Ouroboros. Isn’t that a lovely word? It’s not just a manga — it’s also the name of an ancient symbol: the snake eating its own tail, locked in an eternal loop.
I’ll admit it’s a far-fetched title, but A) I just fell in love with the term, and B) it felt strangely apt when Nature recently rehashed a finding from years ago, warning that science is losing momentum — that it’s gotten stuck in its own circles.
If it’s (still) true, then the recent bloodbath in US research funding might — shockingly — take on a different light: perhaps it’s not sheer madness. Perhaps, if we’ve truly hit the point of diminishing returns, there’s a case for easing off the accelerator — not because we’ve stopped believing in science, but because even science has its saturation point.
If you ask me, though, I suspect there’s something fishy going on with how the authors are quantifying their ‘Consolidation–Disruption Index’. It reminds me of that old line from the sociologist William Bruce Cameron: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
The Nature piece admits as much, citing how the Nobel-winning AlphaFold paper has a relatively low ‘Consolidation–Disruption Index’ in spite of being, arguably, disruptive.
But they go on to explain away the anomaly, claiming that while AlphaFold may have been a profound scientific advance, it’s “not one that conceptually displaces prior biological knowledge or folding principles.”
That, to me, feels like retrofitting the metric to match the narrative. If a discovery that redraws the contours of an entire field doesn’t register as “disruptive,” then what, exactly, is being measured? And more to the point — what’s being missed?
One researcher is quoted, speaking of the emerging field called the Science of Science: “It’s like quantum physics in the 1920s or 1930s. The more you look at it, the more confusing it is.”
I get the impulse to romanticise confusion — especially in a new field trying to prove its depth — but comparing citation metrics to quantum physics feels like a bit of a stretch. The uncertainty in early quantum theory arose from a fundamental challenge to how we understood reality. The confusion here seems more like a category error: trying to distil scientific progress into a tidy metric, and then acting surprised when it leaks.
That said, the paradox is real. More scientists are alive today than in all of human history — and still, the rate of disruptive discovery seems to be slowing. How is that? Why does the engine feel sluggish, even as the fuel keeps pouring in?
In what reads like a riff on the old joke — “How many engineers does it take to…” — I came across a striking figure: sustaining Moore’s Law now requires 18 times as many semiconductor researchers as it did when the industry began. Evidently, the low-hanging fruit is getting scarce even in the applied sciences.
Speaking of Moore’s Law, there’s a perfect reversal of it in biomedicine. Since 1950, the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars of R&D spending — adjusted for inflation — has halved roughly every nine years. Economists call it Eroom’s Law. Funny.
So what’s the root cause of all this?
Plenty of bright minds have failed to find the answer. But when scientists are quoted blaming the rut on how busy they are publishing or perishing, I’m reminded of what social psychologists call the Abilene Paradox: a situation where a group collectively chooses a course of action that none of them individually want — simply because each believes the others do.
And speaking of publish-or-perish: one thing that really stood out to me in this piece of yesterday’s news, was the finding that the number of papers a scientist publishes is inversely proportional (!) to their disruptiveness.
That’s… very interesting.
Especially given what I think of as a counterpoint datapoint, quoted in my earlier post The Science of Science — itself quoting the book of the same title. (I did warn you: ouroboros.)
Less than one percent of all scientists (given a sample of 15 million individuals and their productivity spanning 15 years) are able to keep a constant pace of publishing at least one paper every year. This small fraction contains the most high-impact researchers, putting out around 40 percent of all papers and 87 percent of all papers with more than one thousand citations.
The last word goes to a Danish science-of-scientist with the wonderful name Roberta Sinatra, who posits that maybe “disruptive papers are still out there, but that the scientific community has limited time to read, understand and cite new works, meaning that only a set amount each year can be lauded as breakthroughs.”
I’m putting my money on that observation. Attention, as the saying goes, is all you need.