Claims

Factual · Science and research methods

“Third, successful projects are often scrappy or were afterthoughts that people didn’t initially think were promising, rather than massively funded efforts.”

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, essay author · 17 August 2015 · Machines of Loving Grace (darioamodei.com)

Successful biology projects are often scrappy or afterthoughts not initially thought promising, rather than massively funded efforts.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

What would count as true or false

Judged as of 2015-08-17, as a general claim about successful biology research. True: studies of how biology breakthroughs arose, or a broad historical record, show that a large share of important successes (for example PCR, GFP, CRISPR or monoclonal antibodies) came from small, under-resourced or initially unpromising side projects, and that big, heavily funded efforts did not account for most successes. Mostly true: the pattern is well documented for many notable cases ("often"), but large funded efforts also produced a substantial share of successes. Mixed: the evidence is balanced, with many notable successes from both scrappy and massively funded projects. Mostly false: the claim rests on a handful of anecdotes stated as a general pattern, with no systematic evidence, or the evidence suggests that most successes came from well-funded mainstream programmes. False: systematic evidence shows that scrappy or afterthought projects rarely produce successes in biology.

Evidence

1. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “Tumor biologist Robert A. Weinberg of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., says the returns on cancer genomics “have been relatively modest—very modest compared to the resources invested.””

2. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “Harold E. Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine that “only a handful of major changes ... have entered routine medical practice””

3. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “The $138-million HapMap, he says, was a “magnificent failure.””

4. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “Harold E. Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote recently in the New England Journal of Medicine that “only a handful of major changes ... have entered routine medical practice”—most of them, he added, the result of “discoveries that preceded the unveiling of the human genome.””

5. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “says the returns on cancer genomics “have been relatively modest—very modest compared to the resources invested.””

6. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “Hobbs and Cohen quietly embarked on a project known as the Dallas Heart Study to help uncover the causes of heart disease.”

7. Revolution Postponed: Why the Human Genome Project Has Been Disappointing Scientific American · 1 October 2010

   “The $138-million HapMap, he says, was a “magnificent failure.””

8. Trajectories of biomedical research leading to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (via PMC) · 5 June 2024

   “Nobel laureates are neither hyper-prolific (>72 papers per year) nor hyper-funded (>$100M cumulative).”

9. Trajectories of biomedical research leading to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (via PMC) · 5 June 2024

   “Such differences arose from nearly identical cumulative NIH award budgets of pre-Nobel laureates (median $25.3M) and control researchers.”

10. PCR: celebrating 40 years of development BioTechniques · 19 January 2023

    “Kary Mullis is credited with inventing the PCR method in 1983 while working at the Cetus Corporation (CA, USA), winning the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his ‘contributions to the development of methods within DNA-based chemistry’.”

Reasoning

The Scientific American items (E1–E7) give expert opinions that some large genomics efforts fell short of expectations: returns on cancer genomics were described as 'very modest compared to the resources invested' [E1], and the $138-million HapMap was called a 'magnificent failure' [E3]. These are anecdotes about specific projects, not a study of where biology successes come from. E8–E9 find that Nobel laureates were not hyper-funded, but their NIH budgets (median $25.3M) were nearly identical to those of matched controls, so this neither shows scrappy origins nor addresses afterthought projects. E10 says where PCR was invented but gives no funding level or early view of how promising it was, so the evidence does not establish the general pattern either way.

Cite this claim

Dario Amodei, “Successful biology projects are often scrappy or afterthoughts not initially thought promising, rather than massively funded efforts.” (said 17 August 2015). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_61c8156e76cf, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_61c8156e76cf