Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?hp

by melarina • 12 years ago

95 104 12 years ago

j2kun• 12 years ago

Obama thinks this is a problem? SPEND MORE ON RESEARCH!

te_chris• 12 years ago

I may be wrong, but the way I understand it he couldn't do that even if he wanted to due to congress having ultimate authority to approve/disapprove spending?

kiba2• 12 years ago

Not to mention that we are already in deep debt. We may have allocate part of our budget from other areas to science.

For example, reallocate defense spending to pure scientific research.

pg• 12 years ago

Please don't use all caps for emphasis.

jdonaldson• 12 years ago

Universities also privatize science through patents and IP. Research publications privatize research by bundling and charging exorbitant fees for journals and proceedings. Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs. The closest thing to those outfits are vanity projects from billionaires... SpaceX, etc.

Aqueous4• 12 years ago

The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project. If it was left up to the public sector alone, I don't think we'll be able to go to Mars in 20 or 30 years.

But this hasn't really changed. Even in NASA's hey day space missions weren't government-only projects - The space capsules and Saturn V were built by contracted private firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, North American Aviation. Nothing really has changed in that regard - NASA is still contracting private companies, only now we have an American company, SpaceX, that can not only build a rocket, but design and launch one as well.

Ultimately having innovators like SpaceX who can contract out to more than just the American government will drive the cost of spaceflight down. This can only be a good thing, in my book.

Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars. As far as I can tell the only way we're going to get highly reliable, affordable, mainstream electric vehicle in the next ten years is because of his vanity project, Tesla.

I mean, I'm as skeptical as anyone about pinning the future hopes of humanity on a few extremely rich people. But it's also comforting that incredibly wealthy people like Elon Musk are preoccupied with how to benefit humanity, and not just themselves.

kiba2• 12 years ago

They are engineering projects, rather than something that discovers something new, per se. Even so, extending our capability to explore space allow us to do more scientific research, rather than less of it. With the advent of electric vechicle, the money that went to buying gas and doing maintenance can be better spent on something else.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

I wonder about this. Is Tesla driving battery technology much (which is really sort of the key for EVs), or are they just putting themselves in a good position for when they get good enough?

I realize that they are creating demand for millions and millions of cells, but cell phones, tablets and laptops have been doing that for a decade now.

tsotha9• 12 years ago

The only reason we have a shot at affordable commercial spaceflight, as well as an eventual affordable journey to Mars, is because of that vanity project.

I'm not sure why you're calling SpaceX a vanity project. The company is already profitable, and if things play out like Musk is planning the company stands to make a lot of money. That's not a vanity project; that's a business.

Now, a Mars shot would be a vanity project if it were self-financed. But I doubt it will happen if taxpayers aren't willing to pay for it.

mempko9• 12 years ago

Really? Public money got us to the moon in 10 years but couldn't get us to mars in 30? I think it is more about a lack of will than a lack of resources. Driving down costs isn't an issue. Imagine if we had the will to go to mars and spent the one trillion dollars we spent to go to Iraq on a mars project instead.

Driving down costs isn't the issue...

tinco• 12 years ago

I feel conflicted, at one hand you're complimenting Elon Musk's achievements by comparing SpaceX to NASA and Bell Labs, on the other, you are calling it a vanity project. Which I am sure Musk would not agree with.

Donating money and having your name on a University building, that might be vanity, but more importantly charity. Let's not put mundane judgements on such niceties.

But investing in and aiding in the realization of an operation that comes close to bankrupting and ruining you, that's not vanity, that's a man achieving his dreams and life goals. I'm sure he's flattered and proud of being compared to Iron Man, but I don't think "be likened to Iron Man" is as high on his bucket list as "change the world for the better" is.

pravda• 12 years ago

Our generation doesn't have a NASA or Bell Labs.

Bell Labs was a private corporation.

hdevalence• 12 years ago

... owned by a heavily-regulated monopoly, which was banned from commercializing the research produced at Bell Labs.

foobarian• 12 years ago

Maybe on paper, but in reality the old Bell system was a monopoly, profited more than a non-monopoly would, and on top of that got vast subsidies from the government. I wouldn't be surprised if the money spent for Apolo project was in the same ballpark as the Ma Bell subsidies.

hueving3• 12 years ago

Forced into existence because Bell was a monopoly.

conformal• 12 years ago

i absolutely hate paywalled sites and refuse to read the articles.

that said, this is entirely unsurprising since scientific and mathematics research were almost entirely patronized fields until the rise of the modern university. this is very similar to computing in that first monolithic centralized computing was the path, then it was the PC, then it was the cloud, now it's moving back to a decentralized network. these things are bound to yo-yo and academic research is no different than most human-designed processes.

rjzzleep2• 12 years ago

here's an anecdote from a german communication network professor i was sitting at lunch with.

as comparison, the pay for a professor here is 50k a year, but can be more. you heard that right, that's what a bsc in low pay southern states gets.

he said the following thing which made me rethink the whole thing a little:

"conversely i get to research anything i want to, and i don't have to worry about pleasing business with my research results"

germany though has a big problem of americanization like so many other countries.

i've heard of so many research in the us getting shut down, or the researchers discredited, because they pissed off the wrong company funding the department they were working for.

it's a double edged sword.

EDIT: it's funny this got downvoted. i was personally involved in evaluating software that was written for the DHS by a huge contractor SAIC. they paid 20+ million for that piece of junk, and my supervisor was scared of passing on the assessment, because they were scared we would lose opportunities on further grants(they were impressed by the assessment, apparently we were the only ones that did such a thorough assessment).

i never said professors in germany don't have to get research money or grants, but they are way less dependent on what outcome the industry dictates.

facepalm• 12 years ago

Does it really work that way? My impression was that professors are constantly trying to raise money from the government. Instead of proving industry value, they have to convince bureaucrats that their ideas are worth pursuing. I think strong cases have been made that that's not the optimal way of allocating money for scientific research. For example: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/05/posi... (government funding is not good in pursuing wild ideas)

rjzzleep2• 12 years ago

german academics get a lot of money from industry too. but the numbers are absolutely not comparable to the numbers in the us.

this is not always the case as you can see from the nepomuk thing[1]

but to further strengthen your point, in europe program code or implementation is not considered research. european scientific funding is reserved for research, so a lot of the research you see will never be turned into viable products. that notion also exists in german universities. universities of applied sciences see this differently, but people sometimes joke that these are not real universities.

a lot of what was turned into money is actually european inventions. most americans, don't even know that europe has a lead in neuroscience research(that includes countries like spain). or at least used to, most americans also don't know how great the cs dpt of the tu wien(vienna) is for example.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEPOMUK_(framework) rdf based semantic metadata thingie with a cost of 17 million that is now being ditched partly because it's rdf

angersock2• 12 years ago

"conversely i get to research anything i want to" [that there is funding and no competition for].

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

Is there something missing from this post, like what the German guy is earning? You seem to be making a comparison without one of the comparators.

ThePhysicist2• 12 years ago

In fact, the base salary of a full University professor (so-called W3 group) is 5672,13 € per month (http://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besoldungsordnung_W), so in total (with extra 13th salary) 73737 € / year, hence about 101k$ / year. This excludes extra pay for fulfilling faculty functions etc. which can easily double that amount. Take in addition the generous retirement money, the fact that they are state functionaries and thus cannot be fired and do not pay any social security taxes (usually about 15 % of your salary) makes this look pretty good to me. Btw the salaries of older professors (which are still payed according to the old C standard from before 2005) is even higher. Of course there are so-called "Fachhochschulprofessoren" that earn less than this, but since they usually have strong ties with industry and focus on applied research they profit from other income streams.

jrs993• 12 years ago

I don't know why you would employ a science adviser who thinks that physics isn't "sexy." It's damn sexy. And anyone who really understands even a small amount of physics will think that physics is "sexy."

angersock2• 12 years ago

Erm, no?

Do you mean classical physics and mechanics, quantum mechanics (and if so, what branch), particle physics, solid-state physics, what?

You have to be more specific unless you want to come off as just another -~= Science! =~- people getting off to things they don't actually understand.

jrs993• 12 years ago

I guess I should be more specific and say statistical mechanics. As a science expert, I have to say the rest is truly boring.

beloch2• 12 years ago

Think about what these uber-rich entrepreneurs would find sexy. Curing cancer, a condom people actually want to use, extending human life, saving the world from meteor impacts, bringing mammoths back, flying to space... It's all near-future, commercializable stuff. Next, go read some article titles/abstracts under quant-ph on arxiv and think about how many would of those would really grab these rich dudes by their eyeballs and make them drop a few million.

A huge portion of physics is driven by basic curiosity, has no commercial applications in the near future, and is so esoteric that even other physicists have to work very hard just to understand what's going on. Much of this stuff will wind up being dead-ends, but some of it is the foundation the future will be built on top of. No trained physicist currently alive can predict what will change the world and what won't. Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?

vixen99• 12 years ago

'Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?'. Let! Gosh, lovely implications. What constraints do you have in mind to fetter the lawful activities of very rich people? Who is the 'we' and how will you define 'important'? But it's the 'let' that worries me.

DaniFong• 12 years ago

If so, what say you to the Fundamental Physics Prize -- funded by Yuri Milner?

https://fundamentalphysicsprize.org/

Or the Nobel Prize before that, funded based on inventions in explosives (used for mining, construction, and armament), and to a lesser extent through Alfred's father's and brothers innovations in plywood, the torpedo, oil refining and international finance / business.

michael_nielsen• 12 years ago

Bill Press (the quoted adviser) is an outstanding physicist -- I believe he was the youngest physicist ever tenured at Harvard. I think the quote was out of context. He wasn't saying he doesn't like physics, he was saying it can be hard to sell as a political priority.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Press

jrs993• 12 years ago

That makes a lot of sense. I read that article too quickly and the quote sounded weird when I read it. But it would make perfect sense if he were talking about what he thinks other people think of physics.

001sky• 12 years ago

Non-profits are not public entities, and most universities are "billionaires" and "not public".

Other than that, I have no concerns.

ChristianMarks• 12 years ago

I suppose this means that mathematics and the humanities will advance more than disciplines that require significant funding.

runewell2• 12 years ago

Paywall news article complaining about privatization of information, enough said.

imron2• 12 years ago

It's not a paywalled article. Turn cookies on and click the link again.

If you have cookies off when you click the link it redirects to the login page.

psychometry• 12 years ago

You can't read it if you've already read 20 articles in the past month, either, thanks to evercookie.

runewell2• 12 years ago

http://www.screencast.com/t/QxjN57VfJ

ThePhysicist2• 12 years ago

Seems like the US response to the EU flagship research and innovation programme, "Horizon 2020", which aims to provide 80 BN € (110 BN $) for groundbreaking research withing the next 7 years. One of the "flagship projects" selected for this programme is the "Human Brain Project", which seems similar to what Obama calls “the next great American project: a $100 million initiative to probe the mysteries of the human brain.". Although he should probably add a few digits to that number if he really means what he says, because I think 100 M$ will hardly be enough to unravel the mysteries of the brain.

In any case, as a scientist that's exactly the kind of competition I want to see more of!

vinceguidry• 12 years ago

American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.

Oh how quickly journalists forget the past. The only reason we ever became a scientific superpower in the first place is because of one man, John D. Rockefeller.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Do tell.

tn13• 12 years ago

I did not know that it was American government that invented light bulb, electric motor, transistors, IC chips and so on.

lexcorvus• 12 years ago

I don't expect the NYT to have a multi-century sense of historical perspective, but is a multi-decade sense of perspective too much to ask? The present government-funded model of science was created by Vannevar Bush less than seventy years ago—"in the lives of those now living."

jcampbell1• 12 years ago

A look at major initiatives suggests that the philanthropists’ war on disease risks widening that gap, as a number of the campaigns, driven by personal adversity, target illnesses that predominantly afflict white people — like cystic fibrosis, melanoma and ovarian cancer.

The #1, #2 richest Americans have specifically targeted funding research for diseases that affect only the poor. I think this is a more valid criticism of the NIH rather than philanthropists.

tsotha9• 12 years ago

... diseases that affect the poor in other countries. As an organization funded by US tax dollars, NIH is primarily responsible for advancing the health of Americans. It's not an international charity.

logicchains5• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, the poor in America are more affected by 'lifestyle diseases' (smoking and obesity related illnesses, for instance), which may be more difficult to cure as they need to be addressed from a social angle, not just a medical one.

Fomite• 12 years ago

From the article: “They target polio and go after it until it’s done — no one else can do that,” he said, referring to the global drive to eradicate the disease. “In effect, they have the power to lead where the market and the political will are insufficient.”

This is actively not true. The eradication of small pox was an international, government-led effort. That we have since abdicated that ability doesn't mean we "can't", just that we have chosen not to.

bmmayer1• 12 years ago

...and this is bad because...?

RickHull• 12 years ago

Responding strictly to the headline:

What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?

auvrw• 12 years ago

What distinguishes American science, and why is this distinction important?

this isn't one of the article's complaints, but one distinguishing characteristics of american science funding -- indeed, of the u.s. govt's entire budget -- is disproportionate spending on the military. see the chart at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_policy_of_the_United_St...

anyway, i agree with most of the other comments as i don't see anything seriously wrong with private investment in science. perhaps the fact that these are individuals rather than committees is what the author finds most loathsome, but my perspective is probably biased b/c the first thing that came to mind on reading the title was the allen institute for brain science, that's the first example in the article, and i think it's doing interesting and important research.

nirnira7• 12 years ago

I truly, truly hate articles like this. The constant tone of judgement and scepticism. The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful? Why can't you just say thank you that so many wealthy people choose to turn their fortunes towards so many philanthropic causes? Why do you have to have so much bile and resentment towards individuals choosing freely and harming no one?

Whatever happened to America being the land of the free? When did it turn into the land of cutting down tall poppies?

mempko9• 12 years ago

Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work. They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship. The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach.

So no, I do not celebrate their success and I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment.

And don't give me crap about how we benefit too. If our economy was working as a free market that the same billionaires feel it should, they coudn't be billionaires.

Profit has no space in "real" free markets.

logicchains5• 12 years ago

How much of the funding of Intel/Amd/ARM, who probably built the cpu you're using to access this side, came from the government? How much of the funding of this site itself, and of other sites you may use on a daily basis such as Google and Facebook, came from the government? How much of the funding for the GPU that's rendering this site came from the government? How are you not benefiting from all these things?

Long term profit has no space in models of a _perfectly competitive_ market, a theoretical concept used in the exploration of various economic ideas. The "free"ness of a market doesn't necessarily imply anything about the potential for profit within that market.

nirnira7• 12 years ago

Their success is on the backs of people who do the real work.

Oh really? And when was the last time you attempted to do what these people do? Easy to judge sitting from an armchair, isn't it?

While you're at it, why don't you stop using any of the products that these people create? And stop using any of the products created by people using their products? Why don't you stop patronising for instance any business that uses Microsoft or Oracle software? Let's see how much choice that leaves you.

They are also on the backs of the American people who contribute significant amount of money through government sponsorship.

The American government decided to use public resources to fund research without attempting to monopolise the application of results. If you don't like the fact that people have created successful businesses and products with this, you should blame the government, not the people who took risks and brought the applications to market. You don't get to hold out your hand and ask for something back when you gave it away for free in the first place.

I will judge them sharply for profiting so handsomely from public investment.

Perhaps you should be judged too. After all, aren't you this very moment enjoying the internet? Isn't your enjoyment of it, its enrichment of your life (even potentially your dependence on it for your economic niche) a profit of your own? And how much have you decided to donate to the government as compensation for this profit from your use of the fruits of public research funding?

Profit has no space in "real" free markets.

I suggest you educate yourself in basic economics before making such stupid claims.

hueving3• 12 years ago

Profit has no space in "real" free markets.

What kind of drivel is that? If you create a product/service which nobody else can duplicate and the demand for it is there, you are going to make a profit. That's exactly how a "real" free market functions.

trentmb• 12 years ago

The tech we use today is based on government investment that the private industry coudn't stomach.

Wasn't that, in at least part, the reason why government felt the investment was worth making? To fund (expensive) basic research that can then be taken to drive and create enterprise?

timr• 12 years ago

Did you read the article, or just assume that it says what you hate?

The article is about the balance of funding -- how much of it is private, and how much of it is public. Nobody is claiming that rich people shouldn't be allowed to fund vanity science projects.

nirnira7• 12 years ago

I read the whole article thanks. It was stupid and judgemental - eg criticising rich people for only supporting research into rich white people disease - woops, never mind Bill Gates!

"Balance of funding" is a cute euphemism though for "let's punish rich people for exercising their free choice, steal more of their money and give it to bureaucrats and congressmen in the White House to squabble over and divert into kickbacks for districts and lobbyists." Because everyone knows the government's track record of wise use of funds is so fantastic.

Tycho3• 12 years ago

The article was pretty nauseating. Openly worrying that the government isn't taking more control of human endeavour.

firstOrder• 12 years ago

The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful?

Well let us look at these rich people, on the Forbes 400 richest list. So people can celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful.

#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM #2 Warren Buffett - father was a congressman, grandparents owned a chain of stores in Nebraska #3 Larry Ellison - after a middle class upbringing, he was inspired by a 1970 CACM article and proceeded to hit several home runs over the the next few decades #4 Charles Koch - inherited an oil company #5 David Koch - inherited an oil company #6 Christy Walton - inherited Wal-Mart #7 Jim Walton - inherited Wal-Mart ...and the rest of the Wal-Mart heirs...

Aside from Larry Ellison, all of these people were to the manor born. Telling people to "emulate their success" is ludicrous. Plenty of people are paid good money to tell us why we should "celebrate success" for these people, and should try to "emulate the successful". Anyone who would actually believe these people's press clippings is clearly a fool. They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.

WalterBright4• 12 years ago

Microsoft was bootstrapped from an initial investment of about $5000, as I recall. Hardly uberwealth, and no VC.

I worked for a contemporary of Microsoft at the time. We had better technology, knew microcomputers upside down, had better everything, except had no vision. And that company was booted from nothing.

nirnira7• 12 years ago

They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.

Oh brother. Most of these people started out in life ahead of the average person, sure. But you know what, they all took what they started with in life and worked their asses off to build it into something even greater. I'm sure for every person on this list there's ten people who started with a silver spoon in their mouth, and through sloth and weakness blew everything. Some probably wound up on the streets.

And have you looked into the family histories of these successful people? How many of these families started off with members who had nothing, who worked hard and made it? Does it invalidate their original success that they were smart enough to build a family culture which preserved and built upon success? Oh, I suppose that's another thing we shouldn't bother trying to emulate.

But hey, let's not bother trying to build a representative sample base for our snide claims eh?

Bill Gates may have come from privilege, but then he built on that - he brought computing to the world, introduced untold economic efficiencies to every single industry on earth, and produced more economic growth arguably than any other single individual in the last century. Buffett again worked hard, made smart bets, took risks, and it paid off. Ellison you admit invalidates your hypothesis. Koch I'm not familiary with. The Waltons have obviously been working diligently because last I heard Walmart was a powerhouse that millions of Americans choose of their own free will to shop at every day.

Comparing Bill Gates and the others on this list to a blatantly parasitic ruling class extracting resources from the toil of slaves through a monopoly on state violence is just plain, unforgivable idiocy.

I would expect better from the audience of a website devoted to the idea that anyone who has a valuable idea and works hard can make something of themselves.

tsotha9• 12 years ago

#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM

In what reality could the act of taking a million dollars and multiplying it by a factor of seventy six thousand be viewed as being "born into it"?

marincounty• 12 years ago

"tall poppies"? Our system allowed these Poppies the to flourish. These tall Poppies were never subject to shakedowns, or out right theft of their usually inherited monies. Most never served their country. They lived safe privileged lives. They didn't need to worry about much; other than making money. If we don't start closing the inequity gap, I wonder just how long this "cake walk" for the wealthy will last. I hope we never become, well like Mexico, where the wealthy need to be constantly on alert for kidnapping, or getting shot? As to letting the tall poppies do the right thing with there benevolent gifts; I believe they need some guidance. Bill Gates comes to mind. Spending millions on expensive genetically modified seeds--only to see one crop for some poor tribe in Africa. I do admire he brought up the condom issue though. I don't have any concrete answers, but "only in America" could a lot of these rich dudes make their fortunes. What really irks me is is when they take advantage of all the thing most of us take for granted(like an honest judicial system, right down to the cops on the streets), and then store their money offshore--all because they want a few more shekels. And then when they get in trouble they proudly proclaim,"I am an American.! I have rights".

nirnira7• 12 years ago

Thanks for contributing yet another well-reasoned, impartial analysis of modern society to Hacker news.

clef2• 12 years ago

The cause of man's suffering is: "this belongs to me" (Anthony De Mello)

Science and knowledge belongs to everybody and to no one, regardless of where you are from. Nationalism was pretty fancy and efficient a long time ago, if I see myself as more "American" or "French", than "human", humanity is screwed.

csense• 12 years ago

The more philanthropy or private investment we can attract to scientific innovation, the better.

The public gets the benefit of inventions that wouldn't have existed without this investment (assuming they're marketed in the short term, and in the long term the patents eventually fall into the public domain).

Or alternatively, if billionaires start doing more research, this could be offset by cutting, or slowing the growth of, taxpayer-funded research spending. And give the money back to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts, deferred tax hikes, or different services.

Also, there's less of the waste and uncertainty associated with government spending (think about how many articles you see on long-running science experiments disrupted by Washington's latest budget spasm; if Gates has dumped $100 million into AIDS research and needs $100 million more to produce a vaccine, he's probably going to follow through).

And if things go awry the fallout's not as bad (if Solyndra had happened to some billionaire spending his own money, I don't think anyone would have been outraged).

wallflower• 12 years ago

"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue. Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...

People believe these things...because they have faith."

-From Kary Mullis, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner (and the genius inventor of PCR) in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field".

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science

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