Want to Solve Hard Problems? Fund Niche Research.

Science moves forward by one narrow question at a time.

Scientific research often focuses on specific (sometimes hyper-specific) topics that can feel far removed from everyday concerns. At a moment when research funding is being publicly scrutinized, it’s fair to ask: why should we care about all this niche work?

Short answer: Funding niche science research expands bounds of human knowledge and makes new breakthroughs possible.

Over the past year, research groups have come under growing pressure to justify their value and avoid budget cuts. Even before that, securing funding through annual grant proposals was one of the more frustrating parts of the job for many scientists. As research gets dragged into the public eye, the purpose and conclusions of individual studies are increasingly easy to misunderstand.

Instead of attacking or playing defense for individual papers, I think it’s worth zooming out to ask, what research is actually for?

Funding a wide range of research allows for unexpected connections and breakthroughs — from medical tech to better catastrophe models to insights about how the universe works. Progress comes from exploring widely until new things work, because frequently we don’t understand what we need to know until after we’ve learned it.

In other words, to solve hard problems, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks!

Without research constantly pushing forward our body of human knowledge across many niche areas, we might never discover the knowledge that future breakthroughs depend on.

So how exactly does funding research help us learn things?

For people that consider themselves pragmatists — maybe you work a job that hasn’t changed much in 10+ years — maybe you don’t understand why so much research is needed in the first place.

From that perspective, research should only get funded if it produces clear, actionable results. Ideally, results with financial payoffs. Fund what works. Skip what doesn’t obviously apply to the “real world”. That instinct makes sense.

But I think there’s a deeply pragmatic reason to fund all kinds of research (including work without immediate, obvious applications)!

One way to better think about funding research is through the lens of Venture Capital (“VC”). When they fund start-ups, VC firms don’t bet everything on a single company. They spread smaller investments across many different ideas. Most fail. But a few succeed spectacularly, and those rare successes more than make up for the losses.

Let’s say a VC firm invests equal amounts in 10 start-ups. Over the next decade, nine companies fail but one company returns 100 times their original investment. That single winner delivers a 10x return on the firm’s portfolio. A 10x return on investment in 10 years is incredible by almost any standard.

So for my pragmatic people, think of research funding as academia’s version of venture capital. You invest in a lot of research projects and accept that the outcomes will vary. Some create major breakthroughs. Some become building blocks for other breakthroughs. And some just provide a small piece of knowledge that may or may not become useful later.

Unlike for-profit companies, most science research isn’t designed to deliver short-term wins. Understandably, this makes it a harder sell. Almost no one is doing research to dramatically improve your life next month or next year. They do research to improve the lives of large groups of people over the next decade or next century.

If science funding is the VC of learning things, why is learning things helpful?

Why should we all keep putting time and money into research on topics far removed from daily life?

Let’s think of scientific research as the seed-stage VC of big problems, such as the fight against climate change. We don’t know ahead of time which ideas or which groups are going to be the most successful, so we fund a lot of them. We throw money to a few dozen or a few hundred different groups, and let them explore different problems in a bunch of different ways. Some groups pivot once or twice. Some generate only incremental progress.

But a few produce the next great thing. In VC, “next great thing” typically makes you a lot of money by solving profitable problems. In science, solving big, thorny problems tends to generate public value instead. So what do funders of scientific research get in exchange for “helping the world”? For global powers like the US, it turns out quite a lot.

With extensive, symbiotic ties to the rest of the world, solving international problems helps us all the time (even if we only consider selfish economic benefits, social stability, and political security).

• Fishing and trade routes are affected by climate change through changing ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification.

• Natural hazards like hurricanes and wildfires are affected by temperature, humidity, wind currents, water currents, and sea levels.

• The types and the amount of crops grown each year depend on rainfall, temperatures, wind storms, flood patterns, and soil nutrients.

• Even hyper-local problems like crime and property values can be affected by temperature and precipitation levels.

Every study funded gives us one more small window into the nuanced detail of complex problems (some of which turn out more impactful than others, which is near impossible to tell in advance). With every study, we learn a bit more about flooding levels or rainfall patterns or the impact of temperature change on a certain crop.

Will one more niche scientific study guarantee you stable crops forever? No. But they can certainly provide more insights into climate patterns, how these patterns are changing, and what are the best ways to fight back against climate change.

Extra Benefits

Perhaps my favorite part about funding research is that the by-product we get from even failed projects is people who know how to tackle complex problems. By supporting university research and national labs, we train thousands of brilliant new problem-solvers every year.

Think about all the new engineers and statisticians and scientists who go on to have full careers in medicine or robotics or software. For many of these advanced degrees, learning to reason through hard, ambiguous problems happens primarily through funded research.

In the long-run, as people with advanced STEM training branch into different sectors and tackle real-world problems, the original investment keeps compounding and providing value to the country which funded them. Like many good VC bets, we may have to wait for it to fully pay off a few years or decades later.

Recap

1. Funding research into a wide range of niche science topics helps us find unknown unknowns we wouldn’t think to look for directly.

2. Connecting new discoveries helps us solve complicated problems, often with real economic and security payoffs to the funder.

3. Training people to solve complex problems creates compounding returns over time, continuing to benefit the funding country and the broader world over decades to come.

Bonus photo from college field trip about structural geology: Folded bedrock schist in Cape Elizabeth, Maine!