Suppose we have a brilliant young student with an interest in finding cures for diseases. He has out lined methods he uses and adequately proved his ability to do worthwhile research. The goverment gives him an initial 1 million dollars to start a research program on a disease they assign to him. He comes back in 6 months and the powers to be are impressed with his work and offer him another 10 million to continue with the project.
As the researcher gets deeper and deeper into the project he finds himself hitting more and more dead ends and finds it harder to look for new avenues to go down. He has to report back to his superiors soon but has very little progress he can report.
Once he has reached this stage, does his focus tend to start looking for ways to impress the guys with the money or do they tend to stay focused on what they are doing. I know how important focus can be when raw brain horsepower is needed to work through something. If this is infact an issue with research how is it dealt with?
It’s unlikely that a new researcher will get the money you are believing they would. So to the extent a researcher is motivated by money (and why the hell shouldn’t they be?) the answer is they keep plugging away because they need to in order to get the big bux.
A second motivation is the same as any entrepreneur - keep swinging away until you hit the home run. The vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures end in abject failure. So just as a nascent business person keeps trying and trying, so might a researcher. So if the research has a potential business application, that would keep them going.
The third motivation is simply natural curiosity. A lot of researchers simply want to learn stuff and will be thrilled to make discoveries.
Finally, if this researcher is doing basic research at an academic institution, there may not be a known application of their research. There is a culture of discovering things - some of which may eventually lead to tangible benefit, and others simply answer basic questions that keep humans expanding our body of knowledge.
So the question is - what keeps anybody motivated? Money, personal interest, and prestige!
That’s not generally the way research works. A younger researcher is probably not going to get a 1 million dollar grant, at least not on his own. He’ll probably start out as a post doc in the lab of a senior researcher who does have the clout to get a million dollar grant. And nobody is “assigned” a disease. You write a proposal to NIH or another funding organization for a particular research project on a disease, and then they decide whether to fund it or not.
A researcher isn’t going to be coming back in 6 months. If the original project shows good results (which may take several years), it can form the basis for a grant proposal for much more money. However, this is probably going to be for a team of researchers rather than an individual.
It’s going to be rare that a research project is a total failure in the sense of not yielding any new information. Even experiments that are unsuccessful against the disease will either eliminate certain lines of attack or suggest new ones. Even negative results are data points. Of course, you’re going to focus on lines of research that are most likely to have positive results, so there’s really no conflict between “impressing the guys with the money” and “staying focused on what they are doing.”
Even if the research isn’t yielding results, there is still satisfaction on a daily basis as people grow their technical skills. Researchers are not only researching a particular question, they are also learning proccesses that are new to them, and may be developing and testing new proccesses.
It’s easy for researchers to stay motivated because all the hard work (i.e., the actual lab work) is done by technicians and/or postdocs. The actual scientists in charge of research programs spend a lot of their time looking up new scientific literature, writing papers, overseeing their underlings, attending scientific conferences, etc. If a research area is looking unpromising, the scientist will also start looking into other areas of research.
This is true for industry (pharmaceutical) reserach – I can’t speak for academic research, which may be different.
If no progress is being made then it is hard to stay focussed - because no results means no papers means no grants means no lab - a fate worse than death. So a young PI planning on tenure needs to be very adaptable - this is quite easy if you start out in the centre of an area that the community is currently interested in. If you’re out on a limb, nailing your colours to the mast of one big idea, then it is more difficult.
It can be hard getting postdocs to work on big, push-back-the-boundaries-of-science ideas in the first place, because they’re going to be difficult projects that are unlikely to work. So any smart postdoc is going to hedge their bets and have something more tractable (but less important) up their sleeve that can produce results. You used to be able to [del]bribe[/del] motivate them to work on these brutal projects by getting them a job at the end of it, but that’s less easy these days.
Caveat: I heard this a decade on a sports talk show. A caller said he was involved in cold fusion research. The host asked how long before it becomes viable. The caller said about 60 years-it’s interesting but a bit frustrating because you know you’ll be dead before it works.
Well, I was expected to: the conditions of my fellowship included presenting a report every 6 months. Thankfully and unlike the initial request, that one didn’t need to be translated to English and approved by my advisor; writing for “the people with the money” when you know what level they understand is a lot easier if you don’t need to fight your advisor over including key words that will go waaaay above their heads.
Then again, my grant only covered 12K a year, the replacement of my TA’s salary (the tuition waiver came out of being relabeled an RA); that’s a bit smaller than a mil.
In my case the motivation to get into research was economical: I could get paid to do research and get a grad diploma, or I could join the unemployment lines. Research, here I come! But the motivation to do specific types of research was a combination of curiosity and my obsession with “reducing waste”: my work was on research methods that could make discovery of new products more efficient. The work I would have liked to do if there had been enough background data for it would have been directed towards reducing secondary effects in medications, again something that would have increased discovery efficiency (tagging of products likely to have bad secondary effects would mean the ability to focus on those without the tag).
You weren’t coming back six months after having received a million bucks to ask for another 10 million, which is what I was referring to. A fellowship report is not comparable.
There are a lot of fields where failure is more common than success: think chefs creating new recipes, artists, designers, professional athletes, theoretical physicists and people who start their own businesses, to name a few. The motivation to keep trying always seems to be there.
Even when you hit dead ends, you often discover some useful things on the way.
I’m not a researcher, but I did do a bit of research in Computer Science in college, and my job now involves a decent amount of not really knowing exactly how to accomplish some goal, which results in experimentation and trying out many things, lots of which don’t really get there.
In college, although we set out to solve a much larger class of problem, we ended up narrowing our sights to a more modest one (since we only had a few months to work on it). But we did solve the more modest problem, so we could still feel that we’d had some success, even though we didn’t achieve some kind of revolutionary breakthrough.
At work, I almost always make some kind of modest improvement even when I’m going down a path that ultimately is a dead end. The other day I was working on a new data structure for some processing that I’m trying to speed up. It was ultimately a dead end. It actually made the whole process slower. But then I saw that one part was actually running faster. So I threw away all the changes except that one, and I actually did get a few percent speedup. Not moving mountains, but making steady progress.
Even if I don’t get any useful code out of an experiment, I often still improve my craft. I become better at what I do through practice. That’s often enough to feel satisfaction.
If you are in a field that has a lot of built-in failure, it is not money, prestige, etc. that must motivate you (getting paid makes your work possible, it can’t be the reason you do it at all). There has to be a lot of intrinsic reward in the process. I’ve done a lot of work in various creative arts, in which the end rewards are fleeting if they even come, the process is 90% of the joy and interest. I’m married to someone whose field is particle physics research. Almost all of these massive international collaborative experiments end in failure, inconclusive results, or tiny increments of knowledge, about as small as the particles they are studying. Nobody is getting rich doing this that I can see, but there are plenty of brilliant scientists gleefully and excitedly competing to get their next tweak up and running. Go figure. Life is a journey, or something.
Well, as I said in my next paragraph, I was receiving 12K, not mils - writing those bi-yearly reports was a condition of keeping my lowly 12K coming. But if you are a researcher in an industrial setting (rather than an academic or “pure research” one), betcherass you’re going to be writing reports. That is, if you want your salary and your team’s funding and your lab’s expenses to keep coming.
The distinction is between progress reports that are required by the funding organization and, on the other hand, new proposals seeking additional funding. Colibri correctly points out that someone who is awarded a $1M research grant wouldn’t come back in 6 months and propose $10M for the same work. However, the $1M grantee will surely be required to write periodic progress reports to keep that initial $1M coming in over the life of the grant (which could be many years).
How does anyone stay motivated to do what they are motivated to do? Someone who constructs a vegetable box, designs an irrigation system, researches fertilization options, chooses seeds to plant, thins the sprouts, stakes up the ones that need staking, deals with pests, and otherwise puts a whole lot of effort in to a small vegetable plot is probably not doing it purely so that they can eat a better tasting tomato, although that is part of it.
I know your specific example is just a hypothetical, but it’s worth picking at a bit from the academic side. Students, and to a nearly universal extent postdocs, wouldn’t be asking for their own large pots of money for independent work. They would be part of a research group and would have their work directed by the leader(s) of that group (although postdocs can have considerable freedom in some cases).
When a proposal is submitted, it’ll be rather specific. The idea of forming a research group as a general purpose problem-solving facility doesn’t really bear out. A proposal might focus on a subpart of a subpart of a subfield. It would lay out exactly what the funding is needed for, the techniques and approaches to be used, the milestones or branch-points that lie ahead, etc.
The merit of the proposal is not usually evaluated by the funding agency directly but by experts in the field, who give detailed feedback to the agency on the pros/cons, merits/demerits, topical relevance (to the charge of the funding agency), and likelihood of success of the proposal.
“Superiors” here is a tricky one. For a tenured researcher, the relevant parties are the funding sources. If things aren’t working out, the agencies and the reviewers would assess whether the failures are due to the difficulty of the task, the inadequacies of the researcher, or something in between. It would be perfectly reasonable for funding to continue even if things turned out harder than expected. For a non-tenured researcher, lack of results would be a very stressful scenario, as job security could be in play. For younger researchers (students, postdocs), the consequences of a lack of results depends on the reasons and on the demeanor of the relevant research advisor.
He or she would likely continue to seek funding for the line of research, but if the money stops flowing, there isn’t much option aside from pushing in another direction. Keeping a moderately diversified research portfolio is one way to mitigate against such dead ends, but this is not always easy to achieve in practice in certain fields.
One other point that nobody else has mentioned is that a professional researcher probably isn’t just working on one project. You’re likely to have 3-5 different projects (or more if you have a lot of grad students and postdocs working for you), and they’re probably not all going to be dead ends. This is especially true because they’ll often be spread out over a variety of levels of risk: Some projects, you know going in that they have a very low chance of turning up something interesting, but if they do turn something up, it’s going to be huge. Some projects aren’t going to be huge no matter what you find, but have a very high chance of making some minor incremental progress. A good researcher will usually have one of each of those sorts of projects, plus a variety in between: The slow-and-steady projects will get you through the times between breakthroughs in the big, exciting projects.
I’ll be a bit cynical and say that graduate schools (especially Ph.D programs) tend to weed out the kind of people who are easily discouraged by lack of success. The people who remain in research tend to be those who are diligent and enjoy the process, rather than motivated by the euphoria of success.
This is the only answer I have seen that comes even close to the explanation. David Hilbert, one of the finest mathematicians of all time said it best: “Wir muessen wissen, wir werden wissen” (We must know, we will know). Even if he was wrong (Goedel showed that we won’t always know), it expresses the sentiment perfectly. I have been retired for very nearly 15 years (on Dec. 31), but I am still actively pursuing research and publishing papers. Why? Because I want to know.
About dead ends: there is no such thing. When I started out, I thought that a successful day of research was one in which I had proved a new theorem. That’s nice, but there are few such days. No, a successful day of research is one where you understand something better in the evening than you did in the morning. If that doesn’t happen, then you will not stay a researcher.
To look at it differently, there has been a war on cancer for 40+ years. There has been progress, less than we would want, but there is a hell of a lot that is understood about it today than there was 40 years ago. An enormous amount.
Although the phrase “curiosity-driven research” is used as a put-down to contrast it with money-making research, the kind politicians love, it remains true enough and is really the only thing worth of the name. The rest is development.
And I cannot emphasize this too strongly: if you know where you are going, it is because you have already visited it. When I wrote a grant proposal, most of what I proposed to do was what I had already done. How else could I know it could be done? When you head off into the unknown, you cannot know where you will end up.
I understood what you were referring to, but was pointing out that it wasn’t comparable to the situation in the OP, in which the researcher was “coming back” to ask for greatly increased funding after only six months. Of course, in many academic circumstances as well as industrial ones periodic progress reports are required.
In my experience, it’s generally annually. But I was principal investigator on a $1 million grant once (spread over six years) that didn’t have any formal reporting requirements. Of course, I sent them results whenever they were available.