8 ms·

"The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remed

by FD3SA 13y ago

"The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path." The institution of science is undergoing a catastrophic decline. The reason behind this is simple: it is no longer a growing economy. Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research. And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. It is the riskiest of gambles by definition, requiring inordinate expenditures of time and resources in the present for a chance at some distant breakthrough decades or even centuries in the future. Institutional science is not an economically sound choice in the best of times, let alone during the current span of never-ending recessions. The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing. The reality is that, increasingly, we live in a society that does not understand this philosophy of life. People only care about how they will survive tomorrow, and who can blame them, as the world economy gets ever more competitive and cut-throat. Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes.

temuze 13y ago
>> ...companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research... And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. The problem is that this article generalizes "science" to the life sciences. Biology and medical experiments take a long time, are very expensive and reproducing results can be very difficult. Of course there's more pressure for scientists to produce results and you'll see fishier papers to justify their big grants. Research can be incredibly profitable. What about Bell Labs? 3M? The technology from your iPhone wouldn't have been possible without Apple's big R&D department. There are many examples of successful (and profitable) R&D departments. Heck, Exxon's R&D arm comes out with many innovations a year to make pumping oil out of the ground easier. It just isn't as visible (or linkbait-y) as that new gene they found. >> "[science] has never made economic sense in the present" Life sciences don't. It takes decades for new drugs to come out sometimes. So yes, there are a limited number of people who do this. But electronics? Tech? Mechanical/Aerospace engineering? SpaceX, Intel and others are constantly improving. >> "Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes." Bullshit. There's financial incentive to go with the fold and do conventional things, but there's also a lot of financial incentive to innovate. However, innovation is hard when there's a higher barrier of entry. Information is the industry that has seen the most innovation in the last decade because anyone and their mother can make software. The real problem is making the barrier of entry lower for other industries. To make manufacturing, biomedical research and others easier. And guess what? There's economic incentive to do that, too! People who make software development easier are getting tons of money and 3D printing, which will completely change the way manufacturing is done, will probably create some billionaires in the next decade. The system is fine! In the last decade, we got portable access to all of human information, the ability to always know where we are, advancements in electronics, cars and all sorts of myriad incredible things. Give us another couple decades and we'll make things that will blow anyone from the present's mind.
- notdrunkatall 13y ago
  I hate to say this, but I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I can't believe the old "science isn't profitable" canard is being trotted out to full effect on HN. The fact of the matter is that science is imminently profitable, and this is so obviously true that it takes nothing short of a true believer in the benevolence of the government as the superior investment entity and the free market as bogeyman to believe otherwise. I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it? The desire for profit is the single largest driver of scientific and technological innovation, period. Yes, NASA and DARPA have created some amazing things, but what about the hundreds of billions which are spent by privately held entities' R&D departments every year? Does all of that research yield nothing of value? The pharmaceutical advances? The electronic advances? The advances in automobiles, computers, housing, information access, and, now, space travel, as well as virtually every other product on the planet - do those mean nothing? Of course they do. Private funding for research constitutes the lions share of research funding, and that private research leads to the vast majority of scientific and technological advances around the world. The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    > I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it? This isn't reason.com, is it? > The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot. The private sector doesn't advance science. Also: you are stupid for claiming so. Maybe even first-class stupid. See where that exchange gets us? Now cite your data on the majority of scientific advances being privately funded, since you claim to be able to demonstrate it. In particular, I'm interested in basic-science advances, of the kind that CERN and Stephen Hawking and etc. produce. Who in the private sector is producing those?
    - notdrunkatall 13y ago
      The private sector doesn't advance science? Intel doesn't advance science? Pfizer doesn't advance science? GE? IBM? ADM? BASF? You don't think that private companies regularly form hypotheses, test those hypothesis, and draw conclusions from their results? Applied science is no less worthy of the title of science than is pure science, and the private sector is applied science writ large. As for pure science and government funding, I'm not against it, and promoting one over the other is not my intention, as they both have their roles to play. I agree that pure science would not occur to the extent that it does now absent government funding. What I disagree with is that science would not happen at all were that the case. That's flatly stupid thing to say, and I'm a little amused that you would make that claim just before calling me stupid. In a world where the rate of technological advance is larger than it has been at any other time in the history of the world (and is still increasing), it seems obvious that both are playing their roles rather well. The system is functioning. Science is not dead. Hell, it's not even sick.
feral 13y ago
We could construct hardly any of the infrastructure on which our developed economies are built without science: our energy systems, our food production systems, our communication systems. Science has enabled us to separate fact from fiction, and hence develop theories that allow us to manipulate our environment in sophisticated ways. I don't see how you can argue that 'science' as a whole hasn't paid off as a 'logical financial investment'. That claim is so challenging to my worldview, its hard for me to engage with. For a start, what might we have invested in instead that might have had a higher rate of return?
- miloshadzic 13y ago
  You missed his point. Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment. In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.
  - temuze 13y ago
    And I'd argue that this is false for most industries. Perhaps it's true for life sciences, but many other industries love putting more money into R&D.
    - mjn 13y ago
      R&D is a bit different than science. Usually it has a time horizon of 3-10 years to commercialization, sometimes 10-20 at the high end. While much of science is in the 10-100 range. The 20-year patent window is crucially important for industry R&D. The timeframe can be extended a bit by keeping things as trade secrets, if you're very careful, but it gets trickier. Unpredictable and non-application-specific research also tends to be disfavored: improvement on a chemical process is one thing, since it has a clear path to application in a specific area that the company does business in. But new basic physics results are not favored, since it's not clear whether they will lead to profitable applications at all; and even if there was some way of knowing they would, those applications might not be easy for the company to take advantage of if they don't align with its business. You couldn't directly build a product on Einstein's major results, for example, certainly not within the time window of patent protection (if they were even hypothetically patentable), but they were hugely important anyway. Same with much of the mid-20th-century materials-science work that is now proving useful to chip manufacturers: the tech industry didn't fund that research in the 1950s-70s, because they didn't know at the time which physics results would be useful to them in 2010s chip engineering. But they're definitely using them now! It's important to the tech industry that this pipeline of not-sure-where-this-will-be-applied basic research exists, because it's hard to do things like improving manufacturing processes unless there is an existing understanding of how physics and materials work in the first place. But the case for them funding it directly is weaker, because it tends to have the property that advancing the general level of knowledge benefits everyone, not only you, and you don't know decades in advance which specific knowledge you'll eventually need, anyway.
freyrs3 13y ago
> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research. It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.
- arkonaut 13y ago
  Why is this ironic?
  - rosser 13y ago
    Possibly because of the staunchly anti-government, private-industry-can-always-do-it-better attitude that's nearly endemic in the SV tech scene?
- _sh 13y ago
  It's OK, the silicon valley companies and other private sector institutions who have benefited so much from investment by the DoD and ARPA are ready to address any investment shortfall to the sciences, right? I mean, investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place. Am I right?
  - freyrs3 13y ago
    > investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place Not necessarily, if invest in science you're investing in the lab producing publishable results, without the constraint of bringing a product to market. The two don't necessarily overlap.
    - _delirium 13y ago
Alex3917 13y ago
"Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research." It also has a lot to do with the Bayh-Dole Act and the privatization of research. For-profit research centers are one of the fastest growing areas of the economy. While more public funding would certainly help, the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized. If there were less research but if it were still high quality, we'd be much better off.
- dnautics 13y ago
  >the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized. and science in America in the 19th century was funded how? Because we sure didn't have the NIH, NSF, NIST, DOE, DARPA, or any of these organizations then. Even into the 20th century: For example, most of Irving Langmuir's research (in both applied and basic science) was conducted privately, long before Reagan. Same goes for luminaries such as Gilbert Lewis, Josiah Gibbs, Robert Millikan, etc.
ekianjo 13y ago
> The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing. Are you serious ? It's so obvious that using Science is proving to be profitable for all industries using it. Life Sciences being maybe an exception rather than a rule, because of the complexity to address the issues at hand and the regulatory framework enforcing conservative approaches (we still categorize cancers by "location" rather than protein tracers which makes no sense at all scientifically). All the R&D going on in Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies involved in new technologies are driving innovation forward and proving to provide very tangible returns. The same goes with all the applied sciences done in the automobile industry, the aviation industry with material sciences, and I could go on and on since there is a neverending flow of examples.
spikels 13y ago
"science is a creative pursuit much like the arts" While surprising this statement gets at something missing in science today. Until relatively recently basic science was not dominated by a big institution monoculture but by curious and creative individuals working in a great variety of situations often in near isolation. I wonder if much of the effort to institutionalize and "professionalize" science has been counterproductive. I can't imagine most of the great figures in history of science thriving in the current environment. Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs? I know this is a bit of a rant and I know times have changed. But perhaps something similar to the open-source revolution in software can get science back to its roots.
- dnautics 13y ago
  >Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs? I think you have really hit the nail on the head with this one.
yummyfajitas 13y ago
Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, Public funding for science has generally been growing. It was cut a bit in 2009, but that's the extent of it. http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf I don't know where to find stats for private R&D - do you?

by FD3SA 13y ago

temuze 13y ago

>> ...companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research... And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. The problem is that this article generalizes "science" to the life sciences. Biology and medical experiments take a long time, are very expensive and reproducing results can be very difficult. Of course there's more pressure for scientists to produce results and you'll see fishier papers to justify their big grants. Research can be incredibly profitable. What about Bell Labs? 3M? The technology from your iPhone wouldn't have been possible without Apple's big R&D department. There are many examples of successful (and profitable) R&D departments. Heck, Exxon's R&D arm comes out with many innovations a year to make pumping oil out of the ground easier. It just isn't as visible (or linkbait-y) as that new gene they found. >> "[science] has never made economic sense in the present" Life sciences don't. It takes decades for new drugs to come out sometimes. So yes, there are a limited number of people who do this. But electronics? Tech? Mechanical/Aerospace engineering? SpaceX, Intel and others are constantly improving. >> "Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes." Bullshit. There's financial incentive to go with the fold and do conventional things, but there's also a lot of financial incentive to innovate. However, innovation is hard when there's a higher barrier of entry. Information is the industry that has seen the most innovation in the last decade because anyone and their mother can make software. The real problem is making the barrier of entry lower for other industries. To make manufacturing, biomedical research and others easier. And guess what? There's economic incentive to do that, too! People who make software development easier are getting tons of money and 3D printing, which will completely change the way manufacturing is done, will probably create some billionaires in the next decade. The system is fine! In the last decade, we got portable access to all of human information, the ability to always know where we are, advancements in electronics, cars and all sorts of myriad incredible things. Give us another couple decades and we'll make things that will blow anyone from the present's mind.

notdrunkatall 13y ago
I hate to say this, but I regret that I have but one upvote to give. I can't believe the old "science isn't profitable" canard is being trotted out to full effect on HN. The fact of the matter is that science is imminently profitable, and this is so obviously true that it takes nothing short of a true believer in the benevolence of the government as the superior investment entity and the free market as bogeyman to believe otherwise. I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it? The desire for profit is the single largest driver of scientific and technological innovation, period. Yes, NASA and DARPA have created some amazing things, but what about the hundreds of billions which are spent by privately held entities' R&D departments every year? Does all of that research yield nothing of value? The pharmaceutical advances? The electronic advances? The advances in automobiles, computers, housing, information access, and, now, space travel, as well as virtually every other product on the planet - do those mean nothing? Of course they do. Private funding for research constitutes the lions share of research funding, and that private research leads to the vast majority of scientific and technological advances around the world. The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot.
- _delirium 13y ago
  > I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it? This isn't reason.com, is it? > The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot. The private sector doesn't advance science. Also: you are stupid for claiming so. Maybe even first-class stupid. See where that exchange gets us? Now cite your data on the majority of scientific advances being privately funded, since you claim to be able to demonstrate it. In particular, I'm interested in basic-science advances, of the kind that CERN and Stephen Hawking and etc. produce. Who in the private sector is producing those?
  - notdrunkatall 13y ago
    The private sector doesn't advance science? Intel doesn't advance science? Pfizer doesn't advance science? GE? IBM? ADM? BASF? You don't think that private companies regularly form hypotheses, test those hypothesis, and draw conclusions from their results? Applied science is no less worthy of the title of science than is pure science, and the private sector is applied science writ large. As for pure science and government funding, I'm not against it, and promoting one over the other is not my intention, as they both have their roles to play. I agree that pure science would not occur to the extent that it does now absent government funding. What I disagree with is that science would not happen at all were that the case. That's flatly stupid thing to say, and I'm a little amused that you would make that claim just before calling me stupid. In a world where the rate of technological advance is larger than it has been at any other time in the history of the world (and is still increasing), it seems obvious that both are playing their roles rather well. The system is functioning. Science is not dead. Hell, it's not even sick.

feral 13y ago

We could construct hardly any of the infrastructure on which our developed economies are built without science: our energy systems, our food production systems, our communication systems. Science has enabled us to separate fact from fiction, and hence develop theories that allow us to manipulate our environment in sophisticated ways. I don't see how you can argue that 'science' as a whole hasn't paid off as a 'logical financial investment'. That claim is so challenging to my worldview, its hard for me to engage with. For a start, what might we have invested in instead that might have had a higher rate of return?

miloshadzic 13y ago
You missed his point. Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment. In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.
- temuze 13y ago
  And I'd argue that this is false for most industries. Perhaps it's true for life sciences, but many other industries love putting more money into R&D.
  - mjn 13y ago
    R&D is a bit different than science. Usually it has a time horizon of 3-10 years to commercialization, sometimes 10-20 at the high end. While much of science is in the 10-100 range. The 20-year patent window is crucially important for industry R&D. The timeframe can be extended a bit by keeping things as trade secrets, if you're very careful, but it gets trickier. Unpredictable and non-application-specific research also tends to be disfavored: improvement on a chemical process is one thing, since it has a clear path to application in a specific area that the company does business in. But new basic physics results are not favored, since it's not clear whether they will lead to profitable applications at all; and even if there was some way of knowing they would, those applications might not be easy for the company to take advantage of if they don't align with its business. You couldn't directly build a product on Einstein's major results, for example, certainly not within the time window of patent protection (if they were even hypothetically patentable), but they were hugely important anyway. Same with much of the mid-20th-century materials-science work that is now proving useful to chip manufacturers: the tech industry didn't fund that research in the 1950s-70s, because they didn't know at the time which physics results would be useful to them in 2010s chip engineering. But they're definitely using them now! It's important to the tech industry that this pipeline of not-sure-where-this-will-be-applied basic research exists, because it's hard to do things like improving manufacturing processes unless there is an existing understanding of how physics and materials work in the first place. But the case for them funding it directly is weaker, because it tends to have the property that advancing the general level of knowledge benefits everyone, not only you, and you don't know decades in advance which specific knowledge you'll eventually need, anyway.

freyrs3 13y ago

> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research. It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.

arkonaut 13y ago
Why is this ironic?
- rosser 13y ago
  Possibly because of the staunchly anti-government, private-industry-can-always-do-it-better attitude that's nearly endemic in the SV tech scene?
_sh 13y ago
It's OK, the silicon valley companies and other private sector institutions who have benefited so much from investment by the DoD and ARPA are ready to address any investment shortfall to the sciences, right? I mean, investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place. Am I right?
- freyrs3 13y ago
  > investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place Not necessarily, if invest in science you're investing in the lab producing publishable results, without the constraint of bringing a product to market. The two don't necessarily overlap.
  - _delirium 13y ago

Alex3917 13y ago

"Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research." It also has a lot to do with the Bayh-Dole Act and the privatization of research. For-profit research centers are one of the fastest growing areas of the economy. While more public funding would certainly help, the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized. If there were less research but if it were still high quality, we'd be much better off.

dnautics 13y ago
>the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized. and science in America in the 19th century was funded how? Because we sure didn't have the NIH, NSF, NIST, DOE, DARPA, or any of these organizations then. Even into the 20th century: For example, most of Irving Langmuir's research (in both applied and basic science) was conducted privately, long before Reagan. Same goes for luminaries such as Gilbert Lewis, Josiah Gibbs, Robert Millikan, etc.

ekianjo 13y ago

> The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing. Are you serious ? It's so obvious that using Science is proving to be profitable for all industries using it. Life Sciences being maybe an exception rather than a rule, because of the complexity to address the issues at hand and the regulatory framework enforcing conservative approaches (we still categorize cancers by "location" rather than protein tracers which makes no sense at all scientifically). All the R&D going on in Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies involved in new technologies are driving innovation forward and proving to provide very tangible returns. The same goes with all the applied sciences done in the automobile industry, the aviation industry with material sciences, and I could go on and on since there is a neverending flow of examples.

spikels 13y ago

"science is a creative pursuit much like the arts" While surprising this statement gets at something missing in science today. Until relatively recently basic science was not dominated by a big institution monoculture but by curious and creative individuals working in a great variety of situations often in near isolation. I wonder if much of the effort to institutionalize and "professionalize" science has been counterproductive. I can't imagine most of the great figures in history of science thriving in the current environment. Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs? I know this is a bit of a rant and I know times have changed. But perhaps something similar to the open-source revolution in software can get science back to its roots.

dnautics 13y ago
>Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs? I think you have really hit the nail on the head with this one.

yummyfajitas 13y ago

Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, Public funding for science has generally been growing. It was cut a bit in 2009, but that's the extent of it. http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pDefNon.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy2013/hist13pAgcyRes.pdf I don't know where to find stats for private R&D - do you?