The Slow Science Movement

By Daniel McCabe. Today’s research environment pushes for the quick fix, but successful science needs time to think. There is a growing school of thought emerging out of Europe that urges university-based scientists to take careful stock of their lives – and to try to slow things down in their work.
According to the proponents of the budding “slow science” movement, the increasingly frenetic pace of academic life is threatening the quality of the science that researchers produce. As harried scientists struggle to churn out enough papers to impress funding agencies, and as they spend more and more of their time filling out forms and chasing after increasingly elusive grant money, they aren’t spending nearly enough time mulling over the big scientific questions that remain to be solved in their fields. This slow science movement is patterned, to some extent, on the Slow Food movement, born in Italy in the 1980s. Read more...