Challenging the Status Quo: Stuart Buck on Science Funding & Research

Welcome to another episode of the DeSci Podcast! Today, we are delighted to host Stuart Buck. Stuart serves as a Senior Advisor at the Social Science Research Council and is the Executive Director of the Good Science Project—an organization dedicated to enhancing the funding and practice of science.

In this episode, Stuart addresses key challenges in the scientific landscape, such as bureaucratic obstacles to funding and the distinction between basic and applied science.

He emphasizes the interconnected nature of basic and applied research, highlighting how discoveries from basic research lay the foundation for applied innovations and challenges addressed through applied science inspire new questions in basic research.

Moving further, Stuart shares his view on the metaphor of failure in science. According to him, failure is not synonymous with defeat; instead, encountering failures in scientific endeavors indicates that one is posing pertinent questions and pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

Other topics covered in the podcast include scientific reproducibility, the measurement problem in science, enforcing data accessibility, and many more.

Feel free to navigate through the various topics covered in the Podcast using the timestamps provided below.

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⭐ Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

01:27 Good science project main focus.

03:37 Stuart’s theory of social change

10:04 Areas that need improvement

13:00 Recommendation for young researchers

17:35 Why grantmakers tend to be conservative in funding basic science

21:45 Basic vs Applied research

24:15 The notion of failure in science

30:59 Revisiting anti-portfolio

37:37 The value of funding replication in research

43:45 The problem with metrics

46:49 Outro

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If you want to join us on the show as a speaker or have guest ideas, please shoot us an mail at podcast@molecule.to

Special thanks to

Lea Degen: https://twitter.com/lealeata

Stuart Buck: https://twitter.com/stuartbuck1

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