Basic Research is "Waste"

Newsflash: academic researchers don't patent as much as IBM. In a letter to Nature entitled "Scientists Should Cut Waste Too", Matthew Kumar calls on scientists to do their part in helping reduce the $1.3 trillion US budget deficit by reducing waste and inefficiency and working within their means (in this case, reduced federal funding). Of course on the surface, this doesn't sound too bad. Certainly everybody should be working to reduce waste and inefficiency. The problem is what Kumar views as "waste":

Unlike companies, non-profit academic institutions deliver a paltry return on taxpayers' investments. In 2010, after spending nearly $3.1 billion of taxpayers' money on intramural research, the NIH received $91.6 million in royalties and was issued with 134 patents. By contrast, in 2009 IBM spent $6.5 billion on research and development, generated $15.1 billion in revenue and was issued with 4,914 patents.

There's a lot to pick at here. First of all, NIH funded research versus IBM R&D? We could at least try to compare health research with health research if we want to attempt a fair comparison. Of course picking a pharmaceutical company might undermine the point. And nevermind the fact that patent production isn't necessarily the metric a non-profit academic institution would use as a measure of productivity. Or the fact that academic institutions also have other functions, like teaching the next wave of uber-productive, patent-producing scientists at for-profit companies (and the "wasteful" ones that stay in academia. But the worst part is the implication that basic research is a waste - that if you're not generating revenue or patents, it's not worth it. In my mind, Carl Sagan said it best (click the link for the full passage):

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

I wonder how productive these model companies would be without that wasteful basic research to build on.

Ten Questions to Ask an Alien

Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World:

It's a stimulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would immediately be recognized as such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in "Ten Questions to Ask an Alien."

The connection to aliens stems from how one might test claims from individuals who say they have contact with extra-terrestrial visitors, who are presumably far more scientifically and technologically advanced than we are. The examples given are proof of Fermat's Last Theorem or Goldbach's conjecture, both mathematics problems (the former no longer being eligible, as it has since been solved).

I have no prize to offer for such a contest, but what are some other (preferably non-mathematics) questions we could include on such a list?

A Quote for the Day

Maxwell wasn't thinking of radio, radar, and television when he first scratched out the fundamental equations of electromagnetism; Newton wasn't dreaming of space flight or communications satellites when he first understood the motion of the Moon; Roentgen wasn't contemplating medical diagnosis when he investigated a penetrating radiation so mysterious he called it "X-rays"; Curie wasn't thinking of cancer therapy when she painstakingly extracted minute amounts of radium from tons of pitchblende; Fleming wasn't planning on saving the lives of millions with antibiotics when he noticed a circle free of bacteria around a growth of mold; Watson and Crick weren't imagining the cure of genetic diseases when they puzzled over the X-ray diffractometry of DNA; Rowland and Molina weren't planning to implicate CFCs in ozone depletion when they began studying the role of halogens in stratospheric photochemistry.

These discoveries and a multitude of others that grace and characterize our time, to some of which our very lives are beholden, were made ultimately by scientists given the opportunity to explore what in their opinion were basic questions in nature.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

-- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

How to think about science

As graduate students, we spend a lot of time thinking about science. But we tend to concentrate on the "how-to", the minutiae of daily experiments. Rarely do we concern ourself with the "why". Once in a while experiments work, and we're confronted with something unexpected and we begin to put the pieces of the puzzle together to form a coherent model of reality. This part is what most people would identify as the core of the scientific process. Yet we spend surprisingly little time thinking about epistemology. Do our model reflect reality, or do we impose our biased mental framework onto natural phenomena. What does it mean to do science, is it about the experiments or the theory? Recently I've stumbled upon a series of podcast exploring these types of questions with interviews of prominent figures in ethics, philosophy, history and science which examine science in a social and philosophical perspective. I highly recommend this CBC podcast (Ideas) and particularly this series of interviews "how to think about science". You may not agree with all that is said, but it will make you reconsider many aspects of science which we take for granted.... Here is the roster:

Episode 1 - November 14 - Simon Schaffer
Episode 2 - November 21 - Lorraine Daston
Episode 3 - November 28 - Margaret Lock
Episode 4 - December 5 - Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering
Episode 5 - December 12 - Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour
Episode 6 - January 2 - James Lovelock
Episode 7 - January 9 - Arthur Zajonc
Episode 8 - January 16 - Wendell Berry
Episode 9 - January 23 - Rupert Sheldrake
Episode 10 - January 30 - Brian Wynne