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Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science

95 points by melarina 13y ago

j2kun 13y ago
Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!
- te_chris 13y ago
  I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
  - kiba 13y ago
    Not to mention that we are already in deep debt. We may have allocate part of our budget from other areas to science. For example, reallocate defense spending to pure scientific research.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      It seems to have gone more in the other direction. At least in CS, if you want big funding nowadays you need to do DARPA research, because their budget has fared better. And DARPA research has gotten more micromanaged; gone are the days where they'd hand out large block grants to promote general American excellence in areas of "national importance". Nowadays they partner you with effectively a professional "minder" (called an "integrator") from a contractor like Lockheed or BBN, whose job is to make sure your research stays on the DARPA agenda and is going to deliver what they want. Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell.
      - wolfgke 13y ago
        > Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell. Isn't China a new "dangerous" competitor?
- pg 13y ago
  Please don't use all caps for emphasis.
jdonaldson 13y ago
Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.
- Aqueous 13y ago
  The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years. But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contracted private firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, North American Aviation. Nothing really has changed in that regard - NASA is still contracting private companies, only now we have an American company, SpaceX, that can not only build a rocket, but design and launch one as well. Ultimately having innovators like SpaceX who can contract out to more than just the American government will drive the cost of spaceflight down. This can only be a good thing, in my book. Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars. As far as I can tell the only way we're going to get highly reliable, affordable, mainstream electric vehicle in the next ten years is because of his vanity project, Tesla. I mean, I'm as skeptical as anyone about pinning the future hopes of humanity on a few extremely rich people. But it's also comforting that incredibly wealthy people like Elon Musk are preoccupied with how to benefit humanity, and not just themselves.
  - kiba 13y ago
    They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.
    - _delirium 13y ago
conformal 13y ago
i absolutely hate paywalled sites and refuse to read the articles. that said, this is entirely unsurprising since scientific and mathematics research were almost entirely patronized fields until the rise of the modern university. this is very similar to computing in that first monolithic centralized computing was the path, then it was the PC, then it was the cloud, now it's moving back to a decentralized network. these things are bound to yo-yo and academic research is no different than most human-designed processes.
rjzzleep 13y ago
here's an anecdote from a german communication network professor i was sitting at lunch with. as comparison, the pay for a professor here is 50k a year, but can be more. you heard that right, that's what a bsc in low pay southern states gets. he said the following thing which made me rethink the whole thing a little: "conversely i get to research anything i want to, and i don't have to worry about pleasing business with my research results" germany though has a big problem of americanization like so many other countries. i've heard of so many research in the us getting shut down, or the researchers discredited, because they pissed off the wrong company funding the department they were working for. it's a double edged sword. EDIT: it's funny this got downvoted. i was personally involved in evaluating software that was written for the DHS by a huge contractor SAIC. they paid 20+ million for that piece of junk, and my supervisor was scared of passing on the assessment, because they were scared we would lose opportunities on further grants(they were impressed by the assessment, apparently we were the only ones that did such a thorough assessment). i never said professors in germany don't have to get research money or grants, but they are way less dependent on what outcome the industry dictates.
- facepalm 13y ago
  Does it really work that way? My impression was that professors are constantly trying to raise money from the government. Instead of proving industry value, they have to convince bureaucrats that their ideas are worth pursuing. I think strong cases have been made that that's not the optimal way of allocating money for scientific research. For example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/positive_black_swans.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/posi... (government funding is not good in pursuing wild ideas)
  - rjzzleep 13y ago
    german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us. this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1] but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities. a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) rdf based semantic metadata thingie with a cost of 17 million that is now being ditched partly because it's rdf
jrs99 13y ago
I don't know why you would employ a science adviser who thinks that physics isn't "sexy." It's damn sexy. And anyone who really understands even a small amount of physics will think that physics is "sexy."
- angersock 13y ago
  Erm, no? Do you mean classical physics and mechanics, quantum mechanics (and if so, what branch), particle physics, solid-state physics, what? You have to be more specific unless you want to come off as just another -~= Science! =~- people getting off to things they don't actually understand.
  - jrs99 13y ago
    I guess I should be more specific and say statistical mechanics. As a science expert, I have to say the rest is truly boring.
    - jjoonathan 13y ago
      I vote for solid state! Voting for stat-mech almost seems like cheating :)
- beloch 13y ago
  Think about what these uber-rich entrepreneurs would find sexy. Curing cancer, a condom people actually want to use, extending human life, saving the world from meteor impacts, bringing mammoths back, flying to space... It's all near-future, commercializable stuff. Next, go read some article titles/abstracts under quant-ph on arxiv and think about how many would of those would really grab these rich dudes by their eyeballs and make them drop a few million. A huge portion of physics is driven by basic curiosity, has no commercial applications in the near future, and is so esoteric that even other physicists have to work very hard just to understand what's going on. Much of this stuff will wind up being dead-ends, but some of it is the foundation the future will be built on top of. No trained physicist currently alive can predict what will change the world and what won't. Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?
001sky 13y ago
Non-profits are not public entities, and most universities are "billionaires" and "not public". Other than that, I have no concerns.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
I suppose this means that mathematics and the humanities will advance more than disciplines that require significant funding.
runewell 13y ago
Paywall news article complaining about privatization of information, enough said.
- imron 13y ago
  It's not a paywalled article. Turn cookies on and click the link again. If you have cookies off when you click the link it redirects to the login page.
  - psychometry 13y ago
    You can't read it if you've already read 20 articles in the past month, either, thanks to evercookie.
    - imron 13y ago
      Never had a problem. I use a plugin for auto deleting regular cookies and evercookie requires javascript, which I have disabled by default. That being said, I probably wouldn't read more than 20 articles a month on the NYTimes either - just the occasional one posted to HN that catches my interest.
    - dwaltrip 13y ago
      Incognito mode works
  - runewell 13y ago
    http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ
ThePhysicist 13y ago
Seems like the US response to the EU flagship research and innovation programme, "Horizon 2020", which aims to provide 80 BN € (110 BN $) for groundbreaking research withing the next 7 years. One of the "flagship projects" selected for this programme is the "Human Brain Project", which seems similar to what Obama calls “the next great American project: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.". Although he should probably add a few digits to that number if he really means what he says, because I think 100 M$ will hardly be enough to unravel the mysteries of the brain. In any case, as a scientist that's exactly the kind of competition I want to see more of!
vinceguidry 13y ago
> American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise. Oh how quickly journalists forget the past. The only reason we ever became a scientific superpower in the first place is because of one man, John D. Rockefeller.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  Do tell.
tn13 13y ago
I did not know that it was American government that invented light bulb, electric motor, transistors, IC chips and so on.
lexcorvus 13y ago
I don't expect the NYT to have a multi-century sense of historical perspective, but is a multi-decade sense of perspective too much to ask? The present government-funded model of science was created by Vannevar Bush less than seventy years ago—"in the lives of those now living."
jcampbell1 13y ago
> A look at major initiatives suggests that the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer. The #1, #2 richest Americans have specifically targeted funding research for diseases that affect only the poor. I think this is a more valid criticism of the NIH rather than philanthropists.
- tsotha 13y ago
  ... diseases that affect the poor in other countries. As an organization funded by US tax dollars, NIH is primarily responsible for advancing the health of Americans. It's not an international charity.
  - logicchains 13y ago
    Unfortunately, the poor in America are more affected by 'lifestyle diseases' (smoking and obesity related illnesses, for instance), which may be more difficult to cure as they need to be addressed from a social angle, not just a medical one.
    - tsotha 13y ago
      More difficult than malaria or AIDS? I doubt it. Diabetes will probably be a much easier nut to crack than either, with or without lifestyle changes.
      - logicchains 13y ago
        Well according to some graphs I found on Google, malaria mortality rates have reduced significantly in the past few decades [1], as have AIDS death rates [2]. Diabetes rates and mortality have however been continuously increasing. 1. http://www.umich.edu/~csfound/545/1995/land05.jpg http://www.umich.edu/~csfound/545/1995/land05.jpg 2. http://www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/images/colorbox/drugfactshiv2.jpg http://www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/images/colorbox...
Fomite 13y ago
From the article: “They target polio and go after it until it’s done — no one else can do that,” he said, referring to the global drive to eradicate the disease. “In effect, they have the power to lead where the market and the political will are insufficient.” This is actively not true. The eradication of small pox was an international, government-led effort. That we have since abdicated that ability doesn't mean we "can't", just that we have chosen not to.
bmmayer1 13y ago
...and this is bad because...?
RickHull 13y ago
Responding strictly to the headline: What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?
- auvrw 13y ago
  > What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important? this isn't one of the article's complaints, but one distinguishing characteristics of american science funding -- indeed, of the u.s. govt's entire budget -- is disproportionate spending on the military. see the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_St... anyway, i agree with most of the other comments as i don't see anything seriously wrong with private investment in science. perhaps the fact that these are individuals rather than committees is what the author finds most loathsome, but my perspective is probably biased b/c the first thing that came to mind on reading the title was the allen institute for brain science, that's the first example in the article, and i think it's doing interesting and important research.
nirnira 13y ago
I truly, truly hate articles like this. The constant tone of judgement and scepticism. The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful? Why can't you just say thank you that so many wealthy people choose to turn their fortunes towards so many philanthropic causes? Why do you have to have so much bile and resentment towards individuals choosing freely and harming no one? Whatever happened to America being the land of the free? When did it turn into the land of cutting down tall poppies?
- mempko 13y ago
  Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work. They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship. The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach. So no, I do not celebrate their success and I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment. And don't give me crap about how we benefit too. If our economy was working as a free market that the same billionaires feel it should, they coudn't be billionaires. Profit has no space in "real" free markets.
  - logicchains 13y ago
    How much of the funding of Intel/Amd/ARM, who probably built the cpu you're using to access this side, came from the government? How much of the funding of this site itself, and of other sites you may use on a daily basis such as Google and Facebook, came from the government? How much of the funding for the GPU that's rendering this site came from the government? How are you not benefiting from all these things? Long term profit has no space in models of a _perfectly competitive_ market, a theoretical concept used in the exploration of various economic ideas. The "free"ness of a market doesn't necessarily imply anything about the potential for profit within that market.
    - mempko 13y ago
      I mean, are you familiar with the history of google and facebook? Pagerank was paid for by a government grant. Why aren't the profits of google being distributed into our pockets? Facebook had early investment from CIA connected sources. SpaceX is almost all funded by NASA. I mean look at the technologies they built. Largest people tracker (Google) and largest communication graph (Facebook). Look at the current web technologies and the massive centralization of technology. Let the government turn off the money spigot, and silicon valley will be bankrupt in a week.
clef 13y ago
The cause of man's suffering is: "this belongs to me" (Anthony De Mello) Science and knowledge belongs to everybody and to no one, regardless of where you are from. Nationalism was pretty fancy and efficient a long time ago, if I see myself as more "American" or "French", than "human", humanity is screwed.
csense 13y ago
The more philanthropy or private investment we can attract to scientific innovation, the better. The public gets the benefit of inventions that wouldn't have existed without this investment (assuming they're marketed in the short term, and in the long term the patents eventually fall into the public domain). Or alternatively, if billionaires start doing more research, this could be offset by cutting, or slowing the growth of, taxpayer-funded research spending. And give the money back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, deferred tax hikes, or different services. Also, there's less of the waste and uncertainty associated with government spending (think about how many articles you see on long-running science experiments disrupted by Washington's latest budget spasm; if Gates has dumped $100 million into AIDS research and needs $100 million more to produce a vaccine, he's probably going to follow through). And if things go awry the fallout's not as bad (if Solyndra had happened to some billionaire spending his own money, I don't think anyone would have been outraged).
wallflower 13y ago
"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly. The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II... Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time. Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research... James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century... People believe these things...because they have faith." -From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".

95 points by melarina 13y ago

j2kun 13y ago

Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!

te_chris 13y ago
I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?
- kiba 13y ago
  Not to mention that we are already in deep debt. We may have allocate part of our budget from other areas to science. For example, reallocate defense spending to pure scientific research.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    It seems to have gone more in the other direction. At least in CS, if you want big funding nowadays you need to do DARPA research, because their budget has fared better. And DARPA research has gotten more micromanaged; gone are the days where they'd hand out large block grants to promote general American excellence in areas of "national importance". Nowadays they partner you with effectively a professional "minder" (called an "integrator") from a contractor like Lockheed or BBN, whose job is to make sure your research stays on the DARPA agenda and is going to deliver what they want. Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell.
    - wolfgke 13y ago
      > Partly because I think we no longer feel much of a need to prove we're better in science/tech than a major rival, which was once the Soviets, so general science/tech advancement is a harder sell. Isn't China a new "dangerous" competitor?
pg 13y ago
Please don't use all caps for emphasis.

jdonaldson 13y ago

Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.

Aqueous 13y ago
The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years. But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contracted private firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, North American Aviation. Nothing really has changed in that regard - NASA is still contracting private companies, only now we have an American company, SpaceX, that can not only build a rocket, but design and launch one as well. Ultimately having innovators like SpaceX who can contract out to more than just the American government will drive the cost of spaceflight down. This can only be a good thing, in my book. Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars. As far as I can tell the only way we're going to get highly reliable, affordable, mainstream electric vehicle in the next ten years is because of his vanity project, Tesla. I mean, I'm as skeptical as anyone about pinning the future hopes of humanity on a few extremely rich people. But it's also comforting that incredibly wealthy people like Elon Musk are preoccupied with how to benefit humanity, and not just themselves.
- kiba 13y ago
  They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.
  - _delirium 13y ago

conformal 13y ago

i absolutely hate paywalled sites and refuse to read the articles. that said, this is entirely unsurprising since scientific and mathematics research were almost entirely patronized fields until the rise of the modern university. this is very similar to computing in that first monolithic centralized computing was the path, then it was the PC, then it was the cloud, now it's moving back to a decentralized network. these things are bound to yo-yo and academic research is no different than most human-designed processes.

rjzzleep 13y ago

here's an anecdote from a german communication network professor i was sitting at lunch with. as comparison, the pay for a professor here is 50k a year, but can be more. you heard that right, that's what a bsc in low pay southern states gets. he said the following thing which made me rethink the whole thing a little: "conversely i get to research anything i want to, and i don't have to worry about pleasing business with my research results" germany though has a big problem of americanization like so many other countries. i've heard of so many research in the us getting shut down, or the researchers discredited, because they pissed off the wrong company funding the department they were working for. it's a double edged sword. EDIT: it's funny this got downvoted. i was personally involved in evaluating software that was written for the DHS by a huge contractor SAIC. they paid 20+ million for that piece of junk, and my supervisor was scared of passing on the assessment, because they were scared we would lose opportunities on further grants(they were impressed by the assessment, apparently we were the only ones that did such a thorough assessment). i never said professors in germany don't have to get research money or grants, but they are way less dependent on what outcome the industry dictates.

facepalm 13y ago
Does it really work that way? My impression was that professors are constantly trying to raise money from the government. Instead of proving industry value, they have to convince bureaucrats that their ideas are worth pursuing. I think strong cases have been made that that's not the optimal way of allocating money for scientific research. For example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/positive_black_swans.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/posi... (government funding is not good in pursuing wild ideas)
- rjzzleep 13y ago
  german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us. this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1] but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities. a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) rdf based semantic metadata thingie with a cost of 17 million that is now being ditched partly because it's rdf

jrs99 13y ago

I don't know why you would employ a science adviser who thinks that physics isn't "sexy." It's damn sexy. And anyone who really understands even a small amount of physics will think that physics is "sexy."

angersock 13y ago
Erm, no? Do you mean classical physics and mechanics, quantum mechanics (and if so, what branch), particle physics, solid-state physics, what? You have to be more specific unless you want to come off as just another -~= Science! =~- people getting off to things they don't actually understand.
- jrs99 13y ago
  I guess I should be more specific and say statistical mechanics. As a science expert, I have to say the rest is truly boring.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    I vote for solid state! Voting for stat-mech almost seems like cheating :)
beloch 13y ago
Think about what these uber-rich entrepreneurs would find sexy. Curing cancer, a condom people actually want to use, extending human life, saving the world from meteor impacts, bringing mammoths back, flying to space... It's all near-future, commercializable stuff. Next, go read some article titles/abstracts under quant-ph on arxiv and think about how many would of those would really grab these rich dudes by their eyeballs and make them drop a few million. A huge portion of physics is driven by basic curiosity, has no commercial applications in the near future, and is so esoteric that even other physicists have to work very hard just to understand what's going on. Much of this stuff will wind up being dead-ends, but some of it is the foundation the future will be built on top of. No trained physicist currently alive can predict what will change the world and what won't. Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?

001sky 13y ago

Non-profits are not public entities, and most universities are "billionaires" and "not public". Other than that, I have no concerns.

ChristianMarks 13y ago

I suppose this means that mathematics and the humanities will advance more than disciplines that require significant funding.

runewell 13y ago

Paywall news article complaining about privatization of information, enough said.

imron 13y ago
It's not a paywalled article. Turn cookies on and click the link again. If you have cookies off when you click the link it redirects to the login page.
- psychometry 13y ago
  You can't read it if you've already read 20 articles in the past month, either, thanks to evercookie.
  - imron 13y ago
    Never had a problem. I use a plugin for auto deleting regular cookies and evercookie requires javascript, which I have disabled by default. That being said, I probably wouldn't read more than 20 articles a month on the NYTimes either - just the occasional one posted to HN that catches my interest.
  - dwaltrip 13y ago
    Incognito mode works
- runewell 13y ago
  http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ

ThePhysicist 13y ago

Seems like the US response to the EU flagship research and innovation programme, "Horizon 2020", which aims to provide 80 BN € (110 BN $) for groundbreaking research withing the next 7 years. One of the "flagship projects" selected for this programme is the "Human Brain Project", which seems similar to what Obama calls “the next great American project: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.". Although he should probably add a few digits to that number if he really means what he says, because I think 100 M$ will hardly be enough to unravel the mysteries of the brain. In any case, as a scientist that's exactly the kind of competition I want to see more of!

vinceguidry 13y ago

> American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise. Oh how quickly journalists forget the past. The only reason we ever became a scientific superpower in the first place is because of one man, John D. Rockefeller.

dredmorbius 13y ago
Do tell.

tn13 13y ago

I did not know that it was American government that invented light bulb, electric motor, transistors, IC chips and so on.

lexcorvus 13y ago

I don't expect the NYT to have a multi-century sense of historical perspective, but is a multi-decade sense of perspective too much to ask? The present government-funded model of science was created by Vannevar Bush less than seventy years ago—"in the lives of those now living."

jcampbell1 13y ago

> A look at major initiatives suggests that the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer. The #1, #2 richest Americans have specifically targeted funding research for diseases that affect only the poor. I think this is a more valid criticism of the NIH rather than philanthropists.

tsotha 13y ago
... diseases that affect the poor in other countries. As an organization funded by US tax dollars, NIH is primarily responsible for advancing the health of Americans. It's not an international charity.
- logicchains 13y ago
  Unfortunately, the poor in America are more affected by 'lifestyle diseases' (smoking and obesity related illnesses, for instance), which may be more difficult to cure as they need to be addressed from a social angle, not just a medical one.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    More difficult than malaria or AIDS? I doubt it. Diabetes will probably be a much easier nut to crack than either, with or without lifestyle changes.
    - logicchains 13y ago
      Well according to some graphs I found on Google, malaria mortality rates have reduced significantly in the past few decades [1], as have AIDS death rates [2]. Diabetes rates and mortality have however been continuously increasing. 1. http://www.umich.edu/~csfound/545/1995/land05.jpg http://www.umich.edu/~csfound/545/1995/land05.jpg 2. http://www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/images/colorbox/drugfactshiv2.jpg http://www.drugabuse.gov/sites/default/files/images/colorbox...

Fomite 13y ago

From the article: “They target polio and go after it until it’s done — no one else can do that,” he said, referring to the global drive to eradicate the disease. “In effect, they have the power to lead where the market and the political will are insufficient.” This is actively not true. The eradication of small pox was an international, government-led effort. That we have since abdicated that ability doesn't mean we "can't", just that we have chosen not to.

bmmayer1 13y ago

...and this is bad because...?

RickHull 13y ago

Responding strictly to the headline: What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?

auvrw 13y ago
> What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important? this isn't one of the article's complaints, but one distinguishing characteristics of american science funding -- indeed, of the u.s. govt's entire budget -- is disproportionate spending on the military. see the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_St... anyway, i agree with most of the other comments as i don't see anything seriously wrong with private investment in science. perhaps the fact that these are individuals rather than committees is what the author finds most loathsome, but my perspective is probably biased b/c the first thing that came to mind on reading the title was the allen institute for brain science, that's the first example in the article, and i think it's doing interesting and important research.

nirnira 13y ago

I truly, truly hate articles like this. The constant tone of judgement and scepticism. The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful? Why can't you just say thank you that so many wealthy people choose to turn their fortunes towards so many philanthropic causes? Why do you have to have so much bile and resentment towards individuals choosing freely and harming no one? Whatever happened to America being the land of the free? When did it turn into the land of cutting down tall poppies?

mempko 13y ago
Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work. They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship. The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach. So no, I do not celebrate their success and I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment. And don't give me crap about how we benefit too. If our economy was working as a free market that the same billionaires feel it should, they coudn't be billionaires. Profit has no space in "real" free markets.
- logicchains 13y ago
  How much of the funding of Intel/Amd/ARM, who probably built the cpu you're using to access this side, came from the government? How much of the funding of this site itself, and of other sites you may use on a daily basis such as Google and Facebook, came from the government? How much of the funding for the GPU that's rendering this site came from the government? How are you not benefiting from all these things? Long term profit has no space in models of a _perfectly competitive_ market, a theoretical concept used in the exploration of various economic ideas. The "free"ness of a market doesn't necessarily imply anything about the potential for profit within that market.
  - mempko 13y ago
    I mean, are you familiar with the history of google and facebook? Pagerank was paid for by a government grant. Why aren't the profits of google being distributed into our pockets? Facebook had early investment from CIA connected sources. SpaceX is almost all funded by NASA. I mean look at the technologies they built. Largest people tracker (Google) and largest communication graph (Facebook). Look at the current web technologies and the massive centralization of technology. Let the government turn off the money spigot, and silicon valley will be bankrupt in a week.

clef 13y ago

The cause of man's suffering is: "this belongs to me" (Anthony De Mello) Science and knowledge belongs to everybody and to no one, regardless of where you are from. Nationalism was pretty fancy and efficient a long time ago, if I see myself as more "American" or "French", than "human", humanity is screwed.

csense 13y ago

The more philanthropy or private investment we can attract to scientific innovation, the better. The public gets the benefit of inventions that wouldn't have existed without this investment (assuming they're marketed in the short term, and in the long term the patents eventually fall into the public domain). Or alternatively, if billionaires start doing more research, this could be offset by cutting, or slowing the growth of, taxpayer-funded research spending. And give the money back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, deferred tax hikes, or different services. Also, there's less of the waste and uncertainty associated with government spending (think about how many articles you see on long-running science experiments disrupted by Washington's latest budget spasm; if Gates has dumped $100 million into AIDS research and needs $100 million more to produce a vaccine, he's probably going to follow through). And if things go awry the fallout's not as bad (if Solyndra had happened to some billionaire spending his own money, I don't think anyone would have been outraged).

wallflower 13y ago

"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly. The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II... Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time. Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research... James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century... People believe these things...because they have faith." -From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".