This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to
Globalization II. As I thought about
Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to
have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research -
in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard
some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated,
context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his
enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very
closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university
research.
Noting the critical contributions of science to the war
effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create
“scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to
better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people,
and supporting high level research. Most
interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by
focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the
interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated
and driven. Bush defined this
goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on
a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was
critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge
created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use
in an as-yet unknown circumstance.
As I describe in “Change and the Research University” (see
post Metrics of Academic Excellence for the 21st Century, 2/27/06),
the Bush ideals of creation of scientific capital began to be overtaken by
market forces in the latter years of the 20th century following the
Reagan administration, and government interest in supporting research that Bush
would have called basic declined. Over
the decades, government funding has moved more in the direction of research
that is inspired both by search for fundamental knowledge, and by
considerations of use. Elegant arguments for this type of dual purpose research
are described by Donald Stokes in Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Research and
Technological Innovation. The NIH, for
example, supports much fundamental research, but in areas that may be of use in
combating specific diseases. This leaves
many other areas of biological research with minimal funding, and
consequentially little ability to contribute to the development of scientific
capital.
Berger describes generally decreasing corporate R&D
expenditures, and a narrowing of research focus. She talks of many companies in the biotech
and pharmaceutical industry as being dependent on access to research being
carried out in universities using federal funds. She describes these companies as “fishing for
discoveries in a rushing stream of basic biological and medical research
pouring out of university laboratories that are massively supported by public
funds.” (p.296) This is certainly true,
but market forces at the governmental level already have worked to make this
rushing stream much more narrow than Vannevar Bush would have wanted it to be.
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Posted by: sudarwan danim | March 08, 2007 at 02:18 AM