MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines

Bruce G Charlton writes "In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world. This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions." If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below.

"My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."

Caltech

[Mr. Underbridge]

I might also consider per capita - Caltech competes very favorably despite having a much smaller pool than many of these other institutions. They've had 3 Chemistry Nobel prizes since 1990 - pretty damned good for a department of about 30 full-time faculty.

Carnegie Mellon gets ignored...

[SnowZero]

This "study" is at best a crude approximation, and even then it isn't complete in terms of data. They left off my school, for example. I'm sure some others probably got stiffed too. Of course, I don't think you can fit a reliable trend to three data points anyway -- especially for something highly time delayed such as Nobel prizes.

Carnegie Mellon University
1947-1966: 0
1967-1986: 3
1987-2006: 7

A Blog

[pondelik]

A blog? And I thought it was going to be a credible article.

Normalized by number of profs?

[rdwald]

Is it really fair to compare, say, MIT and Caltech, given that the former has 1,554* faculty members and the latter has 300*? I'll grant that if you're trying to compare the amount of revolutionary work going on at a given school, the fact that one school is larger is a legitimate reason for them to do a larger amount of work. However, comparing the fraction of the school doing revolutionary work seems to be more useful when, for example, considering where to go for undergrad, grad, or postdoc, since it's more likely you'll get to work with one of those individuals conducting revolutionary work.

* Data from USNews Best Colleges 2007 listings for number of instructional faculty at both schools.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

[mdsolar]

There is a whole lot of lore about this but I think you've missed the main theme. Hunters go on expeditions and by working in groups can handle big game like buffalo.

Gathers harvest non-agricultural materials, wild berries and bark fibers and such.

I think you are thinking of post-resource-aquisition fabrication.

The gender breakdown of hunters and gathers is not exclusive and fabrication is even murkier.

Re:Gatherers vs. Hunters

[flyingsquid]

I'd guess that part of the problem could be that the past success of Harvard is working against them. Harvard currently has more name recognition, and more of a perception of success, than any other university in the U.S., so it's bound to attract a lot of people on the basis of reputation alone, on the basis of image rather than substance. In other words, it's going to draw a lot of people in, simply because that's where successful people have gone in the past.

But that's exactly the opposite of what you need to do revolutionary science. To do revolutionary science, you need people who can either think independently of the herd, or actively go against it, and turn over that stone that nobody has ever thought of turning over before. I'm not saying this is a problem for all or even most of the people who end up at the Ivies, but I suspect it has to be a factor.

awards?

[Goldsmith]

It's very hard to use awards as a judge of the scientific worth of an institution. For example, my school (UCI) has three Nobels in the last 15 years or so, but none of them for research done at UCI.

If you're a good enough scientist to get a Nobel (or Fields, and so on...), then chances are at some point some big, well known, well paying school is going to recruit you. It doesn't take a Nobel prize for other scientists to recognize a great researcher, but recruiting someone who has already done their life's great work doesn't make you a great scientific institution.

No matter how much loyalty you may have to a particular place, there are perks at big private schools that state schools like Berkely and Michigan just can't offer. Some well known scientists stick around in smaller incubation schools, but many find that being a big fish in a little pond is just more work and doesn't pay as well.

If you're going to use awards to determine scientific worth, you need to look at where the research which won the prize was done. Of course, this would put my school off the list with a grand total of 0 Nobels. I'm sure other small universities would start moving up the list.

An open-ended question:

[moosesocks]

An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:

Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?

Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.

There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.

Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).

MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.

It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.