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The comment makes little sense, the way that is worded. When and where were politicians responsible for the collapse of the "the longer timescale corporate R&D

The comment makes little sense, the way that is worded. When and where were politicians responsible for the collapse of the "the longer timescale corporate R&D labs"? Are you thinking of ATT/Bell Labs? Are you thinking of just the U.S. and just the East Coast of the U.S., ignoring a much larger world? "Before that, if universities got too demanding, the academics would leave to the corporate labs." Academics who? Let's say biologists, who are a massive presence in academia, exactly where in the private sector were they working before the aforementioned collapse of "the longer timescale corporate R&D labs"? Pharma is strong, maybe stronger than ever, but most of the top pharma-adjacent biologists prefer to stay in academia and collaborate with Pharma, more than the opposite. You are just thinking about a bunch of labs (Bell labs?) able to move maybe 1% of the academics at most in their heyday. And it seems to me, like I explained, that the "productivity pressure" is coming from academics themselves, not from outside academia. Before the 70's, it was fairly easy for a moderately successful Ph.D. to get a position in academia, but the number of positions available did not keep up with the increase of Ph.D.'s who wanted to do academic research. And the "productivity" measurements started.

bsder 3y ago
> When and where were politicians responsible for the collapse of the "the longer timescale corporate R&D labs"? I did not say this and am quite mystified how you managed to construe my words to imply that. The fact that those corporate labs had a longer term focus and then disappeared is simply a fact. > Academics who? Let's say biologists Before PCR (1984ish?), biology had such a vanishingly small presence relative to research funding that it almost doesn't count. Every big company up through about 1970-1980 had very large R&D departments that had been in existence for anywhere between half to a whole century. Sure: IBM, Bell, and Xerox are remembered strongly. However, Kodak and Polaroid had big chemical engineering departments. RCA and Motorola were household names. Every big name in steel (US Steel, Bethlehem, etc.) all had lots of research in metallurgy. Corning was a huge driving force behind ceramic chemistry. Dupont similarly for plastics. When those big companies went down, so, too, did their research departments and the funding driving them. This was a problem because companies funded a LOT of the local universities--Pittsburgh universities, for example, were still using equipment even in the 1990s that had been funded decades earlier by the big steel mills. The collapse of the corporate giants meant that the percentage of academic research funding from government suddenly went way up.

bsder 3y ago

> When and where were politicians responsible for the collapse of the "the longer timescale corporate R&D labs"? I did not say this and am quite mystified how you managed to construe my words to imply that. The fact that those corporate labs had a longer term focus and then disappeared is simply a fact. > Academics who? Let's say biologists Before PCR (1984ish?), biology had such a vanishingly small presence relative to research funding that it almost doesn't count. Every big company up through about 1970-1980 had very large R&D departments that had been in existence for anywhere between half to a whole century. Sure: IBM, Bell, and Xerox are remembered strongly. However, Kodak and Polaroid had big chemical engineering departments. RCA and Motorola were household names. Every big name in steel (US Steel, Bethlehem, etc.) all had lots of research in metallurgy. Corning was a huge driving force behind ceramic chemistry. Dupont similarly for plastics. When those big companies went down, so, too, did their research departments and the funding driving them. This was a problem because companies funded a LOT of the local universities--Pittsburgh universities, for example, were still using equipment even in the 1990s that had been funded decades earlier by the big steel mills. The collapse of the corporate giants meant that the percentage of academic research funding from government suddenly went way up.