5 ms·

>Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev. That's very optimistic, but not necessarily true (even ignoring the question

• jacoblyles 13y ago
  I don't understand why science should be a closed guild in the first place.
  • enraged_camel 13y ago
    Because these days it is institutionalized, and in our society that means it is funded by capitalistic entities, i.e. corporations. In other words, the profit motive dictates that making money to enrich a few individuals is more noble than sharing knowledge for the good of society.
    • anologwintermut 13y ago
      Science is funded entirely by corporations? Tell me, where can I buy stock in the NSF, DARPA, NIH? Or where can I find the articles of incorporation for the MacArthur Foundation or any of the other non-profits that also fund research. Or which corporation is paying my PhD stipend --- I really ought to short their stock since they were dumb enough to hire me.
      • yaok 13y ago
        Those are government entities, and the government's parent company is the corporatocracy that owns all the politicians and media. Science is a business in the service of global capitalism. Truth hurts. I will give you the MacArthur foundation and certain other non-profits. But most non-profits are also operated by the corporatocratic elite, like everything else on this planet.
        • SEMW 13y ago
          You're right - if you define 'funded by corporations' sufficiently loosely (to include everything from governmental bodies to universities to charitable foundations) that the statement 'science is entirely funded by corporations' becomes a tautology, it becomes clear that science is entirely funded by corporations! I for one am shocked and appalled.
          • yaok 13y ago
            You're just being pedantic. The thrust of his comment was clear while not perfectly correct. "Fund" is well understood as a euphemism for "control" It would be ideal if science were "funded" (read: controlled) by the public in the interest of the public good, but in reality it is controlled by the corporatocracy. Is Goldman Sachs "funded" by the government or is the government "funded" by Goldman Sachs? The best understanding is that the government is a corporate subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, a profit-centre that Goldman Sachs invests in and controls by means of investment, and those investments reap profits. Technically you could say that GS is funded by taxpayers, but funding implies both investment and control. So it's more accurate to say that GS funds the government, because this makes it clear where the locus of control is. Citizens are indentured servants that pay tribute to GS via taxes. Academics are indentured servants that receive money and position in exchange for their services to the subsidiary of GS called NSF. Having said that, I think many foundations are genuinely independent of GS control, but they still can't be said to be funded by the public for the public. They are just altruistic private parties as opposed to the megalithic non-altruistic faction that is the corporatocracy.
• api 13y ago
  Part of why it may not be true is that we lack the language or conceptual vocabulary to describe how living systems really work. When we engineer things, it's one-part-one-function. Living systems are every-part-every-function network graphs with weighted edges that are subject to dynamic reconfiguration. A cell isn't a computer that runs "code" in the form of DNA, nor is it a "machine" as we understand it. A "structured cloud of probabilistic quantum interactions among molecular nanomachines" is a bit more accurate. Until we conquer these meta-problems, we won't understand the cell or the genome. I don't think they can be understood classically -- and I don't mean classically in the sense of omitting quantum mechanics. (Though that's true too.) I mean classically in the sense of linear fixed-relationship cause and effect machines.
• anologwintermut 13y ago
  What do paywalls possible have to do with the reproducibility of results? Anyone who has access to a lab capable of even attempting to reproduce such research is either 1) at an institution that has access to those journals or 2) can use google to find the papers anyway. Hopefully both. The fact that tax-payer funded research is put behind paywalls is a travesty , but it seems wrong to claim it actually hinders researchers from doing anything given.
  • return0 13y ago
    If they were open, you would have an online service that could automatically point contradicting studies, and even make suggestions.
    • anologwintermut 13y ago
      Even if they are closed, you can link to the papers (unless the DMCA metastasized again). Granted, someone can't make an automatic tool to find such studies, but that would be hard anyway and presumably the authors are aware of the study they are refuting and could tag them. Now, people trying to make policy decisions could not read or evaluate the studies. If we assume they are capable of doing so in the first place( i.e. their not Lamar smith), then we have an actual argument for getting rid of paywalls. I still think the best one is its a waste of money and a tax on universities/ grants.
  • kanzure 13y ago
    > What do paywalls possible have to do with the reproducibility > of results? Anyone who has access to a lab Actually, there's no institution subscribed to every journal. There are, in fact, many papers inaccessible to even the most funded labs. Spotty coverage.
    • trentlott 13y ago
      I'm published in a highly-ranked journal that our university doesn't have access to. Sorta funny.