From 2019... While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance knowledge

From 2019... Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, Joshua S. Graff Zivin. American Economic Review, 109 (8): 2889-2920. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161574

Abstract: We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases markedly. This surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited. While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. —Max Planck

IV. Conclusion

In this paper, we leverage the applied economist’s toolkit, together with a novel approach to delineate the boundaries of scientific fields, to explore the effect that the passing of an eminent life scientist exerts on the dynamics of growth, or decline, for the fields in which she was active while alive. We find that publications and grants by scientists who never collaborated with the star surge within the subfield, absent the star. Interestingly, this surge is not driven by a reshuffling of leadership within the field, but rather by new entrants who are drawn from outside of it. Our rich data on individual researchers and the nature of their scholarship allows us to provide a deeper understanding of this dynamic.

In particular, this increase in contributions by outsiders appears to tackle the mainstream questions within the field but by leveraging newer ideas that arise in other domains. This intellectual arbitrage is quite successful: the new articles represent substantial contributions, at least as measured by long-run citation impact. Together, these results paint a picture of scientific fields as scholarly guilds to which elite scientists can regulate access, providing them with outsized opportunities to shape the direction of scientific advance in that space. We also provide evidence regarding the mechanisms that may enable the regulation of entry. While stars are alive, entry appears to be effectively deterred where the shadow they cast over the fields in which they were active looms particularly large. After their passing, we find evidence for influence from beyond the grave, exercised through a tightly-knit “invisible college” of collaborators (de Solla Price and Beaver 1966, Crane 1969). The loss of an elite scientist central to the field appears to signal to those on the outside that the cost/benefit calculations on the avant garde ideas they might bring to the table has changed, thus encouraging them to engage. But this appears to occur only when the topology of the field offers a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas, for instance when the star’s network of close collaborators is insufficiently robust to stave off threats from intellectual outsiders. In the end, our results lend credence to Planck’s infamous quip that provides the title for this manuscript. Yet its implications for social welfare are ambiguous. While we can document that eminent scientists restrict the entry of new ideas and scholars into a field, gatekeeping activities could have beneficial properties when the field is in its inception; it might allow cumulative progress through shared assumptions and methodologies, and the ability to control the intellectual evolution of a scientific domain might, in itself, be a prize that spurs much ex ante risk taking. Because our empirical exercise cannot shed light on these countervailing tendencies, we must refrain from drawing concrete policy conclusions from our results.

All of the evidence we have presented pertains to the academic life sciences. It is unclear how the lessons from that setting might apply to other fields inside the academy. In particular, when frontier research requires access to expensive and highly-specialized capital equipment, as is sometimes the case in the physical sciences, the rules governing access to that capital are likely to favor succession by insiders. At the other end of the spectrum, more atomistic fields where scientists generally work alone or in very small groups may evolve in a more frictionless manner. Whether our findings apply to industrial research and development is also an open question. In that setting, the choice of problem-solving approaches is guided by market signals (however imperfectly, cf. Acemoglu 2012), and thus likely to differ from those selected under the more nuanced system of pecuniary and non-pecuniary incentives that characterizes academic research (Feynman 1999; Aghion, Dewatripont, and Stein 2008). Assessing the degree to which our results extend to other settings, and the reasons they might differ, represents a fruitful area for future research.