Why Science is Broken
- Emmanuel B. Harel
- Feb 13
- 9 min read
Updated: Feb 14
Because every day we wait, people we love are dying.
It shouldn't take a family member on their deathbed, while you grill a world-leading clinician staring back at you with emotionless eyes, repeating their mantra that 'we tried our best' as you fight back tears, feeling utterly defeated, useless, and alone, to realise that science is broken.
But that’s what it took me.
The scientific field isn't just broken - its problems are metastasising. I've worked across academic institutions, 'lean' startups, and big pharmaceutical companies. What I've seen is clear: by failing to address these systemic issues, we're not just creating monetary inefficiencies or wasting NIH funding - we're letting our loved ones die.
What makes it so broken and how can we fix it? I’ve grappled with this problem deeply for half a decade - here’s what I’ve found.
Note: While my focus is on biomedical research, these problems extend far beyond it. The inefficiencies I've observed echo throughout many branches of science.
Problem 1: Funding
Science isn't cheap. Every breakthrough demands millions - in machines that can peer into the building blocks of life, in trials that test our theories, in brilliant minds dedicating their lives to discovery.
But today, this vital funding flows from just two sources: governments and 'big pharma'. Both are catastrophically misaligned with actual innovation.
Government funding chains science to political whims. Politicians pass sweeping motions ("solve Alzheimer's!") that trickle down through bureaucratic layers, each trying to decode what success looks like.
The result?
Research institutes chase the safest, most politically palatable options - the ones that tick boxes and show predictable 'progress.' All while knowing that revolutionary science has always lived in the margins, through maverick research that breaks from convention.
This isn't just slow - it's dangerous.
Just a few days ago, a single shift in public policy froze all NIH grant reviews, bringing American research to a grinding halt. Science is too important to be left as a political pawn.
Leaders change, governments fall - but humanity's need to cure disease remains constant.
Then there's Big Pharma, whose research empire is built on an even more twisted foundation. Research funding flows through a deeply oligarchical system, driven not by pure innovation but by existing investments and internal inefficiencies. They double down on failed approaches to recoup sunk costs, while our most dramatic breakthroughs - like Ozempic - often succeed by accident, solving problems they weren't funded to address.
When they do fund external research, it's through safe bets: acquiring late-stage biotechs whose work aligns with their existing machinery. Truly revolutionary research rarely gets a chance.
But while patient-funded solutions offer hope, they're still fighting against a system designed to make innovation as expensive and slow as possible. Nowhere is this more evident than in clinical trials.
Problem 2: Clinical research
That’s why that miracle drug you’re praying for isn’t coming to save you anytime soon.
These numbers are thrown around and accepted with defeated shrugs and empty platitudes:
'Research is hard! It's expensive!'
But who's asking themselves why?
The answer lies in the bloated, bureaucratic world of clinical trials. A single Phase 3 trial - where we finally test if a drug actually works - can cost upwards of $100 million. These trials are so friction-laden and frustrating that even Big Pharma outsources them to specialized groups called Clinical Research Organizations (CROs) to do their 'dirty work’.
The grotesque irony? The biggest cost is finding participants.
Think about that: pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars and years searching for patients who are literally dying for treatment.
These are the same patients desperately searching for hope, the ones begging their doctors for options, the ones scouring the internet for clinical trials that might save their lives.
Yet here we are - in a system so broken that connecting dying patients with potential cures seems to have become our greatest obstacle.
Problem 3: The Publication Racket
(aka: why scientists spend money to publish their research)
Scientists are currently being extorted by the very institutions they praise. In a perverse Stockholm Syndrome-esque world, they routinely pay upwards of $10,000 to contribute their scientific breakthroughs for the good of humanity.
Take Nature, the world's leading scientific journal which charges research groups $13,000 USD to publish an 'open access' paper. That's $13,000 to let people read your work - work that should be advancing human knowledge, work that should belong to humanity.
But - that’s ok. Surely they’re using that revenue to pay for overheads involved in publishing…
Right?
Here’s a reminder of the process:
Upload: Scientific groups upload their papers to the journal of their choosing to review
Review: The paper is ‘peer-reviewed’ (note the use of ‘peer’ here) by other scientists for the journal
Publish: After payment of the fee, the paper is published - most of the time on an online format, meaning there is very low-cost associated with printing.
So that money that was generated from publication fees could be used to publish (minimal cost) or pay reviewers (significant hours of work). But it isn't.
Reviewers are told to embrace this exploitation as nobility - as if getting paid for advancing human knowledge is somehow beneath them. As if poverty is a prerequisite for scientific integrity.
After all, what’s a little cash between ‘peers’?
This value system fell out of favor in the military in the early 20th century - no one 'fights for honor alone' anymore. Yet publishers continue to exploit the goodwill of scientists, building billion-dollar empires on the backs of unpaid labor.
Want to read about your loved one's disease? Pay up.
Want to understand the latest breakthrough? That's behind a paywall too.
Scientific knowledge - knowledge that could save lives - has been turned into a commodity, parcelled out like cable TV packages in the 90s.
And the true perversion? This system of extortion has become science's ultimate status symbol.
Problem 4: Misaligned incentives
So you don't get paid - what's your reward as a scientist? It comes from arbitrary measures created by the very publications that extorted you. Your entire worth as a scientist is determined by the system that exploits you. A scientific ponzi scheme of the highest order.
The crown jewel is the H-index - a measure of how many times your paper has been cited by others. A groupthink validation stamp that supposedly proves your worth. The logic? If your paper is cited often, you must be a leader in your field. But this emperor has no clothes.
Citations aren’t just a vanity metric - they determine your entire future as a scientist
Want to secure a faculty position? Hiring committees weigh your H-index.
Need funding for your next big idea? Grant reviewers check your citation count.
Hoping for tenure? Better prove your ‘impact’ with citations.
But here's the cruel joke: citations are fool's gold. They can be anything - a passing reference, a criticism of your methods, even a rebuttal of your entire thesis. And in an age where AI can summarise papers in seconds, who's actually reading these papers? Is human knowledge truly being advanced, or are we just feeding a citation machine?
This desperation for citations has bred a culture of scientific theatrics. Researchers don't chase truth - they chase numbers.
They 'salami slice' their work - cutting one meaningful discovery into multiple thin publications to maximize their citation count.
They engage in 'p-hacking' - torturing their data until it confesses to positive results. After all, negative results don't get cited.
Here's the damning evidence: a 2010 study found that 84% of published papers reported positive results. Are we really meant to believe that we're solving the deepest mysteries of biology - puzzles that have confounded humanity for millennia - with an 84% success rate?
If so, where are our cures?
These misaligned incentives aren't just corrupting science - they're forcing our brightest minds to waste their talents chasing artificial metrics instead of real breakthroughs. And in this endless pursuit of numbers, we've lost something far more precious.
Problem 5: Lost Purpose
We've forgotten why we do science in the first place.
Most humans don't thrive without a clear, tangible end-state. This is why only a rare few are true 'creatives,' wandering through life for art's sake. The rest of us need a goal, a target, something concrete to fight for.
Science is no different. While a brilliant few might make breakthroughs meandering through biology, most need a clear mission. And not just any mission - one that serves humanity. Without this, research stagnates into academic exercises.
Want proof?
Neuralink and Google both achieved milestones (implantable brain arrays and predictive breast cancer AI models) that my university's world-leading biomedical engineering faculty deemed 'impossible' mere few months earlier.
Why? Because traditional academia has lost its north star.
In life sciences, your goal cannot be the 'love of the game' - it's saving lives.
People join Alzheimer's and cancer research teams because they've been personally insulted by these diseases. They come to solve them.
So at what point do they stop chasing their childhood dream of 'solving cancer' and start relegating themselves to exploring dead ends for more citations?
People are dying now, and we are falling behind. PhDs need to be matched with real-world solutions - it's not just the FDA's regulatory process that's at fault, it's this fundamental loss of purpose. We need to unshackle our scientists from the ivory tower and remind them why they started this journey in the first place.
Problem 6: Research Silos
Science has become a kingdom of isolated fortresses. Even within the same institution, labs battle each other for basic resources - sequencing machines, compute power, lab space. We've created an army that fights under the same banner but forces its units to wage war over their own gear.
The fragmentation of research is killing scientific progress in two ways:
First, we're squandering our resources. Expensive machines sit idle in one lab while another desperately needs them. In an age where AI could be running endless experiments and testing countless hypotheses, we're letting our scientific capacity gather dust. The timeline of discovery isn't limited by our tools - it's limited by our tribal politics.
Second, and more critically, we're suffocating the cross-pollination of ideas. The greatest breakthroughs in life sciences have often come by accident, by unexpected connections.
Where are the European coffee houses that once sparked revolutions in human thought? How can we possibly solve the intricate puzzle of biology when we've locked each piece in a different room?
Does a cancer researcher ever speak to a veterinarian?
Does a brain scientist share insights with a fertility expert?
Biology doesn't respect our artificial boundaries - so why do we trap our research behind them? We're not just wasting resources - we're wasting the most precious resource of all: the spark of human collaboration that drives real discovery.
Problem 7: Data? What Data?
While labs sit in isolation, an even darker truth lies hidden: we can't even trust the data we have.
In September 2024, the ex-director of the National Institute of Aging's Neuroscience arm was discovered to have committed scientific fraud across 100's of papers. This didn't just trash 30 years of seminal Alzheimer's research - it called into question every therapy, every investment, every hope built on that foundation.
In other research domains, fraud is 'frustrating' or 'shameful'.
In Alzheimer's, this is indisputably murder.
Years of therapies were developed targeting amyloid beta plaques - one of the theories he fabricated data to support. How did science, supposedly the purest pursuit of truth, become so easily corrupted by a single researcher?
The answer lies in our broken approach to data. For all science's claims about 'reproducibility,' the data behind experiments is locked away behind paywalls and institutional barriers. Even when you can access it, replication requires exactly matching systems, reagents, and protocols - a nearly impossible task.
But here's the real question: Why are we hiding scientific data at all? If you're truly working to solve dementia, why does it matter if the breakthrough comes from your lab or ten labs working together?
AI companies preach that 'biology will be solved by AI.' But how? It takes six months just to access a single raw dataset from another institution. How can AI solve biology when we've fragmented our knowledge into a thousand locked vaults?
What exactly are these models training on?
Not the full scope of human scientific knowledge - just the scraps we've allowed to escape our silos
The scientific domain isn't just broken - it's actively failing humanity before our eyes. We're trapped in a system of perverse incentives, isolated silos, hidden data, and artificial barriers, all while people are dying waiting for cures.
But we stand at a pivotal moment in human history.
We have the tools, the technology, and the community drive to tear down these relics of outdated scientific practice. We can unlock the mysteries of the universe - if we have the courage to break free from the chains we've placed on ourselves.
I couldn't save my dad from dying. But I'm working hard as hell to make sure that when the doctors tell you 'we tried everything,' you'll know it's true.
This was incredible