed reading recently called the Big Switch by Nick Carr. The book is a good read and takes some well known ideas and, with good examples, argues that computing will become a commodity provided by utilities. The analogy he draws is with the electrical industry which was originally based on selling private generation units. I didn’t know this, but apparently Thomas Edison’s business model was to sell electricity generators to businesses and that is what sustained the early growth of the industry. It wasn’t until the costs of distribution started to fall and the switch to AC that this model was overtaken by that of the electricity company as a utility. Now of course we just expect to be able to plug in and get the power we need when we need it. So the developments in on demand and cloud computing look to him like the same “big switch” where computing resource becomes a commodity, provided by big utilities such as we are seeing with Amazon and others. So in this new world the idea that an organisation will have its own computers and software managed locally will seem as archaic as a company deciding to have its own power generation facilities. Of course this requires something of a culture shift for people to decide to do their work and store their data “in the cloud”, particularly where that data is critical to the business or maybe the academic reputation of the scientist. So why is this relevant to my feeble excuse for not approving comments for several days? Read on …


Open Source Drug Discovery

Could you invent a drug for free?

No. It costs on average almost $1 bn to get a new drug launched. Although much of that cost comes from counting all the failures along the way, since for every 150 drug discovery projects that get started only one, 12 years later, makes it to market.

But could you invent a drug without spending any money?


SoHo Science

In the previous post I talked about the long tail of science as independent scientists (or small groups) working outside the mainstream research organisations. Of course it could be an individual within a large organisation who works in a very specialised domain, with few if any peers. But usually I think about the SoHo (small office — home office) individual, as the “extreme” example. There are lots of good scientists already working this way, perhaps making a living as consultants and advisers, but “cloud computing”, and science in the cloud creates an opportunity for this to expand, perhaps to the point where the majority of scientific “product” comes from this long tail.


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