The Positive Sum Strategy Harnessing Technology for Economic Growth (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Basic Research in the Universities: How Much Utility?
Basic Research in the Universities: How Much Utility?
Pages 263-274
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From page 263... ...
The result is a unique venture which tightly couples research and research training, improving the quality of both, and is heavily dependent on public funding. Now, because of the drop in government support of the capital infrastructure of university research and because of the need to spread technology transfer, the relationship between quality and utility in basic research is being explored anew, and rzew relationships between universities and industry are being tested.
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From page 264... ...
As deficiencies in the infrastructure for university research worsen, strains emerge in odd and unexpected places. For example, equipment and buildings once paid for by the government are now paid for by private sources instead; this change accounts for the most significant element in the recent rise in the indirect cost rates at major universities.
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From page 265... ...
THE QUALITY-UTILITY DEBATE Most of us in the university sector have believed firmly that as long as quaky is kept high, as long as pnucipal investigators are decently supported and permitted to follow their own noses, quality will beget discovery, and utilizer will probably follow. That notion, sometimes called the Columbus theory of research, is actually much older than most people thinly it is.
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From page 266... ...
Other important elements include a new and growing scientific focus on preventive health and the disciplines relevant to its practice, and the recent appearance of strong commercial incentives for the application of new discoveries in molecular genetics. In 1976 the President's Panel on Biomedical Research, a group of scientists and medical administrators, presented President Ford with a report the Congress had commissioned two years earlier.
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From page 267... ...
The formal analysis of research productivity seems to show disproportionate contnbutions by a relatively small number of scientists, and the histories of disciplines always focus on a few giants.5 But retrospective examinations of many modern advances reveal a complex web of precursor influences in which dozens of workers have played essential roles. I do not believe that it is possible at this time to generate a hypothesis about the distribution of significant work that would be of much use in formulating research policy.
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From page 268... ...
Is it the search for solutions to a major intellectual puzzle that impedes human understanding? With so little knowledge about why scientists do science and about what kind of guidance for research will therefore work best, what principles can be brought to the design of research policies that optimize quality and utility?
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From page 269... ...
Ironically, dunug the early days of "peer review," when it received the most active and enthusiastic support from the scientific community, the process probably did not fit that definition. Members of the early National Institutes of Health study sections and National Science Foundation panels were, for the most part, extraordinarily accomplished scientists, drawn from the very top of the quality spectrum; their judgments may have been respected in si=,nif~cant part because these scientists were viewed not as peers but as the very best.
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From page 270... ...
The first was a 1969 study of weapons systems done by the Department of Defense in an effort to satisfy the Congress about the value of research and exploratory development. The study, called Project Hindsight, examined the development of 20 weapons systems and concluded that the critical events identified by the Deparunent of Defense participants were primarily the result of work in applied areas having specific systems requirements as objectives.9 The systems were not selected using criteria established in advance, nor was the evaluation of critical events done by persons unconcerned with the outcome of the study.
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From page 271... ...
No more vivid example can be found than in the fevered corporate activity surrounding genetic technology. To an unexpected degree, the commercial push behind that activity involves the scientists who are themselves responsible for the basic discoveries, and often the academic institutions to which they belong.
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From page 272... ...
The arguments in favor of this position are strong: the financial return is there and someone is going to get it; the universities have sponsored the research and nurtured the climate in which it took place, so a share should go to them in order to replenish their capacity to do more; and donors and trustees, who characteristically press hard for sound and aggressive financial management, insist Mat legitimate sources of income for these purposes be tapped. The spectrum of possible institutional solutions, beginning with the simplest, could be represented as follows: 1.
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From page 273... ...
It has provided some possible models for overcoming the impediments to rapid diffusion of basic research advances into human use. Thus, although I continue to worry about the variety of individual commercial arrangements being made by university scientists in biotechnology, I believe that most of He institutional responses to the new commercial incentives have been encouraging steps.
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From page 274... ...
Comroe, Jr., and Robert D Dripps, Scientific approach to a national biomedical science policy, Science 192:(1976)
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