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"Science. Science seems broken. The current funding models are broken and favor political skill over scientific genius. We need new business models for basic

"Science. Science seems broken. The current funding models are broken and favor political skill over scientific genius. We need new business models for basic research. There are a lot of areas where scientific developments can have huge commercial applications — materials, neuroscience, climate engineering, and cheaper/better ways to get to space, just to name a few—and we’d love to figure out a way for it to happen. " I think he misunderstands the meaning of the term "basic research": "Basic research (also called pure research or fundamental research) is a systematic study directed toward greater knowledge or understanding of the fundamental aspects of phenomena without specific applications or products in mind." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research) So the very idea of basic research is that there are no forseeable commercial applications (or indeed any practical applications). Personally, I think that private funding is NOT suited to finance fundamental research, since the time horizon there is way too long for most VC companies, and I doubt that many of them would finance something "just because it is interesting and we don't understand it yet".

irollboozers 13y ago
Check out Experiment (http://experiment.com http://experiment.com). Even in 'research', there are different types and different motivations. I believe the Science that we see today is more a reflection of the past decades' focus on commercial innovation. As opposed to the previous few centuries, where science was the product of exploration and curiosity. How we do science today will not be the same as how we do science in 10 years.
- ThePhysicist 13y ago
  Well that's an interesting website, but honestly I think it's not possible to fund fundamental research using crowdsourcing: For example, the last group I worked in consisted of about 6 full-time researchers, 4 PhD students and about 3-6 master students / interns. The salary and infrastructure costs there probably already amount to more than 1 M$ / year. In addition, expenditures for electricity and other required materials (in our case liquid helium) amount again to several 100k$ / year. And this is just what keeps the lights on, doing actual research projects typically requires again several million dollars per project over the course of 3-5 years. To raise that amount of money through crowdsourcing seems very unrealistic and would put the scientists at the "mercy of the masses", so with all due respect I think it's not a viable idea. There could be other interesting use cases for this kind of platform of course: I think in research education this could be a great tool to collect money for student projects at schools and universities, which in the long term will benefit science a lot by producing more scientists :) I just think that funding professional, institutionalized research is and should stay the job of the government.

irollboozers 13y ago

Check out Experiment (http://experiment.com http://experiment.com). Even in 'research', there are different types and different motivations. I believe the Science that we see today is more a reflection of the past decades' focus on commercial innovation. As opposed to the previous few centuries, where science was the product of exploration and curiosity. How we do science today will not be the same as how we do science in 10 years.

ThePhysicist 13y ago
Well that's an interesting website, but honestly I think it's not possible to fund fundamental research using crowdsourcing: For example, the last group I worked in consisted of about 6 full-time researchers, 4 PhD students and about 3-6 master students / interns. The salary and infrastructure costs there probably already amount to more than 1 M$ / year. In addition, expenditures for electricity and other required materials (in our case liquid helium) amount again to several 100k$ / year. And this is just what keeps the lights on, doing actual research projects typically requires again several million dollars per project over the course of 3-5 years. To raise that amount of money through crowdsourcing seems very unrealistic and would put the scientists at the "mercy of the masses", so with all due respect I think it's not a viable idea. There could be other interesting use cases for this kind of platform of course: I think in research education this could be a great tool to collect money for student projects at schools and universities, which in the long term will benefit science a lot by producing more scientists :) I just think that funding professional, institutionalized research is and should stay the job of the government.