In this episode, Amit Varma interviews Saloni Dattani, a scientist turned journalist and founding editor of Works in Progress, about the broken incentives and institutional failures hindering scientific progress. They discuss the slow pipeline from discovery to patient access, the need for transparency and specialization in research, and how data can be a powerful tool for good when properly visualized and shared.
Summarized by Podsumo
Saloni Dattani argues that scientific progress is not just about discovery but about overcoming institutional bottlenecks—funding, regulation, and infrastructure—that delay breakthroughs by decades.
She criticizes the current peer-review system as a gatekeeping bottleneck that slows publication and discourages risk-taking, advocating for more open, iterative review processes like preprint servers and community notes.
Dattani emphasizes the importance of data transparency and reproducibility in science, calling for charts to include source data and code so others can verify and build upon findings.
The conversation explores how broken incentives in academia (publish or perish, siloed specialization) prevent the division of labor that could accelerate research, and how funding for neglected diseases like malaria is critically insufficient.
Saloni shares her personal journey from a disillusioned PhD student to a writer and data journalist, highlighting how learning about the history and sociology of science transformed her understanding of what drives progress.
"I just thought we deserve much more than this, right? I think we deserve much more of a kind of adult approach of… actually telling you what we're confident about, what we're not, like how this research was done."
" — Saloni Dattani"
"It's not just about how difficult the problem is. It's also about the funding and who's working on the institutions and the motivation. And sometimes it's like the trendy things in science get more attention and things don't get solved just because only a few people are working on them."
" — Saloni Dattani"
"I just thought, you know, let's try to make sure that this doesn't happen. And I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen. And I thought, let me try this [bug bounty]. And I would say this success has been kind of moderate."
" — Saloni Dattani"