The biggest surprise I got after starting Science 2.0 and getting to know scientists in a number of fields was that the private sector did no basic research.

This was a surprise to [ insert link text here ] me, since at previous companies we did a whole lot of basic research and a little company called Bell Labs was kind of famous for it.   Of course, the whole assertion was silly, no matter how many times I heard it.  And I did hear it a lot, so much that it became like a mantra, and with it was the implied belief that corporate science was mercenary and 'for sale' while university science was more pure.

Of course, to the public, that purity business was not believed at all, which would shock academic scientists as much as corporate scientists are stunned by the implication that a salary is different from a grant when it comes to integrity.  The public instead commonly accepts that scientists chase funding, so if the government decides solar power is the next big thing, a bunch of scientists start putting in proposals for improving solar cells.   

Prof. John P. A. Ioannidis has been tackling these issues for a long time and, really, no one can provide better context.  He is the ultimate insider who also has an appreciation for how things can change, like Science 2.0 and we have written on his work many times.  In Nature, he says the funding system is broken and outlines some ways to fix it - but does anyone want to listen?

A few months ago, a Senator highlighted some problems with NSF funding - he said the exact same things numerous scientists said, about waste, funding of non-science, duplication, and arcane processes.  All scientists had to do to get some problems fixed was say nothing.  They didn't have to agree, that would have been bad for future funding, we all understand that, but just say nothing.  Instead, the Internet lit up with tired "Republicans are anti-science" rhetoric, even though Sen. Coburn had also tackled far more defense industry waste and was against tax breaks for Republican sacred cows like oil companies.  Progress toward reform; none, because nothing can ever be fixed if insiders regard anything other than 'more money' as a political gauntlet.(1)

Then there are the journals.  In Britain a typical university library spends 65% of its budget on academic journals, even though the researchers are writing for free and the peer review is done for free.  Yet efforts to open up studies to be published on a site like Science 2.0, or a pay-to-publish journal, are stymied, ironically most recently by Democrats who routinely get endorsed by big media companies yet who scientists contend claim more about science than Republicans.

Then there are the universities themselves and in his Nature comment Ioannidis starts with something that makes perfect sense but, in the world of progressive academia, will never, ever fly; that universities should ignore grant portfolios in tenure and promotion decisions.   The knee-jerk reaction from academia will be to cheer yet any efforts at that would be resisted because the alternative lacks transparency and the 'fairness' that is the bedrock of progressive thought.  He rightly believes that if scientists were able to focus less on grants they can focus more on actual transformative research.  But focusing on more transformative research got an outcry from scientists just a short while ago.  

He then posits either shifting more toward a conservative approach - only the best research gets funded - or a completely progressive approach - all researchers get funded, yet that won't work either, since a narrow approach might be too political and make it hard for young researchers to break into science while a broad approach would just have a lot more people entering research.  Science is currently something of a meritocracy - not all research is funded - and yet we still produce far more Ph.D.s than can ever get research jobs, funding everyone would make that problem worse.  We also have issues of scale.  A theoretical mathematician could do quite a bit for $50,000 whereas a biology lab couldn't do much at all.

But government funding does not have to be opposing points on a scale; it can be three points of a triangle, namely merit, fairness and then randomness.  As an article he cites in Nature itself noted, the imperfections of peer review mean that up to a third of current grants are effectively being awarded at random anyway, and he uses as an example the Foundational Questions Institute, with the caveat that worthy research may be missed in random/lottery system - though worthy research is missed now.

What he leaves out is that funding need not be government at all.  The idea that basic research is only done by the NIH or NSF or others was always silly; the government certainly has taken over the lion's share since World War II, but they did so precisely so they could control the direction of research, not some fuzzy-wuzzy goal of giving scientists freedom for the public interest.  The private sector has happily let taxpayers underwrite more basic research; the rewards are the same but the risks are now spread over 300 million people instead of one company.

The big exception to the 'only universities do pure research' claim - biotech - is maddeningly dismissed as some exception that wouldn't work in other fields because supposedly companies do no research.   Biotech companies don't wait for academia because it's too slow, even in a basic research world, to have meaningful advancements.  In business, they want successes, failures and nothing, in that order.   A failure is better than nothing.

It's certainly okay that academics don't want to be in competitive world, that is why they didn't go into the private sector - but by making it seem like success is less important, the field has been opened up to a lot of people who also want to not have to do anything that now that won't have an application for up to three decades.

Taxpayers are the customers and as the government continues to face pressure to be accountable to the public - something everyone agrees is a good idea - the pressure to 

(1) And even that does not work.  Pres. G.W. Bush reversed Clinton-era declines in science funding and doubled NIH funding and boosted NASA 15% yet was still considered anti-science by people who never voted for a Republican and never would, no matter how much money they threw at science.