I see a problem with the continuing move toward corporate science. As corporations upgrade their research arms (good) there is not an associated upgrade to public research (bad). I trace a lot of the current scientific redundancy back to the Bayh-Dole Act. The government was not seeing the number of patents licensed from public funded research climb so it allowed small businesses and universities to collect those patents and license or use them as they saw fit. The National Science Foundation began looking at research based on the ability to accomplish tech transfer.
In 2008 the total amount expended was about $51 billion dollars on research from federal, state, and local funds. The Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) got about $14 billion of that expended funds. Some of those FFRDCs are also universities but many of them are private corporations or think tanks. About one third of the money went to University FFRDCs in 2008 then went to them in 2005. The funding of university research has been decreasing with small spikes since the late 1970s. If you look at historical trends you can see that there has been an increase in dollars, but in real dollars looking at the GDP it is fairly stagnant. The trend can be strongly seen when the non-defense numbers are looked at a little closer.
Former Senator Bayh in an article states pretty conclusively that the Bayh-Dole Act has been a boon to the economy. He states that 6000 companies, 300,000 jobs, and over 5000 new products have been created since 1996. Since we don’t have a control we can’t look to see what would have happened without the Bayh-Dole Act but we can discuss what has happened logistically. I would contend the Bayh-Dole Act has contributed to the reduction in STEM education, the fundamental shift from high risk (low yield) science, and productization as a functional area of research.
Google founder Sergei Brin, Apple founder Steve Wozniak, and Corporate Mogul Bill Gates were not scientists. They were technologists. This is not a fundamental problem in the act of commerce but it is a problem for science. Describing and adapting scientific knowledge for practical purpose is technology. Describing and evaluating the world increasing our knowledge of that world is science. When you make scientists research products (with defined end states) we create engineers as they ware working toward requirements versus a hypothesis. For a pharmaceutical company as long as they follow the rules I don’t have a problem with that.
I do have a problem if we as a society decide to do this with all our science which is where we appear to be heading.
This corporatism of science has had the following impacts on the market place of ideas.
1) Redundant or minimalistic research vectors resulting in products. The head of DARPA is very proud of how quickly they get results even if those results are small engineering products versus scientific break throughs.
2) Reduction in high impact advances in basic science slowing the innovation cycle or making people flee the United States for more progressive countries. If there is no funding and the jobs are small or low paying why would you stay where you’re not wanted?
3) Focus of Universities on funding in a shrinking pool of money may be driving professors from tenure to corporations or simply professors wanting to get out of the academic rat race for a place where funding or research opportunities are more assured. Most researchers want to research not chase funding.
4) A big part of college has become planning on how to be a corporate mogul and a scientist. This is good for corporations but bad for public availability of science and the educational prospects of the next wave of scientists.
There are a lot of problems with how we are implementing social decisions toward science and the political ramifications and rancor around these decisions have much less to do with solving the problem than continuing it. The short vision horizon of government and public policy makers has radically reduced the innovation capacity of the United States. This is not a direct result of a reduction in the populations intelligence quotient but a series of rational decisions made by people in understanding their future career paths. How many times have we heard the homily attributed to various captains of industry, “I don’t need a PhD I hire a dozen PhD’s for the price of one good engineer”?
The focus on STEM without focusing on where those STEM students are going to go is political nightmare. Many of our current problems reflect back to the Bayh-Dole act and how we deal with intellectual property. Locking up pubic funded science within private and corporate entities is not an answer. Neither was the federal government locking up patentable intellectual property. The problem of dealing with intellectual property isn’t how to lock it up but how we have locked it up. The problem is that the system as it is working now is focused on short term politically motivated solutions and not being expended on blue sky dreams. We know that people won’t always succeed at high risk science but neither will we innovate at the plodding rate we’re going now.
Political expediency and a continuing shortening of decision cycles has killed innovation. Gerrymandering the education system won’t fix what is an instantiated systemized set of political objectives and directives. Political expediency setting cycles of scientific inquiry at ever shorter periods and halting projects because they appear to be fruitless may seem discretionary. However, they don’t realize that we’re talking about inquiry not engineering. People focus on the 4 years it took the Manhattan Project to build the nuclear bomb, and forget the 40 years of inquiry that preceded it in theoretical and experimental inquiry.
Innovation is not dying in America because we don’t have enough STEM students. It is dying because nobody has the vision in public policy to say become great and put the public trust behind those people who try. Until then we’ll just educate more lawyers.