Science Is Inherently Inefficient
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe Stupid Reason That Elon Musk Is Complaining About Scientists Spraying Bobcat Urine on Alcoholic Rats, To cut spending on ‘wasteful’ experiments is to misunderstand where brilliant discoveries really come from., Elon Musk wants to cut down on wasteful s
When people feel economically pinched, they often try to clean house. They look at their spending and identify inefficiencies. Maybe they shop too much, or need a cheaper cell phone plan. Maybe (if they are a CEO) they look for workers to lay off and projects to get rid of. The obsession with efficiency is of course why many people might be excited that President-elect Donald Trump has announced he is appointing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head a ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE, of course; government acronyms with a nod to cryptocurrency flattery are nothing if not efficient). Musk and Ramaswamy immediately announced that they would ‘not go gently,’ and spoke of attacking government waste.
When it comes to ‘wasteful’ scientific research, there are tons of examples to point a finger at. The government funded research that put shrimp on treadmills! The government funded a study spraying bobcat urine at alcoholic rats! The New York Post compiled a list of suggestions of things DOGE ought to keep our tax dollars away from, including cats on treadmills. (So many treadmills!) The outrage is palpable. How dare scientists do research without an immediate practical application! So inefficient. Science and efficiency should always go hand in hand.
But what these angry pundits truly reveal is how little they understand about how science works. For science to be effective, it simply cannot be efficient. Scientists do things they’ve already done, and do them over and over again, changing one tiny variable at a time. They do a lot of seemingly silly things in an attempt to re-create aspects of the world in a lab, where they can be monitored and replicated over and over and over. These studies might seem like a waste of precious resources. But this inefficiency is, in itself, efficient. It is the simplest, most clear way of coming to a true understanding of reality. (Would you rather researchers … try to chase shrimp around in their environments?) These seemingly silly studies provide proof of a phenomenon—and sometimes exercises in serendipity.
Lest you require a reminder, most modern scientific experiments are constructed using the scientific method. Develop a hypothesis, test the hypothesis and try to disprove it. But testing a hypothesis is not as simple as conducting a single experiment. It means replicating a test, over and over, to prove that the results weren’t an accident. It means changing the parameters of that test one variable at a time, trying to get from correlation to causation. Other scientists must then replicate those results, proving that the first results weren’t happenstance.
If science tried to be efficient, if it refused to replicate, we would end up only with observations and correlations. We could see that shrimp populations in the wild were declining in certain areas, for example. But, what’s causing them to wither and die—is it the water quality? Is it more bacteria in the water making the shrimp sick? More predators? Overfishing? Without studies—inefficient studies—we could not say for sure. We could just give a correlation between certain factors and the shrimp. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that; those things and these things are correlated. Correlations are the rumor mill of science. Like rumors, sometimes the connection is true, sometimes it’s totally false, and sometimes it’s been deeply complicated by some other factor that didn’t make it into your groupchat. Is the correlation the cause? To find out, you need to replicate; do something over and over again, varying the temperature, water pH, bacterial infection, and more, to find out which of the many options is causing the shrimp decline. You need to sign some shrimp up for a gym membership and see how they respond to different conditions you create in a tank. In other words, to save the oceans (and everyone’s shrimp cocktails), you need to do things that seem obsessive and silly and wasteful. This is, in the end, more efficient than the alternative.
Inefficiencies in science are important beyond replication. They also create an environment for surprising new discoveries, things scientists would never have dreamed of had they not been in the lab, conducting basic research. If Alexander Fleming had not left a bunch of petri dishes full of bacteria out in his lab (there for replication), he never would have gotten the blank spot in one dish. That blank spot was a mold—a mold that was producing the lifesaving drug penicillin. Two scientists studying metabolism accidentally discovered that removing a dog’s pancreas caused diabetes—paving the way for the discovery of insulin. The two discoveries were accidental, inefficient. They went on to save millions of lives. The line between basic research and discoveries is not always short. Science requires us to be patient. Ozempic? That started with lizard venom experiments in the 1980s. No one could have predicted where those experiments would eventually lead.
OK, yes, maybe you still have questions about the bobcat pee thing. People seem very upset about the idea that the government is spending money spraying bobcat pee on rats, but here’s the thing: There are many rodent studies that waft bobcat pee, cat hair, fox odor, and more at mice. If this sounds silly, it’s because you are not thinking like a mouse. Predators stress out mice. Cats, bobcats, and foxes? Mouse predators. Those ‘wasteful’ studies were studying the effects of stress on rats—and how that stress might be increased if those rats had a lot of previous alcohol exposure. It’s not just about giving rats nightmares. It’s something important to study and understand for the many people living with both alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. That kind of research can lead, down the line, to important medical interventions.
When people pull out these examples of inefficiency, mocking the seemingly silly ‘wastes’ of government funding, what they are really showing is their ignorance. They are showing that they have no real understanding of what research is or how it works. And if basic research is stripped down, streamlined, or tossed entirely in favor of ‘efficiency’? It will not just be scientists who will suffer—it will be all of us.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2024/11/wasteful-science-trump-elon-musk-bobcat-urine.html
Ref: slate
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