Not so long ago, on a website not so far away, an opinion was expressed: creativity was being suppressed in science. On the surface, the statistics support this: younger researchers are getting progressively less of the funding. Older researchers, it is asserted, tend to propose less risky and less innovative research. As with any good opinion in science, Nobel prize winners are wheeled as supporting cast. But, is it really true? Are we truly suppressing the creative side of science?

The answer is, overwhelmingly, no. Scientific papers are a crude measure for scientific progress, but never have more papers being produced per year than now. Clearly, something creative is going on here. If you don't like scientific papers, simply look at technological progress: your smartphone would not have nearly as much punch without the creativity of scientists; antiviral drugs were not found lying about on the ground; experimental stem-cell therapies were not accidentally attempted. Behind all of these new things lies a decade or more of scientific research. But, you know, thats not creative at all.

Maybe a lack of creativity manifests if we restrict ourselves to more fundamental breakthroughs, like... finding exoplanets, brown dwarfs, the anisotropy in cosmic microwave background, the Higgs Boson, Bose Einstein Condensates, or the acceleration of the rate of expansion of the universe. Not to mention very clever experiments that test the very nature of reality itself, like Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, and Bell inequality tests. Oh wait, all of those have happened in the last 20 years. Some have even garnered Nobel prizes for their work.

The point being that it is pretty clear that scientists are creative and active. New things are being discovered every day.

The missing years

That is not to say that the statistic that show that older researchers are claiming a larger share of the research funding pie are not true. But, those statistics doesn't answer a very important question: what are all these younger researchers doing while trying to get that first big grant? Its not like we vanish after grad school and a couple of postdocs to suddenly reappear at age 50 with our first big grant. This "gap" is part of the explanation for why there isn't a creativity deficit—in fact, it explains how we are becoming more creative than ever before.

The figure about grants is a bit misleading, I believe. To give it some context, let's take a look at my own stats. A quick tally (and I am not sure that it is complete) reveals that I have applied for funding 21 times since 2002. With a success rate of one third. That is actually not too bad. However, I think that according criteria used to determine success, I'm batting zero. The discrepancy comes from the fact that I have applied for personnel fellowships on four occasions and never succeeded. On those fellowship applications, I am the only applicant. But on the rest I am one applicant from a team. Sometimes I am the lead applicant, sometimes I am the writer but not officially an applicant, and on others I only contribute.

In other words, I have a team of scientists working with me. I claim those grants as mine on my CV, but so does everyone else who contributed. This is actually how most of modern science works. Even if one of those fellowships had come through, I still would have written or contributed to these team grants.

So, how does individual creativity come through in these situations? First of all, there has to be one person who has some vision of what the research question is. This person has a research agenda that they want to pursue. They normally also have a battery of their favorite techniques that they like to apply to all research questions. Often, these techniques are inadequate (otherwise the research would have been done already). The rest of the team takes the research agenda and runs with it: they ask themselves what techniques they know and how they might contribute to the research.

Risky research

The lack of creativity being decried is in the first part: setting the research agenda. But, actually, I don't believe this is a real issue. The argument is that if the research appears risky, it won't get funded. That can, indeed, be true.

But risk is also tricky thing to define. If I write a proposal that states that I am going to study adhesion of bacteria to surfaces using some fancy technique that I developed, I might be proposing something with the potential to change the entire research landscape in cell adhesion studies. But, despite that potential, it will never get funded. That's because I am a physicist who knows absolutely bugger all about cell biology. However, the same application, written jointly with someone who has studied cell-adhesion for a while very well may succeed in attraction funding.

The difference is that, even though my fancy technique might not pay off, there is enough expertise in the research team to get something out of the research. Indeed, anyone with experience knows that a good grant proposal has to present a stepwise plan of increasing risk: a mix of guaranteed progress and long-shots. Presenting an all-or-nothing plan is a good way to get no for an answer.

When you do that, though, your research suddenly doesn't look risky anymore. Even though the last few steps, would otherwise look like a huge leap, the framework set by the other experiments make them look like a short, logical step.

These "lack of creativity" stories come from a very specific view of scientific history. We love the idea of the lone genius. But lone geniuses are actually very rare. In fact, even the ones we think of as lone geniuses often rely on the support of others anyway. The vast majority of science has been collaborative. A recent modern example was the Solvay conference in 1927. At that conference, all the top people working on this new theory of matter, called quantum mechanics, got together and discussed their results. Their discussions pulled together all their disparate contributions into a coherent theory that has guided us ever since (and, yes, it is still rigorously questioned).

You won't find me arguing that younger researchers shouldn't get a larger chunk of the pie. I believe that is worthwhile. But, the statistics and mechanics of funding research are not a good measure for creativity. Progress in society, solutions, and research breakthroughs are. And these can be found in abundance in recent times.