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To take one single simple example, the mRNA vaccines that saved tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic (earning a lot of money for the companies th

To take one single simple example, the mRNA vaccines that saved tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic (earning a lot of money for the companies that produced them), and are one of the most promising technologies for many other vaccines, cancer treatments, etc. would have been completely impossible without decades of NIH funding. Bayer might find individual academic studies to be poor basis for starting new drug development trials, or whatever, but they certainly wouldn't pretend that they can independently replace the entirety of American academic biomedical research, which is substantially dependent on public funding. It's much too large and expensive a task for industry to take on, especially since industry would have to pay much higher salaries to attract the same talent. You'll see similar in most fields: basic research into interesting curiosities in academic labs does not instantly and immediately lead to new commercial products. But immediate productization is neither the purpose nor motivation of scientific research, and effectively all new product development is completely dependent on having open research as a part of the same global social system: non-commercial labs, substantially funded by public money, find and explore most of the novel phenomena, train nearly all of the researchers including the ones who end up in industry, provide the structure for knowledge sharing like journals and conferences, and so on. Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. While many research grants go to projects that fail or don't lead anywhere promising (which is why they rarely get funded by industry), occasionally one of those projects ends up creating huge (sometimes literally trillions of dollars) benefits down the line, with little if any reward accruing to the researcher who did the work, but massive improvement for the whole society.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims. > Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster. As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly. There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.
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mike_hearn 2y ago

Industry already pays higher salaries, the purpose of funding scientific research IS in fact productization even if not immediate, and new product development can't be said to be dependent on open research if 90% of the time the claims don't replicate. If anything it's the opposite, product development would depend on not wasting all your budget on replicating false claims. > Funding scientific research is among the highest leverage things the US government can do. A deeply subjective claim asserted as obvious fact. It can just as easily be argued that governments could spend nothing on scientific research and progress would occur at the same rate or even faster. As for the mRNA vaccines, just be aware that this is a bad example to use for the wonders of government science. Lots of people who carefully checked the data and studies at the time realized the mRNA vaccines didn't work and public health agencies were lying about their effectiveness, as they lied about so many other things. Later on many other people realized this too, usually after taking several boosters and still getting infected repeatedly. There are better and less controversial examples to cite if you want examples of government funded science with high impact (e.g. AlexNet), but it's not enough to point to a handful of examples. You have to show that they'd have never happened otherwise, which is impossible to show as usually it's clear that they would.

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