Patrick Collison

Broken incentives in medical research

Kevin Kallmes Economics, Liberty , , , , , ,

Last week, I sat down with Scott Johnson of the Device Alliance to discuss how medical research is communicated only through archaic and disorganized methods, and how the root of this is the “economy” of Impact Factor, citations, and tenure-seeking as opposed to an exercise in scientific communication.

We also discussed a vision of the future of medical publishing, where the basic method of communicating knowledge was no longer uploading a PDF but contributing structured data to a living, growing database.

You can listen here: https://www.devicealliance.org/medtech_radio_podcast/

As background, I recommend the recent work by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on broken incentives in medical research funding (as opposed to publishing), as I think their research on funding shows that a great slow-down in medical innovation has resulted from systematic errors in organizing knowledge gathering. Mark Zuckerberg actually interviewed them about it here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/mark-zuckerberg-interviews-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/.

Broken Incentives in Medical Innovation

Kevin Kallmes Law, Liberty, Politics , , , , , ,

I recently listened to Mark Zuckerberg interviewing Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison concerning their thesis that the process of using scientific research to advance major development goals (e.g. extending the average human lifespan) has stagnated. It is a fascinating discussion that fundamentally questions the practice of scientific research as it is currently completed.

Their conversation also made me consider more deeply the incentives in my industry, medical R&D, that have shaped the practices that Cowen and Collison find so problematic. While there are many reasons for the difficulties in maintaining a breakneck pace of technological progress (“all the easy ideas are already done,” “the American education system fails badly on STEM,” etc), I think that there are structural causes that are major contributors to the great slowdown in medical progress. See my full discussion here!