Here is a page from Dr. Robert Becker's book The Body Electric:
In the last four decades, changes in the structure of the scientific institutions have produced a situation so heavily weighted in favor of the establishment that it impedes progress in health care and prevents truly new ideas from getting a fair hearing in almost all circumstances. The present system is in effect a dogmatic religion with self-perpetuating priesthood dedicated only to preserving the current orthodoxies. The system rewards the sycophant and punishes the visionary to a degree unparalleled in the four-hundred year history of modern science.
This situation has come about because research is now so expensive that only governments and multinational corporations can pay for it. The funds are dispersed by agencies staffed and run by bureaucrats who aren't scientists themselves. As this system developed after WW2, the question naturally arose as to how these scientifically ignorant officials were to choose among competing grant applications. The logical solution was to set up panels of scientists to evaluate requests in their fields and them advise the bureaucrats.
This method is based on the naive assumption that scientists really are more impartial than other people, so the result could have been predicted decades ago. In general, projects that propose a search for evidence in support of new ideas aren't funded. Most review committees approve nothing that would challenge the findings their members made when they were struggling young researchers who created the current theories, whereas projects that pander to these elder egos receive lavish support. Eventually those who play the game become the new members of the peer group, and thus the system perpetuates itself. As Erin Chargaff has remarked, "this continual turning off and on of the financial faucets produces Pavlovian effects," and most research becomes mere water treading aimed at getting paid rather than finding anything new. The intuitive "lunatic twinge," the urge to test a hunch, which is the source of all scientific breakthroughs, is systematically excluded.
Here is a page from Dr. Robert Becker's book The Body Electric:
In the last four decades, changes in the structure of the scientific institutions have produced a situation so heavily weighted in favor of the establishment that it impedes progress in health care and prevents truly new ideas from getting a fair hearing in almost all circumstances. The present system is in effect a dogmatic religion with self-perpetuating priesthood dedicated only to preserving the current orthodoxies. The system rewards the sycophant and punishes the visionary to a degree unparalleled in the four-hundred year history of modern science.
This situation has come about because research is now so expensive that only governments and multinational corporations can pay for it. The funds are dispersed by agencies staffed and run by bureaucrats who aren't scientists themselves. As this system developed after WW2, the question naturally arose as to how these scientifically ignorant officials were to choose among competing grant applications. The logical solution was to set up panels of scientists to evaluate requests in their fields and them advise the bureaucrats.
This method is based on the naive assumption that scientists really are more impartial than other people, so the result could have been predicted decades ago. In general, projects that propose a search for evidence in support of new ideas aren't funded. Most review committees approve nothing that would challenge the findings their members made when they were struggling young researchers who created the current theories, whereas projects that pander to these elder egos receive lavish support. Eventually those who play the game become the new members of the peer group, and thus the system perpetuates itself. As Erin Chargaff has remarked, "this continual turning off and on of the financial faucets produces Pavlovian effects," and most research becomes mere water treading aimed at getting paid rather than finding anything new. The intuitive "lunatic twinge," the urge to test a hunch, which is the source of all scientific breakthroughs, is systematically excluded.