MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>MIT Leads in Revolutionary Science, Harvard Declines </p>

<p>Bruce G Charlton writes
"In three studies looking at the best institutions for 'revolutionary' science, MIT emerged as best in the world. This contrasts with 'normal science' which incrementally-extends science in pre established directions."
If you're interested in reading more about how this was determined, read more below...</p>

<p>My approach has been to look at trends in the award of science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine/ Physiology and Economics — the Nobel metric) — then to expand this Nobel metric by including some similar awards. The NFLT metric adds-in Fields medal (mathematics), Lasker award for clinical medicine and the Turing award for computing science. The NLG metric is specifically aimed at measuring revolutionary biomedical science and uses the Nobel medicine, the Lasker clinical medicine and the Gairdner International award for biomedicine. MIT currently tops the tables for all three metrics: the Nobel prizes, the NFLT and the NLG. There seems little doubt it has been the premier institution of revolutionary science in the world over recent years. Also very highly ranked are Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, Caltech, Berkeley, Princeton and — in biomedicine — University of Washington at Seattle and UCSF. The big surprise is that Harvard has declined from being the top Nobel prizewinners from 1947-1986, to sixth place for Nobels; seventh for NFLT, and Harvard doesn't even reach the threshold of three awards for the biomedical NLG metric! This is despite Harvard massively dominating most of the 'normal science' research metrics (eg. number of publications and number of citations per year) — and probably implies that Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end."</p>

<p><a href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/15/131256%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/15/131256&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows MIT. The school is amazing and is an extremely creative place.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Harvard may have achieved very high production of scientific research at the expense of quality at the top-end.

[/quote]

Of course, it's debatable whether there's enough money in the world to maintain a science faculty at Harvard's size with MIT's quality. :)</p>

<p>I may have understood him incorrectly, but my PI mentioned off-hand the other day that investigators at Harvard Med basically have tenure (perhaps informally) as long as they can keep bringing in grant money. This is obviously not true at MIT -- it's possible to have extramural funding and still be asked to leave.</p>

<p>Having been a student in both places, I can say that there's a pretty big atmosphere difference between biomedical science at MIT and at Harvard. I suspect that part of the difference is geographical (MIT's biomedical researchers are all within about a five-minute walk from each other, while Harvard's are spread across Cambridge, the Longwood Medical Area, and Mass General Hospital), but the two places feel very different even in other ways.</p>