CULTURE AND RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE 377
develop a sufficient publication record to warrant a faculty position, he or she is for all intents and
purposes out of the academic research game—a teaching position may be available, but taking a posi-
tion that primarily involves teaching is not regarded as a mark of success. However, it is exactly
individuals with such experience that are in many instances the backbone of industrial laboratories and
provide the continuity that is needed for a product’s life cycle.
The academic drive for individual recognition also tends to inhibit collaboration. Academic re-
search laboratories can and do work together, but it is most often the case that such arrangements have
to be negotiated very carefully. The same is true for large companies that collaborate with each other,
but such companies are generally much larger than a single laboratory and intracompany collaboration
tends to be much easier to establish. Thus, the largest projects involving the most collaborators are
found in industry rather than academia.
Even “small” matters are affected by the desire for individual recognition. For example, academic
laboratories often prepare reagents according to a lab-specific protocol, rather than buying standard-
ized kits. The kit approach has the advantage of being much less expensive and faster to put into use,
but often does not provide exactly the functionality that custom preparation offers. That is, the aca-
demic laboratory has arranged its processes to require such functionality, whereas an industrial labora-
tory has tweaked its processes to permit the use of standardized kits.
The generalization of this point is that because academic laboratories seek to differentiate them-
selves from each other, the default position of such laboratories is to eschew standardization of re-
agents, or of database structure for that matter. Standardization does occur, but it takes a special effort
to do so. This default position does not facilitate interlaboratory collaboration.
10.3.5 Issues Related to Funding Policies and Review Mechanisms
As noted in Section 10.2.5.2, a variety of federal agencies support work at the BioComp interface.
But the nature and scale of this support vary by agency, in terms of the procedures for making decisions
about what proposals are worthy of support.
10.3.5.1 Scope of Supported Work
For example, although the NIH does support a nontrivial amount of work at the BioComp interface,
its approach to most of its research portfolio, across all of its institutes and centers, focuses on hypoth-
esis-testing research—research that investigates well-isolated biological phenomena that can be con-
trolled or manipulated and hypotheses that can be tested in straightforward ways with existing meth-
ods. This focus is at the center of reductionist biology and has undeniably been central to much of
biology’s success in the past several decades.
On the other hand, the nearly exclusive focus on hypothesis testing has some important negative
consequences. For example, experiments that require breakthrough approaches are unlikely to be di-
rectly supported. Just as importantly, advancing technology that could facilitate research is almost
always done as a sideline. This has had a considerable chilling effect in general on what could have
been, but the impact is particularly severe for implementation of computational technologies in biologi-
cal sciences. That is, in effect as a cultural aspect of modern biological research, technology development
to facilitate research is not considered real research and is not considered a legitimate focus of a stan-
dard grant. Thus, even computing research that would have a major impact on the advancement of
biological science is rarely done (Box 10.6 provides one example of this reluctance).
It is worth noting two ironies. First, it was the Department of Energy, rather than the NIH, that
supported the Human Genome Project. Second, the development of technology to conduct polymerase
chain reaction (PCR)—a technology that is fundamental to a great deal of biological research today and
was worthy of a Nobel Prize in 1993—would have been ineligible for funding under traditional NIH
funding policy.