On Science: Fatigue, Ownership, and It's Soul
Your Scholarly Digest 21st August, 2025

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Hi Scholar,

The act of scholarship often involves looking backwards to go forwards, as beautifully outlined by this poem:

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BRAIN FOOD

When Science Gets Tired: On Paradigm Fatigue and Exemplars

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific communities conduct their research according to a paradigm - a shared set of assumptions, beliefs, examples, and values. Early in a field’s development, multiple schools of thought may exist, each advocating for the wider adoption of their specific paradigm until one school achieves dominance over the others: an event Kuhn terms a “paradigm shift”, which he argues is the main driver of scientific progress. With this consolidation, a discipline “matures”: its basic assumptions are stabilized, and research becomes conducted within agreed rules, methods, and standards of success. “Mature” science - compared to a science without a dominant paradigm - is faster and more efficient because it has essentially become an exercise in “puzzle solving”.

This week's Brain Food is a thought experiment wherein Kuhn's paradigm is taken out of its discipline-specific context and applied in a broader, meta-scientific sense. There are common assumptions, practices, and measures of success that shape research culture across fields today:

could scholarship globally be united by a shared paradigm?  

If a global scientific paradigm does indeed exist at the present moment, it arguably meets many of the criteria that define Kuhn’s  “mature” science. The goal of conducting a literature review is commonly articulated as “to find the gap” in the literature - the missing piece of the puzzle, if you will. The efficiency of research by many measures is through the roof; we are publishing more scientific articles than ever before and global collaboration is at an all time high. There are clearly defined ways to evaluate the success of research via the number of citations and various other metrics to measure the impact of our work.

To many, the maturing of science appears nothing short of pure progress. However, the most radical implication of Kuhn’s work is that a mature science cannot last forever and will eventually enter crisis: over time, anomalies accumulate that the dominant paradigm cannot reconcile. As anomalous results and findings pile up, the puzzle solving capacity of the dominant paradigm becomes strained. A kind of paradigm fatigue sets in. Perhaps, Scholar, you have already begun to feel this fatigue? A sense that even as more gaps in the literature are filled by the flood of published literature, meaningful questions are harder to come by? A feeling that even as research efficiency grows to the point that research output growth becomes hyperbolic, progress is stalling? That the rules and methods we agree will recognise success in scholarship are simply rewarding conformity? 

In the postscript to the 2nd edition of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, Kuhn reflects on the “most novel and least understood” concept discussed in the main text: the paradigm as shared example. Shared examples are how students learn what theories and rules really mean and how to use them. In other words, examples teach students how to see the world as the paradigm sees it: examples impart "a time-tested and group-licensed way of seeing". 

In applying the concept of paradigms to the culture of science as a whole, the exemplars that stabilise our current paradigm are not only the problems worth pursuing but also the figure of the ‘good scholar’ we valorise. Currently, the exemplar of the global scientific community is a harsh and visible critic who can always find a gap in a piece of work; a specialist who furthers their field by staying within the boundaries of widely accepted knowledge; a prolific producer of articles with impressive impact metrics. If paradigms rest on their exemplars, then ours will not change until we can point to scholars who refuse the dogmas of the current research culture and practice science otherwise.

NEWS

Publicly Funded, Commercially Controlled

CRISPR-Cas9, a technology that enables precise editing of genes in living organisms, is probably the most significant biotechnology developed so far this century - which is exactly why a heated intellectual property battle is going on over who gets to own the technology. 

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuele Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work (published in 2012) that demonstrated CRISPR-Cas9 could be used to precisely cut DNA in a test tube. A few months later Feng Zhang’s lab proved that CRISPR-Cas9 could be used to edit DNA inside a living cell, paving the way for therapeutic (and therefore commercial) applications of the technology. 

The complexities of US patent law meant that the intellectual property was split between The Broad Institute (representing Zhang) and the University of California (representing Doudna), along with The University of Vienna and Charpentier who is named as an individual. Needless to say, this was not acceptable to either side and the legal wrangling continues in 2025. 

This particular battle will eventually work itself out. However it does raise a more interesting question about the concept of ownership in the context of academic research: who should own the fruits of publicly funded research?. The two landmark studies involved in the current IP battle received a blend of funds from US, Austrian and Swedish taxpayers. Going even further back, the basic research these high profile studies are built on was funded by the Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and EU funding agencies. In many ways, CRISPR-Cas9 is a shining example of what can be achieved by global cooperation in research. But when the result of this collective effort becomes a technology worth potentially billions of dollars, is our current model of ownership – concentrated in a few hands – really the right one?

RESOURCE

John Locke’s Method for Organising Information 

Note-taking is hardly just about record-keeping; it’s also about how we structure, fragment, and connect ideas. This week’s resource is a mini-essay on John Locke’s method of commonplace note-taking, outlined in his New Method of Organising Common Place Books (1706). Locke saw note-taking not only as a kind of “supplemental memory,” but also as a practice of scientific investigation through the organisation of information. It’s worth a read if you’re seeking inspiration for sorting information out ‘whilst also enabling connections to germinate’. 

OPPORTUNITIES

Funded PhDs, Postdocs and Academic Job Openings

• Postdoctoral and Faculty Positions @ Cornell University, USA: Postdocs: click here

• PhD and Postdoctoral Positions @ Utrecht University, Netherlands: click here

• PhD Scholarships @ Swansea University, UK: click here

• Research Positions @ Manchester University, UK: click here

KEEPING IT REAL

But Monsieur, What Is the Soul of a Comet?

Chapter 1: The Expanding Universe from The Limitations of Science By JWN Sullivan. 

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