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Jan 15, 2025 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
Christopher Steven Marcum, PhD, FGSAORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0899-6143Thanks for reading The Good Science Project! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. In this guest post, Chris Marcum (a friend of the Good Science Project) reflects on his experience with the Intramural Research Program (IRP) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and makes some needed suggestions for reform.
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Dec 31, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
Unlike the rest of the FreakTakes ARPA series, today’s piece does not have the usual narrative structure. It is, instead, a set of personal notes cleaned up and re-structured as a post. While the post is atypical, the ARPA series would be incomplete if I did not outline the factors that mark key regime changes at the agency over time.
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Dec 24, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
Two promising items in NIH data news recently: As described in this post from my friends Mike Lauer and Tara Schwetz at NIH, the NIH is creating a “Science of Science Scholars Program Pilot.” What does this mean, you might ask? The NIH is planning to do more to offer scholars access to internal administrative data, so that they can answer questions such as: How can NIH assess the economic impact across its portfolios, including contributions to treatments and interventions?
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
Introduction by Stuart Buck: This is a guest column from Jeremy Berg, who is currently Associate Senior Vice Chancellor for Science Strategy and Planning, Health Sciences, and Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, School of Medicine, at the University of Pittsburgh.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
Aishwarya is a curiosity-driven systems thinker working at the intersection of technology and society. Her interests span human-AI collaboration, social technology, knowledge systems, and complex adaptive systems. A Cambridge alumna and Cosmos Ventures grantee, she's the founder of The Analogue Group, an R&D fund through which she's reimagining how we approach intractable problems by embracing complexity. In 1999, Google's founders couldn't sell their company for $1 million.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
This is the first essay in a three-part series. I (David) wrote a similar trilogy before we started our “Science Angels” funding program at the Experiment Foundation. This set is coming three years and two hundred and fifty grants later. We learned a lot in that time. And we have good ideas about where to go next. The lessons might surprise you—they did me. Also, it’s fundraising season in non-profit land.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
experimental-history.com | Adam Mastroianni |Stuart Buck
Even a years ago, if you had tried to talk to me about the “philosophy of science,” I would have skeddadled. Philosophy? As in, people just...saying stuff? No thanks dude, I’m good. I’m a Science Guy, I talk Data. But then I realized something: I had no idea what I was doing. Like, nobody had ever told me what science was or how to do it. My advisor never sat me down and gave me the scientific Birds and the Bees talk (“When a hypothesis and an experiment love each other very much...”).
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
This is an interview with Daniel MacArthur, whom I first met when he was at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Boston. During his time in the US, Daniel co-directed both the Medical and Population Genetics Program and the Center for Mendelian Genomics at the Broad Institute. He has since moved back to his homeland of Australia. In a layperson’s terms, what is your current research agenda?
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
principia-scientific.com | Stuart Buck
What’s the problem? Groupthink. Science funders wield an enormous amount of influence—usually unacknowledged—over what kinds of research will get done. They can bias an entire scientific field towards unproductive ideas, away from innovation. After all, in a highly-competitive academic market, if scientists know that a grant is even slightly more likely to be funded if it aligns with the current fad, then they are going to hitch their work to that fad.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
goodscience.substack.com | Stuart Buck
In theory, the Good Science Project endorses the proposed Department of Governmental Efficiency that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been promoting now that Trump got elected. After all, we have published numerous articles about how scientists are affected by administrative burden (44% of their research time in surveys, although it can be up to 70% of their time in anecdotal cases that I’ve heard about!).
