Can an indie scientist get funding to run a real lab?

Indie Scientists?

In my last post I looked at a full-stack approach to open science - getting up and running as that rarest of birds, the self-educated indie scientist. Long thought to have gone extinct in the Victorian era, some believe the “gentleman scientist” - gentleperson, surely? - may be due for a comeback.

Is this actually a viable approach for someone who wants to do more than vanity research? I’ll assume for the moment that we’re talking about someone who has the emotional support, the motivation, the intellectual firepower, and the good sense to do quality work, bearing in mind that many practicing scientists lack one or more of these qualities.

In that case, it comes down to lab equipment, space, and living resources. Or, in other words, money, money, and money.

What is the state of the field for getting funding? Well, there’s bad news, and then there’s more bad news.

Big money and an independent lab

The National Institutes of Health makes government science grants, and if you’re looking for millions they’re the place to get it. However, NIH grants require applicants to have a Ph.D. as well as substantial experience in administering a lab and publishing research. In fact, government funding is working on reducing the time it takes for a postdoc to receive their first major grant. That’s their major innovation. If a postdoctoral researcher has a tough time getting funding to open her own lab, an independent researcher without a Ph.D. will find it even more difficult.

If you want to do top-tier research, then, you’d better go where the smart people, and big money is: academia. Right? Probably, but here’s more bad news. As How to succeed in science: a concise guide for young biomedical scientists points out, the average age at which a postdoc receives a major grant is 43.

That’s for someone who went straight through grad school, I presume. Now you’re two decades away from retirement, and you’re just getting in a position to do the research you’re really interested in.The “concise guide” above notes that it really did use to be easier thirty or forty years ago. For more, Science and Nature discuss some of the problems a postdoc faces in moving out on her own.

Even under the relatively pro-science - in economic terms - Obama administration, the funding for science has remained flat. Because this flatlining followed a small funding boom, the field is now glutted with postdoctoral researchers: the “Postdocalypse”.

Now, if you do get a lab up and running, unaffiliated with a university or hospital, you have the advantage of nimbleness, which may help you to generate results faster, and result in a better track record of getting funding. Or that was the case 30 years ago, anyway.

Funding the unaffiliated researcher

Okay, if the big money goes to established researchers, and it’s very hard to become one, how about the prospects as an indie researcher?

Let’s start by pointing out the obvious, as this Quora post does well. Although an independent research theoretically has more research freedom by not worrying about grant proposals and restrictions, about bureaucratic administration, lack of time, money, and equipment make going indie very hard.

For those reasons, I think, very few people become indie researchers, and “citizen science” doesn’t do hard, cutting-edge science. I’m sure training and funding are the major reasons for this, but again let’s stick to funding and assume you can self-train (like this).

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Some hope the postdocalypse could be a biotech boom opportunity in disguise. Ethan Perlstein couldn’t find an acadmic position despite sterling Ivy-league credentials, and decided to crowdfund his work before forming a public benefit corporation to continue researching “orphan diseases”.

(A public benefit corporation is a very interesting profit-nonprofit hybrid, in which the corporate officers balance duties to mission and to profit)

More broadly, others argue the dual rise of crowdfunding and cheaper tools will pave the way for an alternative to the university system of doing science, and allow more people to get started as independent researchers.

Diversifying funding sources?

In the same vein, Rhiannon argues that science funding may be diversifying. Private grant-giving institutions and patrons such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Y Combinator prefer to give to non-government labs - a good sign for independent researchers. If government grantors follow suit, then both funding, and active scientists, will become more diverse. However, that’s stil an if.

Are these resources sufficient for a full-time researcher to live on and build a private lab? That’s a tough sell, but maybe.

• If you identify as a citizen scientist, you have a couple of resources to investigate.

• Entrepreneurship is always an option. Nobelist Peter Mitchell, Craig Venter, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Ethan Perlstein all became independent researchers, funding their work through entrepreneurship or other means (Venter combined entrepreneurship with staggeringly large NIH grants).

• Much of the question may come down to whether you can get access to slighly larger amounts of money via grant-giving institutions.

I don’t really know whether, with the assistance of Instrumentl, or quasi-grant institutions like BreakoutLabs, or other grantors, one can move beyond RocketHub or Experiment. (I also don’t know whether the NSF’s standards are as restrictive as the NIH’s).

Personal and societal ignorance

I’m going to end with a big “I don’t know” for the full-time prospects of an indie scientist. Crowdfunding may not (or, less likely, may) provide sufficient funding for a few. Entrepreneurship will work for a few, but biotech is perhaps harder than academia. Big grants from the NIH are out. For synthetic biology, funding may increase in the future. Smaller grants are a possibility, but I don’t know, and I suspect few others do either.

The path forward remains uncertain for someone who doesn’t want to suffer through the academic meat grinder - but it remains uncertain as well for those who do.