A lab director sets out fixes for the scientific ecosystem | Review of: The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters by Jeremy J. Baumberg

"The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters. Jeremy J. Baumberg Princeton University Press (2018)

Experienced scientists have two core tasks. One is to produce great research. The other is to encourage people to think about how to do great research. Jeremy Baumberg has done the first; now he tries his hand at the second. He was a professor at 30 and is a fellow of the Royal Society. He is well-funded and experienced internationally, in both the private sector (at IBM and Hitachi) and the public realm (the University of Cambridge, UK), running nanotechnology groups with a focus on nanophotonics. As The Secret Life of Science shows, he’s in an excellent position to create a refreshing description of how research “really works and why it matters”. In this solid, coherent and thoughtful study, Baumberg deploys an ecosystem model to describe research processes. (I was once an ecologist and know the usefulness of such models in capturing resource flows, competition, behavioural parallels and so on.) He clarifies the dynamics of publishing, conferences, media, translation to industry and careers, and provides a broad summary of influence....

Baumberg’s recommendations for change are admirably succinct. Rightly, in my view, he tackles the overabundance of scientists and the benefits of constraining the pipeline. He proposes changes in funding distribution to restore diversity of ideas. He calls for better conferences attended by fewer people, and for improving tools through artificial intelligence and customized knowledge retrieval. He commends open access and open data, and proposes open instrumentation...."