But still, the scientists, economists and public health experts we spoke to think, given promising animal results and diminishing returns in curing individual disease, the time is right for a major scientific shift of money and focus to ageing.

We can't say with certainty whether a scientific push to slow ageing would actually work, of course. And anti-ageing has no shortage of charlatans and dubious claims.

Scientists trying to run these trials complain they just can't raise the cash. The EU’s Horizon Europe spends just 0.08% of its collaborative grant funding on ageing biology, less than an eighth of what it does on cancer.

But there's mounting scientific evidence that some drugs and therapies prolong life in animals. It's just that there's very little money, or political will, to test them in humans, or to research the underlying biology of ageing.

In the rich world, life expectancy increases are slowing. Better treatments for diseases of age make limited impact, as in old age, after you're cured of one, you'll be hit by another. For example, it's estimated that if we completely cured cancer, this would only add 2-3 years to life expectancy.

When Berlin airport was overbudget and late, that was rightly the focus of every article.

Science and technological development is much more complex and uncertain that building an airport! But is it so fundamentally unpredictable that we can't at least ask a few questions about budget/timing?

Full link here: commission.europa.eu/document/dow...

(one of the metascientists quoted in the piece actually thinks the obsession with metrics may itself explain the purported decline in disruptive science).

In other words, the quest to quantify disruptiveness, however measured, could end up dampening disruptiveness itself.

Because if we find a good measurement, the risk is that researchers then try to optimise their work to maximise this metric, rather than actually producing "disruptive" or "novel" science (like how citations are gamed now).

Perhaps the science system should quit its addiction to metrics.

Thank you Alexandra! Yes, appropriate to see that coming out the same day. My view is that we don't yet have a settled good metric on disruptive/novel research. It's not that these metrics are contradicting each other exactly, they're just measuring things in different ways.

Kratsios says a lot on research bureaucracy, for example, that the average academic would agree with. But he also has the brass neck to say that "America’s national laboratories and universities are its crown jewels" just as the Trump administration tries to foist ideological appointees on Harvard

There's a doom-loop risk here: returns to research investment are falling, which allows politicians to make cuts, which further stagnates science and technology breakthroughs, leading to further falls in public and political support.

But on my reading, he's using this diminishing return on science investment to justify the huge cuts to research currently being pushed by the White House.

No one I can think of in the metascience world worried about declining research disruptiveness would support cuts!