{"text":[[{"start":8,"text":"The writer is a professor at MIT and Politecnico di Milano, and founder of Carlo Ratti Associati"}],[{"start":14.85,"text":"For once, I should thank the Trump administration. It has forced academia to confront a problem that has long needed attention: the shortcomings of peer review. The proposed cure, however, is far worse than the disease."}],[{"start":29,"text":"The modern American research system grew out of the vision of a single engineer from my own university, MIT. In 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed a grand three-way bargain: government would fund research; scientists with the relevant expertise would judge its merit; and society would reap the benefits. That arrangement gave us the modern American research university and the long chain of inventions that shape our lives today."}],[{"start":53.65,"text":"But peer review is hardly beyond criticism. It can too easily curdle into peer reassurance; like our woolly cousins, we researchers are not immune to herd behaviour. More fundamentally, every generation of scientists struggles to change its own assumptions. As the German physicist Max Planck suggested, science advances one funeral at a time."}],[{"start":75.7,"text":"There is another more recent challenge: ideological pressures. Under the Biden administration, several diversity, equity and inclusion requirements injected non-scientific criteria into peer review and grant decisions. The Trump administration now seeks to address this."}],[{"start":91.95,"text":"A new regulation currently under consideration by the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requires that, before any federal research grant is awarded, a political appointee certify that the work will “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities”. Funding could be revoked whenever political priorities change."}],[{"start":111.5,"text":"The answer to imperfect peer review is better peer review, not political supervision. Replacing scientific judgment with political alignment risks undermining the very engine of discovery. Faced with the risk that a project could be cancelled when the political weather turns, the rational researcher abandons the ambitious idea for the safe one. The boldest discoveries are not banned; they are simply never attempted."}],[{"start":136.7,"text":"What can be done instead? In conversations at MIT, several possible solutions have emerged. Funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation could be encouraged to support a more heterogeneous set of ideas. I propose dividing peer review into two stages: first, verifying the methodological soundness of the research, which could also benefit from recent AI developments; second, allowing the findings to be debated openly within the scientific community."}],[{"start":167.1,"text":"This process of discussion and criticism is one of the great but underutilised strengths of science. It allows ideas to compete over time rather than being decided in advance by a small group of gatekeepers. Funding agencies in New Zealand and Switzerland have already moved in a two-tier direction by awarding some grants by lottery among proposals judged methodologically sound."}],[{"start":190.5,"text":"Elements of this model already exist in another domain of peer review: the process that decides what research to publish. Open-access journals such as Scientific Reports or Public Library of Science focus primarily on methodological soundness, allowing broader judgments to emerge through subsequent citations."}],[{"start":210,"text":"These are only some of the reforms that a revised proposal to the OMB could address. But if left in its present form, it risks undoing America’s scientific advantage."}],[{"start":220,"text":"In 1658, Sir Thomas Browne captured the cruelty of recorded history, writing: “Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it.” We keep a better record of the arsonist than the architect. For much of the past century, America has been the architect of modern science. It would be a bitter epitaph to be remembered for its undoing."}],[{"start":251.45,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1783925080_2634.mp3"}