Stem Cell Breakthrough
Dammit! Bush wins again: Researchers Report Stem Cell Breakthrough
posted by Byron | Tuesday, November 20, 2007
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Byron Matthews, a sociologist retired from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a partner in an educational software company, lives near Santa Fe, NM.
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2 Comments:
The only depressing portion of this piece refers to the new science becoming "eligible for federal funding" to make "new waves of discovery." It is, accordingly, intuitively obvious that the current breakthrough (like all breakthroughs) was a result of funding-other-than-federal. The dolts at NSF have won an important victory when, in a piece about private research (certainly not federal), the author has the audacity to wax eloquent about the possibility of federal funding. That would only bog the research down in grantsmanship, bureaucracy and self-sustaining sloth. Let us now praise famous men, but let us not think they got that way through government grants.
- Karl
I think you're right, but also that market forces will put the sequence of events on a sort of automatic pilot toward the private sector. Stem cell applications promise to be the biggest and most profitable thing that medicine has seen since the development of antibiotics. Private companies will take this ball and run with it, already are. I think that federal funding will be a much smaller factor here, compared with more esoteric research efforts. It's with those latter projects, the ones without any obvious immediate application, that fed funding will always have a necessary role to play.
NIH, NSF, etc. have long been the primary funders of basic biological science on university campuses. That's no doubt still true, but changing. Companies like DuPont, etc. at least 20 years ago (that's when I first became aware of it on my campus) began to make large continuing grants to university-based researchers and labs. These companies know where the fundamental breakthroughs and innovative applications are going to come from, and they want a proprietary piece. These grants can be very lucrative to researchers personally, and I remember that already becoming an issue in our biology department, along with issues involving the publication, sharing, and ownership of results (and patents) arising from research funded in this way.
Byron
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