1. If all research is undertaken my corporations or private interests, then only research which is profitable or fits the private interests will be funded. This encourages a short term approach to research and a lot of viagra research while harder to solve problems are neglected.

2. A government should act in the interest of its people and can be held accountable for its decisions and actions and does not necessarily expect a profitable return on its funding. This allows governments to fund long term research such as AIDS and cancer research which could save lives.

Private industry can and does provide massive funds for scientific research, but it does so with an eye towards profit. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it limits the scope of science, and its very usefulness. Basic research that is not limited towards a profit goal (curing a disease for instance) sometimes comes up with things that later turn out to be extremely useful. One example off the top of my head is that we’ve recently learned that intelligence may not require the highly specialized and centralized neural pathways of higher mammals. Basic research into Octopuses, that as invertebrates have “looser” nervous systems has shown them to be vastly more intelligent than was initially thought. Basic research into fruit flies has given us an unbelievable amount of information about development and genetics, the list goes on and on. In the extremely competitive world of profit-driven scientific research, time and viability constraints can eliminate basic research studies that can yield great results in time. That’s where government, not as constrained by a bottom line, comes in.

Other good reasons for government funding? How about moral ones? Not all diseases are “sexy” to study. Malaria, Cholera, Chagas, diseases that affect mainly very poor people are given a lot less attention that the suffering of men who can’t get it up anymore. Government can step in (and does) to fund research into these diseases, often in conjunction with private companies.

One: When science is funded by private enterprise, the only research that gets done is research that will be directly financially profitable, in the short or medium term, for the company doing the research. But a lot of useful and important research that advances humanity’s welfare and understanding, or that may have long-term benefits, doesn’t fall into that category. (Who’s going to do astronomy if all science is privately funded? Not to mention medical research for relatively rare illnesses.)

Two: It’s been well- documented that research that’s privately funded tends to be biased in the direction the funders want it to go. Even when it’s done by very well- intentioned researchers who are trying hard to be objective.

I’m not saying there should be no privately- funded scientific research at all. But it is greatly to the benefit of us all for there to be scientific research funded by people with no financial stake in the outcome.

We had better science, and a more rapid advance of science, in the early part of the 20th century when there was no centralized government funding for science

This is a common claim, but one which anyone with any knowledge of the history of science knows is false.

There was a lot of really, really bad science in the good ol’ days. It just doesn’t seem that way because we simply don’t learn about the bad stuff – we only learn about what was done right.

Examples abound – Newton spent more time/money researching pressing scientific issues like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, than he did physics. Strangely enough, we still read/use his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and the laws of physics he uncovered; but the angel stuff has fallen into disuse…

There are thousands of other examples – like the belief in the spontaneous generation of pathogens, transmutation of elements, the non-existence of atoms, lamarkian evolution, etc. All of these scientific concepts had long histories as scientific dogma, all were positions held by large numbers of scientists at one time or another, and all had some degree of evidence “proving” them correct.

The old scientists also had the advantage that they were doing the easy stuff – for example, a table-top microscope which today sells for a few hundred bucks used to be enough to make significant scientific advances. Today, similar advancements require microscopes costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. The reason is simple – most of what could be done with simple tools has already been done; to progress further requires better, more powerful tools.

With that old microscope, Robert Hook discovered cells. With that new microscope, I can dissect the cell into little pieces and uncover its inner workings….

Likewise, total scientific output has advanced greatly over time. While the major mechanism of scientific publication has changed since the good ol’ days (from books to peer-reviewed journal articles), the total amount of scientific output – both per scientist and humanity-wide – is much higher today than it was in the past.

The effects of this are obvious – today we make about as much scientific advancement per decade as we used to per century.

That huge increase in output is due to three major factors – standardization and systemization of scientific research methods, funding from government and private organizations, and the expansion of education to the masses.

The removal of government funding would be disastrous for continued scientific advances. The US has undergone government funding cuts over the last decade, and has seen as a result a precipitous decline in their productivity. The rest of the world has increased funding over the last decade – the end result; the US has gone from the most productive producer of new science to a below-average producer of science.

Now imagine if all that money went away.

Bryan

Other than a handful of philanthropic billionaires, the only viable alternative to public funding is corporate funding. There are only a limited number of corporations that have enough of an R&D budget to fund fundamental research in academia.

By the way: if you’re worried for the position of power that government could get over academia, worry harder over the position of power these corporations get: we can at least influence the government directly, and the government at least should have the public interest in mind.

Since governments in general have been cutting budgets, academia is now relying more and more on corporate funding. This causes problems, however. In general, corporations are far more interested in research that has direct applications and relatively short term returns. Very few companies have the guts (or the money) to do fundamental research, just for the sake of getting new knowledge that doesn’t necessarily yield any practical application, and even if it does, only after years of more research. Many universities, therefore, are already experiencing a clear shift from fundamental research to applied research, because the latter is just so much easier to get funding for.

It’s not that difficult to argue that a shift away from fundamental research could cause scientific stagnation on the long term. Therefore, society as a whole will benefit when there is sufficient fundamental research going on.

Since there is a clear advantage of having fundamental research in a society, instead of applied research only, and since it seems unlikely that individual corporations or individual citizens will have the incentives and means to support fundamental research, public funding is a good idea. (Note: because of this, it might be a good idea to limit public funding to fundamental research only)

The fact that you don’t trust your own government to handle the responsibilities of regulating public funding in the interest of the actual public is a completely different problem. It doesn’t mean you should stop public funding, it just means you need to fix your government. Support the Change Congress initiative, for instance.

Corporations don’t like research. It’s really expensive and there’s no guarantee that it’ll go anywhere.

Indeed. That’s also why this bit,

Science is an economic good like everything else, and it is very bad for production of high quality goods for the government to control the means of production…

is misleading. The market may be great at finding ways of distributing soup cans and setting prices for them, but science is not a soup can. Really, it’s misleading to even think of it as a service that can be rented out like, say, plumbing, even though pieces of work done as part of science can be.

And some important areas of science were in a primitive state in the first half of the 20th cy. and developed rapidly afterwards, like planetary science and molecular biology.

Planetary science is a rather obvious one; spacecraft were able to observe other planets with MUCH greater resolution than ground-based telescopes.

And molecular biology? Around 1950, biologists were starting to use X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of biomolecules, and Watson and Crick got to work on DNA in 1951. DNA was already suspected of being the molecule of heredity as the result of Oswald Avery’s 1944 experiments and similar ones, and if it was, then how would it do that work? Watson and Crick hoped to help answer that question.

First, a little general critique of the idea that modern science isn’t “advancing as fast” as science in the early 20th century – that’s just not really possible to meaningfully measure. What constitutes a substantial advance or new field? How do you measure it? It is my opinion that the l9th and 20th centuries created three fields which are almost definitive of science in the minds of people: evolution, relativity and quantum mechanics.

These three theories are what science is to most people. It is also perceived by non-scientists that no paradigm change has happened, therefore science is “slowing down”, somehow. I, myself, believe the cause of that is that, as time progresses, our theories will become more robust, closer to being “true” and thus needing less fixing. The reason there hasn’t been a “new evolution”, a paradigm shift of the magnitude of evolution, is because evolution is, well, largely . . . right and true. Oh, sure, it has been refined and will continue to be refined for a very long time to come. But, at the root, it’s true. So, what someone like Tipler sees as a “slowdown” in science – as measured in paradigm shifts and “revolutions” – is actually a fulfillment of science. We’re getting more things right, and when they’re right, you can’t much improve on it.

Which is not to say that there won’t be new scientific revolutions. There will be, of course, unless humans are not, ourselves, seed intelligences – it’s an open question where humans are smart enough to continually improve our intelligence; it’s possible we’ll hit some sort of intellectual ceiling and no matter how hard we try we won’t be able to understand any more than we will understand at that time. I think we’re really far away from that point, assuming there *is* such a point for us, but it also suggests another reason why even if one accepts that science isn’t improving as fast as is used to there might be reasons unrelated to how science if funded.

So, as sub-points A and B to issue one, Tipler’s article is weak because A) revolutionary science is not inherently better than normal science – that scientific revolutions aren’t happening all the time isn’t a failing and B) he doesn’t even attempt to discussion alternate reasons why science might have changed between then and now.

Because, as point two, science has definitely changed. Not all of it is for the better. I feel, for instance, that quantum mechanics has has the hell studied out of it because it’s useful for nuclear weapons (this isn’t controversial if you’ve had any contact with actual physics departments in universities), and it is perverse that almost all science is funded for primarily military reasons. The National Science Foundation and DARPA work cheek and jowl to fund projects that have, primarily, national security implications. Thus, billions is spent, annually, on space science (think satellites) and quantum (think bombs and computers) but relativity – which is in many ways a much stronger theory than quantum physics – gets about 1% of funding. I’m not really fond of that, certainly, but science has changed. I mean, my wife, f’rex, does theory work but to do it, she needs banks of supercomputers. She’s doing really sweet work if you’re an astrophysicist studying Jupiter or the sun’s weather, and sweeter if you’re doing oceanography about temperature shifts in the Arctic, but to do her job she’s got to have access to supercomputers. Even theorists need millions of dollars to do their work. This is true in every field of science. The guys in the 19th and early 20th centuries were “lucky” in the sense that could do their science with inexpensive tools relative to the wealth of their culture. But, alas, all the cheap research has been done. Gone are the days when guys like Plank needed a magnet and some iron filings to do their research – now we need satellites and particle beam accelerators. Even the theorists need supercomputers.

The idea that the private sector will food this bill any better than the government is, shall we say, deeply unproven. Indeed, what is proven is quite a bit the opposite. Corporations don’t like research. It’s really expensive and there’s no guarantee that it’ll go anywhere. Like, biotech start-ups – probably the field that the corporate sector has most embraced as a contrary model to publicly funded science – have basically stopped happening because there’s no easy way to get DNA strands into the cells of living beings. I mean, with plants and single celled organisms, well, it can be done because even though the process kills 99% of the cells they can culture the remaining 1%. You kill 99% of the cells of a human and they die. Thus, no meaningful gene therapy. We can’t get the fixes to the cells. The work into solving this problem has been ongoing for decades and no one has had any breakthroughs – there’s no reason to suspect we won’t be at it for another 20 years, or maybe 200, before it’s solved. Lots of research is like that, it ends in failure and is useful not in what it does but in what it eliminated, and you can’t run a for-profit company like that. So, really, private companies and corporations don’t get involved in research until the heavy lifting has been done by someone else, usually the government. (You can see this in the mapping of the human genome. It wasn’t until it became obvious that it was working and profitable before business go involved in a kind of scientific land grab to patent genes in a sick little bit of cynical profiteering – but it wasn’t until the government footed the bill enough to demonstrate that it was profitable that it happened; this happens with virtually all technology, by the way, there’s hardly a single new technology that wasn’t funded in its infancy by the government – cars, planes, TV and radio, computers, the Internet, you just about name it and it was funded by the government before business came along.)

So, given that science is expensive and will keep on getting more expensive – it’s currently so expensive that no individual can fund it, no matter how passionate, and it’s impossible to predict which technologies will take off so there’s little business incentive to do in-depth research – I can’t think who else can and will fund it.

Which is not to say that government funded science is unalloyed goodness. It’s not. Like I said, almost all science is driven primarily by military concerns. It’s an insult to science for it to be appended to the military like that, not to mention very dangerous – in the end, they’re looking to weaponize everything. I think that’s scary. But where else can you get the money? Science, as a whole, is obviously one of the most benevolent undertakings in history. Even with the funding perverted by weaponeers, these men and women are doing more good than just about any other institution that’s ever existed. Hell, throw out the qualifiers. But it could be done better. I’d like for science funding to be a much bigger part of our public policy agenda than it is, now. I’d like the purse strings to be taken away from the military and put into the hands of the people – I think we’d see a big change in priorities, and even if we didn’t, well, at least it’d be the people deciding rather than a bunch of colonels in the Pentagon.