One quick observation that is probably a small thing or not right:
For the 8 fields that reached establishment, the median time between a field’s origin year and establishment year[3]was 18 years, with the quickest field (Genetic Circuits) becoming established after 5 years, and the slowest (Clean Meat) becoming established after 63 years (the full list of times to establishment for the 8 fields, in years, is: 5, 16, 16, 17, 19, 26, 26, 63).
For Clean meat it looks like you use something like the date of postulation as the initial time point to measure the length of time to field establishment.
I don’t have a great understanding but have a feeling that for Genetic Circuits something like the date of postulation point maybe isn’t the initial time point used when measuring the length of time to field establishment?
If so, that might be doing most of the work in setting Genetic Circuits as the quickest and Clean Meat as the slowest.
Nice, thanks for those links, great to have those linked here since we didn’t point to them in the report. I’ve seen the Open Phil one but I don’t think I’d seen the Animal Ethics study, it looks very interesting.
Thanks for raising the point about speed of establishment for Clean Meat and Genetic Circuits! Our definition for the “origin year” (from here) is “The year that the technology or area is purposefully explored for the first time.” So it’s supposed to be when someone starts working on it, not when someone first has the idea. We think that Willem van Eelen started working on developing clean meat in the 1950′s, so we set the origin year to be around then. Whereas as far as we’re aware no-one was working on genetic circuits until much later.
At the moment I’m not sure whether the supplementary notes say anywhere that we think van Eelen was working on developing clean meat in the 50′s, I think Megan is going to update the notes to make this clearer.
This was really cool! Thanks a bunch for writing it up :)
For those interested, it somewhat reminded me of Some Case Studies in Early Field Growth and Establishing a research field in the natural sciences.
One quick observation that is probably a small thing or not right:
For Clean meat it looks like you use something like the date of postulation as the initial time point to measure the length of time to field establishment.
I don’t have a great understanding but have a feeling that for Genetic Circuits something like the date of postulation point maybe isn’t the initial time point used when measuring the length of time to field establishment?
If so, that might be doing most of the work in setting Genetic Circuits as the quickest and Clean Meat as the slowest.
Nice, thanks for those links, great to have those linked here since we didn’t point to them in the report. I’ve seen the Open Phil one but I don’t think I’d seen the Animal Ethics study, it looks very interesting.
Thanks for raising the point about speed of establishment for Clean Meat and Genetic Circuits! Our definition for the “origin year” (from here) is “The year that the technology or area is purposefully explored for the first time.” So it’s supposed to be when someone starts working on it, not when someone first has the idea. We think that Willem van Eelen started working on developing clean meat in the 1950′s, so we set the origin year to be around then. Whereas as far as we’re aware no-one was working on genetic circuits until much later.
At the moment I’m not sure whether the supplementary notes say anywhere that we think van Eelen was working on developing clean meat in the 50′s, I think Megan is going to update the notes to make this clearer.
Thanks, Ben! :)