Woodley Park Institute founder and president Dr. Kristine Willis has been selected by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) as a Civic Science Fellow to explore how scientific communities identify, support, and advance ideas with the potential to transform the physical sciences. The 18-month fellowship, supported by the John Templeton Foundation and the Civic Science Fellows program, will bring Willis together with AIP’s research team and a broad community of scientists, scientific societies, funders, entrepreneurs, historians, policymakers, and other stakeholders. The project will examine how promising opportunities for discovery are recognized—and how organizations can make better decisions about supporting transformative research in a world of finite resources. Understanding How Breakthroughs Take Shape Scientific breakthroughs are often easiest to recognize in hindsight. Long before their importance becomes clear, however, scientists, research institutions, funding agencies, and other organizations must continually decide which ideas and investigators to support. Through the fellowship, Willis will

For years, critics have argued that the U.S. National Institutes of Health favors clinical research over fundamental science. A new analysis of more than 2.2 million grant applications suggests they may be right—and indicates that the shift has been driven less by an increase in clinician-scientists pursuing research than by administrative decisions at the agency.

The comprehensive study, spanning fiscal years 1986 through 2017, shows that while support for curiosity-driven research through the traditional R01 grant remains prominent, NIH has increasingly channeled funding through alternative types of grant mechanisms. Although many of the new mechanisms theoretically support the entire spectrum of biomedical research, in practice, awarded applications have increasingly pursued translational and clinical science.

A team of researchers has developed a novel network-based strategy to predict which areas of biomedical research will produce transformative breakthroughs—up to twelve years before the key discoveries are published and 30 years or more in advance of their recognition by a major prize. The work demonstrates that scientific progress, long thought to be unpredictable, leaves measurable traces well before its impact becomes widely recognized.

The study, Prediction of transformative breakthroughs in biomedical research, analyzed the co-citation network of more than 17 million papers in PubMed, the comprehensive database of peer-reviewed biomedical literature. Using this network to map distinct scientific topics, the researchers isolated and tracked the work that produced past breakthroughs, discovering a common signal that preceded more than 90 percent of Nobel Prize– and Lasker Award–winning biomedical discoveries included in their analysis.