To confront 21st century challenges, science must rethink its reward system

One of Science in Transition's founders describes how his experience as a young HIV/AIDS researcher convinced him that science needs to change

HIV/AIDS research in the early 1980s was a new and exciting field of science. I had started working as a biomedical researcher in Amsterdam, a city with a large and visible gay community. The new disease was a threat to public health and was highly contagious. It was transmitted by sexual contact and in the developed world affected young healthy gay men and recipients of blood and blood products. It took some time to realise that a truly immense and devastating epidemic was going on in sub-Saharan Africa affecting men, women and children.

This disease attracted bright scientific minds all over the world, working feverishly to understand the origin and biology of the virus. We wanted to know how the virus moved through the population, entered and killed immune cells and how to counteract it. AIDS patients were dying in the hospitals and we were working as fast as we could towards better therapies for HIV-positive patients.