I really liked your point that studying payment or delivery is treated as less intellectually serious than studying a pathway, even when those systems determine whether the discovery reaches anyone. Implementation success often looks like an absence: no missed appointment, delayed treatment, or preventable admission. How do we make that kind of knowledge as visible and fundable as a laboratory result?
It takes us beyond the romantic idealism of “pure curiosity” and into the real world—where curiosity, like everything else, is shaped by funding, prestige, infrastructure, markets and academic hierarchies.
The invisible-direction point holds well outside health. Security research runs the same way: response has a budget line, a named owner and a failure that shows up on a particular Tuesday, while prevention has none of the three, so the questions that attract money are the ones whose answers can be counted. What makes it self-sealing is that prevention's success is an absence, and an absence cannot be put in front of a funding panel.
I really liked your point that studying payment or delivery is treated as less intellectually serious than studying a pathway, even when those systems determine whether the discovery reaches anyone. Implementation success often looks like an absence: no missed appointment, delayed treatment, or preventable admission. How do we make that kind of knowledge as visible and fundable as a laboratory result?
That’s a real challenge - similar to cases of disease averted through prevention. Making something count that doesn’t happen!
It takes us beyond the romantic idealism of “pure curiosity” and into the real world—where curiosity, like everything else, is shaped by funding, prestige, infrastructure, markets and academic hierarchies.
A timely reminder🎯
The invisible-direction point holds well outside health. Security research runs the same way: response has a budget line, a named owner and a failure that shows up on a particular Tuesday, while prevention has none of the three, so the questions that attract money are the ones whose answers can be counted. What makes it self-sealing is that prevention's success is an absence, and an absence cannot be put in front of a funding panel.
Spot on!