‘Science by consensus’ impedes scientific creativity and progress: An alternative to funding biomedical research

Abstract

The very low success rates of grant applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are highly detrimental to the progress of science and the careers of scientists. The peer review process that evaluates proposals has been claimed arbitrarily to be the best there is. This consensus system, however, has never been evaluated scientifically against an alternative. Here we delineate the 15 major problems with the peer review process, and challenge the Science Advisor to the President, and the leadership of NIH, NSF, and the U.S. Academy of Sciences to refute each of these criticisms. We call for the implementation of more equitable alternatives that will not constrain the progress of science. We propose a system that will fund 80,000 principal investigators, including young scientists, with just half the current NIH budget, three-fold more than the current number of grants, and that will forego the cumbersome, expensive, and counterproductive peer review stage. Further, we propose that the success of the two methods over 5–10 years be compared scientifically.