First off, I want to say thanks for the education and the living stipend. I'm a graduate student currently funded by you thanks to all of your generous donations to the National Institue of Health by way of the IRS. It is in my best financial interest to tow the party line and say that there is no such thing as to much investment in research and development at the federal level. After all, I'm rather unlikely to convince Pfizer to fund my intellectual curiosity at the basic linguistic structure of DNA, and I firmly believe that scientific research is absolutely essential for economic growth and innovation.
The premise behind funding research at the federal level is that there is little incentive for private companies to investigate basic biological or physical phenomenon for knowledge sake alone. Private companies want to make drugs to cure diseases because they can sell those drugs for profit; elucidating the physical mechanism that a protein uses to bind DNA pales in comparison. In addition to the enriching our understanding of the world around us, which few would disagree is a laudable goal, basic research into the aforementioned mechanism might have unintended applications. The modern internet was born from physicists working at a particle accelerator whose purpose was to investigate the fundamental laws of physics at the atomic scale. No one anticipated it, but the plethora of data and the need to share it spawned the world wide web. This often cited example would likely never have been funded by any company because of the high costs and low odds of payoff.
But, like everything, research funding is far more subtle. The Economist recently held a small debate concerning the nature of public versus private research funding (see here, though the interface is unfortunately clunky to read now that the debate has closed). The first and clearest take home message is that there is no way to delineate basic from applied research. Research falls on a continuum, and what one person would call basic another would call applied. Can we truly study plant genetics without uncovering applications that lead could lead to drought resistant Genetically Modified Organisms? I was fully convinced by this argument that basic versus applied is a false dichotomy and I was ready to go home with my tail in between my legs. But another debater briefly raised the issue of profit versus non-profit research and I realized this is the real underlying debate and the cause of my unease at funding particular research areas.
The first thing that you must know is that academic science is a very safe endeavor for scientists. Sure, becoming a professor is incredibly difficult and so to is procuring tenure. But compared to the alternative option of starting your own company to fund your research, the financial security of an academic job can't possibly be understated and I would love to hear any debate to the contrary. I don't doubt that a life as a consultant or in the pharmaceutical industry where you work on a research project dictated form above is far safer, but if you want to pursue your own research goals and intellectual curiosity there is absolutely no safer place to do it than under the umbrella of a university. As such, I'm continually baffled that taxpayer money can be used to fund research that is then taken to the private marketplace either by professors starting their own companies or by selling their discoveries to existing companies.
The Economist debate failed truly elucidate this issue, and to this day I can't see any economic justification behind why a professor should have their research funded by the government such that if they fail, they lose nothing but prestige. If they succeed, they can profit wildly and profiting wildly isn't as uncommon as you might think. At my own institution I know of countless professors with multiple spin-off companies or income generating patents. This absurd system is the very same paradigm as 'moral hazard' that banks operate under and that has proven so wildly unpopular (i.e. if a bank fails, the government will bail them out but if they succeed they reap rewards).
You could make the argument that financial incentives are the best way to encourage progress, and I would be the first to agree. But individuals who chose a life in academia have either done so out of intellectual curiosity or at very least out of safety. They could have founded their own companies, procured their own venture capital, profited if they succeeded and been forced into bankruptcy if they failed. This is the capitalist model that I so ardently support. But instead they chose the safety net of academia where they can study their own research whims as long as they can convince taxpayer funded agencies that there is some remote benefit to it.
My hope, is not that we decrease federal research funding for the sciences. Quite the contrary I think that research funding should be greatly increased. But the dirty little secret that any honest scientist will tell you is that a lot of research funds are poorly spent either on frivolous projects or on financing public risk for private gain. Developing better funding strategies that re-align incentives and payouts by keeping the taxpayer in mind will add to the pool of money available to non-profit driven scientists who will continue to produce ever-more novel and exciting research that benefits everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment