Posted on 10/31/2006 7:19:14 PM PST by Logophile
Can science get by without your tax money? Just ask them over at IBM
Science Notebook by Terence Kealey
SCIENCE POLICY across the globe is but a series of footnotes to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 book Science: The Endless Frontier.
Before the Second World War the US Government spent little on applied science and nothing on pure science. In 1940 its total research budget was only $74 million, mainly for defence and agriculture, when the private sector was spending $265million, of which $55 million was for pure science. Yet by 1940 America had long been the richest country in the world, and its researchers, including Edison and the Wright brothers, had transformed the world — on private money. Meanwhile, Einstein flourished at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, which had been privately endowed by the Bambergers with $25 million.
But the Second World War thrust America into funding military science, and by 1945 Vannevar Bush, a brilliant scientific manager, was administering a federal research budget of $1.6 billion, supporting the Manhattan and other projects.
Bush believed that the success of federal science in wartime could be extrapolated into peacetime, so he wrote Science: The Endless Frontier to lobby Washington into maintaining its support. This was because, Bush explained, pure science was a public good that the private sector would not support yet which, paradoxically, the private sector needed if it was to create applied science or technology. Bush sketched out a National Science Foundation to distribute federal funds to university scientists by competitive grants. All science funding agencies across the globe have since been modelled on the NSF.
But Bush also knew that in reality America’s private sector had funded pure science generously before 1940 and in his book he issued a warning that federal money might not just supplement the private money but might, instead, “drive it out” and end up reducing the total spent on research. Has it?
In 2003 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a comprehensive survey that reviewed all the known factors that could explain the different growth rates of member countries. The report found, unexceptionally, “a significant effect of research and development (R&D) activity on the growth process” (that is, research powers economic growth). But then it found, explosively, that it was only “business-performed R&D . . . that drives the positive association” (only private research powers economic growth).
Even more explosively, the OECD found that the public funding of R&D appeared to damage economic growth because it “crowds out resources that could be alternatively used by the private sector, including private R&D” (ie, the public funding of research does indeed displace the more useful private funding).
Scientists today find it hard to believe — even though they know that there is no real distinction between pure and applied science — that the private sector would fund pure science. But scientists are casuists. Consider the Human Genome Project. We were told that only governments and medical charities would fund it because it was such pure science. But when Craig Venter, of Celera Inc, started to overtake the publicly funded teams, they responded by greatly multiplying their demands on the taxpayer on the ground that the human genome was too important to be left to the private sector.
Contrary to myth, the private sector does tons of science — because it is so profitable. Consider IBM. The Times Higher Education Supplement’s survey last year showed that Harvard University’s science papers are the most cited globally (20.6 citations per paper on average) but coming in second was IBM (18.9), outranking all other universities and research bodies. And because IBM invests so much in science, it has for the past 12 years been awarded more patents (3,000 annually) than any other institution. And by its patents IBM earns more than $1 billion annually in licence fees.
The scientists will not easily surrender their faith in government funding, but because public money crowds out private money it tells us that science is not the public good of Bush’s book. Science is not a field of endeavour on which taxpayers’ money need be spent.
Terence Kealey is Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University
After WWII funding for the the sciences lapsed ...until sputnik.
You'd think that 9-11 and the anthrax events would warn us to stay ahead of the game but somehow it's not happening.
Any professor who puts teaching ahead of research will find it very difficult to earn tenure or promotion at a major university. The old adage "publish or perish" has been replaced by "get funded or get out" (at least in the sciences and engineering).
The guy I'm thinking of still publishes fairly frequently (and has some good funding). Somehow, however, he seems to take a personal interest in his Organic Chemistry students, and try to help them master their subject. I don't know how he pulled that; but he always struck me as the exact definition of how a professor should be.
And it was that "publish or perish" that got all the basic research done.
So the theory was fully developed 200 years ago? That was long before the National Science Foundation was created. How did Fourier manage without a government grant?
If you are saying that a sound theoretical foundation is important for developing technology, I will not disagree with you. (Although I would point out that the development of the technology sometimes precedes the development of the theory.) But that does not mean that tax money is required to do theoretical research.
Perhaps so. But it has also harmed teaching at the universities.
The difficulty is that years ago large corporations like ATT used to fund pure research facilities with no expectation that anything marketable would come out of them for many years, if ever. They were looking for Nobels, not money (in the short term). Bell Labs is an example. NV Philips still has a lab in Briarcliff Manor, New York. But years ago the accountants started demanding, well, accountability. And the scientists who were paid to sit around with their feet on their desks, creating new branches of mathematics and thinking their way to new knowledge, were asked to begin producing some product that could be sold.
I have friends who worked for Philips back in the golden days. These were the people whose random doodlings produced the compact disk. They were expected to spend much of their day staring out the windows and thinking beautiful thoughts about science. Today no one is going to finance that. There has to be direct market applicability in all the work the lab turns out. This means that only the federal government and sometimes major universities are going to generate novel concepts that are pure science with no short-term place in the market.
Well, I'm not sure what golden age of teaching in the universities you are thinking of, but my undergrad days were half a century ago and I can count the inspired teachers on the fingers of one hand...and have plenty left over.
Yes, I have heard that argument frquently over the years. However, the federal funding agencies do not fund truly novel concepts. The people at NSF, for instance, will tell you that they do not fund new or "risky" research; they want to see published results first.
I know they have a lot of fun with different branches of science at NIST, fun with physics at Batavia, fun with math at the University of Chicago, and fun with biomedical work at a lot of major university hospitals.
I said nothing about a "golden age of teaching." No doubt that inspired teachers have always been rare. The difference is that now inspired teaching is not rewarded at many universities.
There was a time, before the Second World War, when science and engineering professors at most universities were expected to teach three or four courses a semester. Now a teaching load of two courses a semester is considered heavy.
As teaching loads decreased, enrollments increased. How have the universities managed? One way has been to increase the class size; another has been to hire graduate students and adjunct faculty to teach.
I have observed these developments firsthand. When I was on the faculty of a large Midwestern university, I used to teach a course that enrolled 800 to 1200 students every fall. One department head at the same university bragged that 85% of the undergraduate student contact hours were taught by people other than regular faculty.
I said "fund" not "fun." (I am sure that they have both at the places you mentioned.)
Yes !!! If it looks like a money maker private citizens will invest.
self-ping.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
Are you really suggesting that the government should lavish tax money on researchers in hopes that they will discover something that might be useful in 200 years?
Or to put it differently, if Fourier had not done that particular work when he did, would semiconductor devices be impossible to make today? Lithography was used in printing long before it was applied to semiconductor processing. If the diffraction integral is so important to making small semiconductor devices, I daresay it (or its equivalent) would have been derived in the 20th centutury when it was needed.
No private entity would fund science that has no possibility to be used in the near future.
Apparently some of them do. And more did in the past, before government money crowded out the private money.
But without govt. support, there would be little basic science.
According to the article, private money financed basic science before WWII.
The comparison to IBM is deeply flawed. IBM had a monopoly in high performance computing till a decade ago. As with every monopoly(Bell labs under AT & T is the best example), they guzzled dollars into basic science without a second thought. The payoff came decades later and most of the patent income this article cites probably comesfrom patents filed on the slightly modified basic science. No private company is in a position to guzzle zillions on basic science today without an immediate payoff.
I have to disagree on several points. First, IBM did not have a monopoly in computing. Yes, they were the biggest; but they had competitors, both here and abroad. They did research to stay the biggest. (Full disclosure: I worked for IBM for a short time.)
More to the point, IBM has competitors today. And yet, as the article points out, IBM continues to excel in research, both applied and "pure." (Dr. Kealey argues that the distinction between pure and applied research is somewhat exaggerated anyway, and I agree with him.)
AT&T was a monopoly for many years and yes, Bell Labs was a tremendous source of basic and applied research. But AT&T was unique in that respect. Many other companies that were not protected monopolies conducted
No private company is in a position to guzzle zillions on basic science today without an immediate payoff.
I see two things wrong with this statement. First, you seem to imply that basic science requires the "guzzling" of enormous amounts of money to thrive. I am not sure that is true. (Much of that money is wasted, at least at the universities.) Second, companies are not the only private entities that fund research: foundations and individuals do too.
By "fun" I meant "doing pure science for the love of it, not because there's going to be a dollar bill at the end of the project." That of course is how scientists operate, or want to operate: many of them would do the work even if they had to pay to get into the laboratory rather than the other way around.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.