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How would the world be different if the US spent more on research over the past 50 years? If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 200

How would the world be different if the US spent more on research over the past 50 years? If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003, for example, would our knowledge be 10-20 years ahead of where we are now? Knowledge we would be discovering 2038 might be discovered this year. If there is some sort of Moore’s Law for investment in research, by 2050, we’d have technology from 2150 at the current pace?

weboxeh 9y ago
Scientific progress isn't in a 1:1 ratio with funding.
- no_identd 9y ago
  True, but misleading. On a local scale, the ratio seems significantly worse than 1:1. On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
  - ksk 9y ago
    >On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
  - Brockenstein 9y ago
    I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet. We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.
gowld 9y ago
The Human Genome Project was very well funded, and progressed extremely quickly.
- dekhn 9y ago
  The public project actually languished for a long time until the Celera project caused a small number of HGP players to speed things up. It wasn't the funding that fixed things- it was the competitive spirit and a few smart people with duct tape.
  - api 9y ago
    Would Celera have done what they did without HGP doing a lot of preliminary research and creating an environment of strong interest? It seems to me that these kinds of arguments have a "that which is seen vs. that which is unseen" problem. All the preliminary R&D that sets the stage and builds interest gets forgotten after the big "Eureka!" In reality "Eureka!" is a borderline myth. Look at any big invention and you can find that a lot of fertilizer was added to the soil before it sprouted.
    - dekhn 9y ago
      Yes, Celera would have done what they did. Remember, they didn't need the preliminary research of the HGP, because instead of using a scaffolding method, they went straight to shotgun sequencing which saved them 5+ years. Nobody's denying that the HGP and Celera were able to rest on a strong foundation, but the reality is that the HGP was running itself lazily because they had no competition. I worked in genomics at the time and it was really a sleepy corner of bioinformatics.
  - gowld 9y ago
    At the same time, Celera didn't launch until 1998, 8 years after HGP started. So Celera effectively languuished since 1990 as well. Ideas need to ripen in their time. Celera didn't jump in the game until the tech (bio tech and computer tech) was ready, and BTW Celera had the benefit of consuming all of HGP's output while keeping their own secret.
Brockenstein 9y ago
I'm all for more money for research, we spend too much on the military as it is. Learning new things no matter how useless the knowledge seems right now might have untold applications in the future. That being said, throwing money at science and expecting predictable and measurable results on any sort of definable timetable isn't realistic. Even if the human genome project had been completed in 1993 that's not a promise that every sort of discovery or applications based on that knowledge would have been discovered between 1993 and 2008. And invariably there's things we've learned between 2008 and 2010 that is a dependency for some of the work utilizing the human genome. So sure, somehow if we knew everything in 1993 that we did in 2003 we'd be years ahead. And if we knew everything we did in 1993 in 1893 woah, just think of that. And so on and so on. More funding can help in the quest to learn about the universe. But you can't just buy knowledge (doubly so for a specific technology or somesuch) by the year, decade, or century. Money doesn't have that power, and that's not how science works.
ModernMech 9y ago
> If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003 Could the project have been completed in 1993 with infinite funding? Just taking into account computing power put into the project, it was exponentially greater in 2003, so perhaps in 1993 it wasn't enough. Maybe it would have taken until 2003 no matter what, as the limiting factor wasn't money but something else.
- melling 9y ago
  The idea is that we shift the entire timeline of discovery by a few years at first then by more as time passes. I didn’t mean to imply that we spend large amounts of money on one project to get it done earlier. Simply, that we spend more on research, in general, then would we reach the ability to solve the Human Genome Project earlier. I picked this project randomly. The LHC and Higgs could be another.
fastaguy88 9y ago
One of the remarkable features of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was that much of the technology needed to complete the project not only did not exist (e.g. highly parallel sequencers), but was not even imagined (e.g. PCR - the polymerase chain reaction). Unlike landing on the moon, where much of the science was well understood, the technical solutions to the human genome were not known when it was envisioned. Science is not engineering; the HGP succeeded because science came up with technical solutions that could then be engineered. But both were required. It is unclear that there are effective ways to accelerate unimagined scientific discoveries.
stillsut 9y ago
It's an interesting question. I'd look at it from the angle of ability to marshal resources for an to meet constantly arising but unanticipated threats and opportunities. So not the Genome Project, we always knew we'd need to figure that out, same with how to beat cancer, same with fusion, etc. I'm talking about when internet transaction started becoming an opportunity, there was already a well developed (if esoteric) field of cryptography that could build solutions for that application... and it turned out that was the tip of the iceberg of what crypto is doing nowadays. On the threat side, there are many examples of Soviet jet can do X, therefore the US has to dip into research on say allow metals, to build a jet that can do Y and counter the threat. We don't know what grand projects are tractable with today's or tomorrow's technology - beat cancer or invent fusion first, anyone? We know in the future we'll need answers to questions we haven't even asked yet; that's what you're really buying with your research dollars.

weboxeh 9y ago

Scientific progress isn't in a 1:1 ratio with funding.

no_identd 9y ago
True, but misleading. On a local scale, the ratio seems significantly worse than 1:1. On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. I feel like one could draw some connection from this to the fact that technological progress seems to grow at a quadratic-hyperbolic (and not an exponential, as Ray Kurzweil would have you believe) rate, but alas, I can't think of a way to do so right now.
- ksk 9y ago
  >On a global scale, due to interdisciplinary synergies, it seems to exceed 1:1. How does it seem to do that? If you're going to call somebody misleading, might as well go through the effort of linking to data that you consider 'not misleading'.
- Brockenstein 9y ago
  I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet. We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.

gowld 9y ago

The Human Genome Project was very well funded, and progressed extremely quickly.

dekhn 9y ago
The public project actually languished for a long time until the Celera project caused a small number of HGP players to speed things up. It wasn't the funding that fixed things- it was the competitive spirit and a few smart people with duct tape.
- api 9y ago
  Would Celera have done what they did without HGP doing a lot of preliminary research and creating an environment of strong interest? It seems to me that these kinds of arguments have a "that which is seen vs. that which is unseen" problem. All the preliminary R&D that sets the stage and builds interest gets forgotten after the big "Eureka!" In reality "Eureka!" is a borderline myth. Look at any big invention and you can find that a lot of fertilizer was added to the soil before it sprouted.
  - dekhn 9y ago
    Yes, Celera would have done what they did. Remember, they didn't need the preliminary research of the HGP, because instead of using a scaffolding method, they went straight to shotgun sequencing which saved them 5+ years. Nobody's denying that the HGP and Celera were able to rest on a strong foundation, but the reality is that the HGP was running itself lazily because they had no competition. I worked in genomics at the time and it was really a sleepy corner of bioinformatics.
- gowld 9y ago
  At the same time, Celera didn't launch until 1998, 8 years after HGP started. So Celera effectively languuished since 1990 as well. Ideas need to ripen in their time. Celera didn't jump in the game until the tech (bio tech and computer tech) was ready, and BTW Celera had the benefit of consuming all of HGP's output while keeping their own secret.

Brockenstein 9y ago

I'm all for more money for research, we spend too much on the military as it is. Learning new things no matter how useless the knowledge seems right now might have untold applications in the future. That being said, throwing money at science and expecting predictable and measurable results on any sort of definable timetable isn't realistic. Even if the human genome project had been completed in 1993 that's not a promise that every sort of discovery or applications based on that knowledge would have been discovered between 1993 and 2008. And invariably there's things we've learned between 2008 and 2010 that is a dependency for some of the work utilizing the human genome. So sure, somehow if we knew everything in 1993 that we did in 2003 we'd be years ahead. And if we knew everything we did in 1993 in 1893 woah, just think of that. And so on and so on. More funding can help in the quest to learn about the universe. But you can't just buy knowledge (doubly so for a specific technology or somesuch) by the year, decade, or century. Money doesn't have that power, and that's not how science works.

ModernMech 9y ago

> If the Human Genome Project had been completed in 1993 instead of 2003 Could the project have been completed in 1993 with infinite funding? Just taking into account computing power put into the project, it was exponentially greater in 2003, so perhaps in 1993 it wasn't enough. Maybe it would have taken until 2003 no matter what, as the limiting factor wasn't money but something else.

melling 9y ago
The idea is that we shift the entire timeline of discovery by a few years at first then by more as time passes. I didn’t mean to imply that we spend large amounts of money on one project to get it done earlier. Simply, that we spend more on research, in general, then would we reach the ability to solve the Human Genome Project earlier. I picked this project randomly. The LHC and Higgs could be another.

fastaguy88 9y ago

One of the remarkable features of the Human Genome Project (HGP) was that much of the technology needed to complete the project not only did not exist (e.g. highly parallel sequencers), but was not even imagined (e.g. PCR - the polymerase chain reaction). Unlike landing on the moon, where much of the science was well understood, the technical solutions to the human genome were not known when it was envisioned. Science is not engineering; the HGP succeeded because science came up with technical solutions that could then be engineered. But both were required. It is unclear that there are effective ways to accelerate unimagined scientific discoveries.

stillsut 9y ago

It's an interesting question. I'd look at it from the angle of ability to marshal resources for an to meet constantly arising but unanticipated threats and opportunities. So not the Genome Project, we always knew we'd need to figure that out, same with how to beat cancer, same with fusion, etc. I'm talking about when internet transaction started becoming an opportunity, there was already a well developed (if esoteric) field of cryptography that could build solutions for that application... and it turned out that was the tip of the iceberg of what crypto is doing nowadays. On the threat side, there are many examples of Soviet jet can do X, therefore the US has to dip into research on say allow metals, to build a jet that can do Y and counter the threat. We don't know what grand projects are tractable with today's or tomorrow's technology - beat cancer or invent fusion first, anyone? We know in the future we'll need answers to questions we haven't even asked yet; that's what you're really buying with your research dollars.