Topline
Despite surges in fields like AI, medicine and nuclear energy, major advances in science and technology are slowing and are fewer and farther between than decades ago, according to a study published in Nature on Wednesday, stagnation researchers say must be reversed to combat some of the most pressing problems—like climate change—facing humanity today.
The rate of disruptive scientific breakthroughs has slowed in recent decades, researchers found.
Key Facts
Despite explosive growth of innovation and scientific research in recent decades, developments have become more incremental and less disruptive, with progress stalling in multiple key fields, researchers found.
The researchers analyzed some 45 million scientific papers and 3.9 million patents between 1945 and 2010, examining networks of citations to assess whether breakthroughs reinforced the status quo or disrupted existing knowledge and more dramatically pushed science and technology off into new directions.
Across all major scientific and technological fields, these big disruptions—the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, which rendered earlier research obsolete, is a good example of such research—have become less common since 1945, the researchers found.
Instead, the citation patterns suggest papers and patents are increasingly more likely to be consolidating and developing existing knowledge than disrupting it, the researchers said, with innovators drawing on increasingly narrow sources of knowledge to develop their work.
More incremental work means “it may take longer to make those key breakthroughs that push science forward more dramatically,” said Russell Funk, a professor at the University of Minnesota and one of the study’s authors.
The researchers said the findings underscore the need to rethink how we conduct scientific research in order to better facilitate disruptive work and harness innovation to take on humanity’s most pressing problems like climate change and space exploration.
What We Don’t Know
It is not clear precisely why innovations across science and technology have slowed in the decades since 1945. The researchers said their finding—which they also observed analyzing the kinds of language used in patents and scientific papers over the same time period—is unlikely to be due to declining quality of research, as the innovative drop remained even when they only analyzed top-tier publications and Nobel-winning discoveries. Statistical analyses also ruled out changing publication, authorship and citation practices. Popular ideas that scientists may have plucked all the “low-hanging fruit”—relatively easy advances in the field—or take longer training given the greater amount of knowledge both struggle to explain the similar rates of decline across different disciplines.
Contra
Huge advances in science and technology in recent years—such as leaps forward in artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion and gene editing—can make it hard to believe scientific progress is stalling. The researchers said such advances are not inconsistent with the slowdown. Declining disruptive work does not preclude breakthroughs, it just slows the rate at which they occur. The detection of gravity waves and development of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines are two excellent examples of highly disruptive work happening at a time when most research is more incremental in nature, they said.
What To Watch For
The nature of scientific research is imperfect and criticism abounds for how funding is secured, how research directions are selected, diversity among researchers and subjects and the pressures for academics to “publish or perish.” The researchers, who said their findings support a rethinking of how research is conducted and endorses academics being allowed freedom to focus on quality and expand their horizons, joined a chorus of others advocating a research revamp.
Further Reading
Small Teams of Scientists Have Fresher Ideas (Atlantic)
How big technology systems are slowing innovation (MIT Technology Review)
Despite What You Might Think, Major Technological Changes Are Coming More Slowly Than They Once Did (Scientific American)
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/01/04/where-are-all-the-scientific-breakthroughs-forget-ai-nuclear-fusion-and-mrna-vaccines-advances-in-science-and-tech-have-slowed-major-study-says/