6 ms·
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
by mrj 14y ago
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
- jackpirate 14y agoTwo enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.
- me2i81 14y agoYou can like Celera or hate it, but you can't just pretend that it didn't exist...
- pmb 14y agoIt was, however, founded by a guy who left the human genome project and took his hard-won expertise elsewhere.
- angersock 14y agoi mean all weve accomplished is connecting over a billion people and letting you see the person you want to talk to in real time on a device smaller than a hotpocket yeah i guess industry isnt really accomplishing much these days (How are your examples actually useful?)
- mbreese 14y agoAnd most of that was driven by academic research 10-50 years ago. The fear is that we aren't currently funding the academic research that will drive technology in the next 20-50 years.
- angersock 14y agoIf you take that timeframe, fair point.
- sthatipamala 14y agoSibling commenter explained it fine, but to elaborate... your example relies on the existence of wireless networks, LCD technology, assorted networking protocols, cryptography (for secure logins, etc), and video compression algorithms. All of those have been advanced in some part by academic research.
- mbreese 14y agoThe human genome sequencing didn't really get going until they had to start competing with Celera. In the end, the HGP ended up adopting the same techniques to keep up. So, that probably isn't the best example to use. The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many smaller labs.
- scarmig 14y agoThe Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy. When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I guess is your point.
- yen223 14y agoCould the smaller projects have the expertise and resources to discover something like the Higgs-Boson? Centralization of resources is not necessarily a bad thing.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThe more important question is could multiple smaller labs have come up with something more valuable (to science or society) than weighing the Higgs Boson (the discovery was expected, the weight was an unknown)?
- neutronicus 14y agoIt's not like looking for the Higgs is the only thing people have done at the LHC. For instance, there's another big experiment going on investigating Quark-Gluon plasma, and the OPERA experiment was using LHC neutrinos. The LHC is a big, expensive piece of infrastructure that groups have to share, but there are multiple groups.
- 14y ago