This account is mothballed. You can read my @sciencebusiness.net articles here: sciencebusiness.net/author/david...
And a wider selection of my writing here: davidjackmatthews.journoportfolio.com
Hey #polisci: we need more work like Gilman’s new FP piece: plausible scenarios of how world order is reorganized by climate, or more accurately, the shift from fossil to green assets. 🧵
foreignpolicy.com/2025/09/01/e...
This piece could take the comparison with the Opium Wars even further - in that you could argue, at a stretch, that (some) US digital products are the modern equivalent of opium. Lucrative for the exporter, rather unhealthy for the population on the receiving end.
I still often think about this story. If the US proves to have massively over-invested in LLMs, should we start considering the credulity of the US's tech media ecosystem, so prone to overhyping new products, a strategic weakness? What will China have invented while the US was obsessed with AI?
But still, the scientists, economists and public health experts we spoke to think, given promising animal results and diminishing returns in curing individual disease, the time is right for a major scientific shift of money and focus to ageing.
We can't say with certainty whether a scientific push to slow ageing would actually work, of course. And anti-ageing has no shortage of charlatans and dubious claims.
Scientists trying to run these trials complain they just can't raise the cash. The EU’s Horizon Europe spends just 0.08% of its collaborative grant funding on ageing biology, less than an eighth of what it does on cancer.
But there's mounting scientific evidence that some drugs and therapies prolong life in animals. It's just that there's very little money, or political will, to test them in humans, or to research the underlying biology of ageing.
In the rich world, life expectancy increases are slowing. Better treatments for diseases of age make limited impact, as in old age, after you're cured of one, you'll be hit by another. For example, it's estimated that if we completely cured cancer, this would only add 2-3 years to life expectancy.
Today, we've published a feature that asks a fundamental question for anyone involved in science policy: should we focus less on curing individual diseases like cancer or Alzheimer's, and instead try to understand and slow ageing?
sciencebusiness.net/news/drug-de...
When Berlin airport was overbudget and late, that was rightly the focus of every article.
Science and technological development is much more complex and uncertain that building an airport! But is it so fundamentally unpredictable that we can't at least ask a few questions about budget/timing?
Important point in this @nature.com piece about science journalism - too much reporting is just about the outcome, not the process.
The question often missing in sci/tech breakthroughs stories is: why now? Why did it take this long to understand/build this?
www.nature.com/articles/d44...
As the EU fails to agree on scientific sanctions against Israel, there's one under-reported reason why Berlin might be blocking them - Germany is currently buying a $3.5 billion Arrow 3 missile shield from Israel.
sciencebusiness.net/news/interna...
Full link here: commission.europa.eu/document/dow...
Believe it or not, the EU's new €410 billion European Competitiveness Fund will fund...the Metaverse ("virtual worlds", as Brussels calls it).
For how many years does an idea have to be dead before the EU removes it from their policy roster?
At least there's no mention of blockchain.
(one of the metascientists quoted in the piece actually thinks the obsession with metrics may itself explain the purported decline in disruptive science).
In other words, the quest to quantify disruptiveness, however measured, could end up dampening disruptiveness itself.
Because if we find a good measurement, the risk is that researchers then try to optimise their work to maximise this metric, rather than actually producing "disruptive" or "novel" science (like how citations are gamed now).
Perhaps the science system should quit its addiction to metrics.
Since writing this feature, I've had a nagging thought. In part, the article describes how metascientists are trying to find good metrics to measure "disruptive" or "novel" science.
But do we actually want them to succeed?
Thank you Alexandra! Yes, appropriate to see that coming out the same day. My view is that we don't yet have a settled good metric on disruptive/novel research. It's not that these metrics are contradicting each other exactly, they're just measuring things in different ways.
There's a fascinating feature out in @nature.com today from @davidmjourno.bsky.social, on whether and why scientific breakthroughs are getting harder to achieve. It's a narrative being discussed by some of the most powerful science officials in the world, such as OSTP director Michael Kratsios. 🧪
Kratsios says a lot on research bureaucracy, for example, that the average academic would agree with. But he also has the brass neck to say that "America’s national laboratories and universities are its crown jewels" just as the Trump administration tries to foist ideological appointees on Harvard
There's a doom-loop risk here: returns to research investment are falling, which allows politicians to make cuts, which further stagnates science and technology breakthroughs, leading to further falls in public and political support.
But on my reading, he's using this diminishing return on science investment to justify the huge cuts to research currently being pushed by the White House.
No one I can think of in the metascience world worried about declining research disruptiveness would support cuts!
Another very revealing - and perhaps ominous - speech from Michael Kratsios, Trump's appointee as OSTP director.
He argues - correctly, in my view - that we're seeing diminishing returns from science spending, and we need new ways of organising research.
www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-st...
Great piece arguing scientific incentives have led researchers to predominantly invent new materials that are difficult to scale up into real world use: www.worksinprogress.news/p/why-its-so...
He also wants to shake up how the state funds research: "Prizes, advance market commitments, and other novel funding mechanisms, like fast and flexible grants, can multiply the impact of government-funded research."
The Institute for Progress et al research agenda reaches the White House.
Fascinating speech by the US's new OSTP director, Michael Kratsios, last week.
He accepts the Robert Gordon etc argument that sci/tech has slowed down. "Progress today pales in comparison to the huge leaps of the 20th century."
www.whitehouse.gov/articles/202...
www.spd.de/fileadmin/Do...
This is an idea dreamed up by Musk 12 years ago, but was found to be completely technically and economically unfeasible, and no replacement for trains. Frankly embarrassing of the German gov to resurrect this idea. Do they read the news on a ten year delay?
In Feb, I criticised Europe for wasting money and attention on over-inflated US tech hype cycles like genAI, the metaverse and blockchain: sciencebusiness.net/viewpoint/ai...
Well, Germany's incoming government has gone one further. They're promising a test hyperloop route in their governing plan!
