Why science and synchronized swimming should not be Olympic sports

Abstract

The brief, for my intermittent comment column for Genome Biology, was to give a UK perspective while keeping it interesting for an international audience. That's a tough brief. There is little reason for people to take an interest in events taking place in a rainy windswept island, famous mostly for bad food, greedy bankers and reality shows. Recently, though, because of the London 2012 Olympics, the focus of the world's attention has briefly flitted in our direction. So, while basking in our reflected Olympic glory, I will start with sport. In the UK we can be rightly proud of the fact that (as the head of the International Olympic Committee pointed out) we as a nation have done much to codify many Olympic sports. But this probably points to a national failing: we love rules, we love measuring performance and hence we love inventing sports. That's why we invented cricket; it has loads of obscure rules and loads of complex performance statistics. A game that can take 5 days and has to stop for rain or bad light (in England!) was not invented for the drama or spectacle. Our obsession with performance metrics is not just limited to sport; the government has taken to measuring and publishing the performance of everything from schools and hospitals to police forces and train operators. They have even tried to quantify our national happiness (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/wellbeing/measuring-national-well-being/summary-of-proposed-domains-and-measures/summary-of-proposed-domains-and-measures-of-national-well-being.html). Sportsmen and -women can obsess about measuring their performance and gauging it against their past performance and the performance of others, but researchers are quite different. In academia we don't like other people judging what we do (or even defining what we do) and we tend not to like metrics designed to measure our performance. But many years ago, UK government decided to ignore these protestations from our ivory towers and created a mechanism for measuring research quality called the Research Excellence Framework (or REF for short). REF is the reason that some readers may have noticed UK-based collaborators acting increasingly strangely, maybe looking stressed and distant, obsessing about impact factors and questioning the value of everything they do against impenetrable metrics.