[bsmith89]

The outright falsehood of this statement:

> just about every important breakthrough in science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American university.

Really makes it difficult to take the rest of this comment seriously.

In case the ways it is "not even wrong" need to be detailed:

1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded by public money doled out by the NIH, NSF, and other national organizations. The public/private status of the university has little bearing on that, as most university research funding comes through these agencies, with something like 50% generally going directly to the universities themselves. Research at "private" universities as it currently exists would not survive without this mechanism.

> something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together

2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. How do you define breakthroughs? Press releases from university PR departments? Patents? Either way (or by some third—hopefully measurable—way that I'll allow you to define for us) I guarantee that you need to go much further down the list of private universities before you match the output of "all publicly funded universities around the world put together".

I imagine that you have in mind important (and/or well publicized) advancements from MIT/Stanford/Harvard and are forgetting about the enormous amount of research output from public universities (which include but are not limited to Berkeley, CalTech, U of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, U of Texas, Ohio State, etc.)

> Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it.

3. As you hardly cite any evidence for this, I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities).

So my question to _you_ is whether this comment is motivated by a knee-jerk anti-government reaction, or if I'm entirely misunderstanding where you got these ideas?

[mrjangles]

>1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded...

At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too. These grants are usually very successful. This does not disprove my point in any way, in fact, it _is_ my point

>2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other.

You have to understand that it is in the interest of the tens of thousands of people doing work doing non-sense research to pretend their research is important. Just because you hear about them telling you how important their worki is in the media, doesn't mean it is.

Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced by just a hand full of people. I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable.

>I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities).

Yes, that is my point...? You are calling my comment a knee jerk reaction yet you have responded without seeming to understand any of it.

[derbOac]

> Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced by just a hand full of people. I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable.

In my experiences, the current system has led to problems with a small number of people "sucking up credit" that's unwarranted, in the sense that they're very very good at taking credit from others and building up a CV that makes it look like they're at the center of things.

In any event, I'm very skeptical of these things at this point based on my personal experiences. Usually progress is incremental and involves a lot of efforts from lots of individuals. Even bigger advances usually involve a confluence of things.

Bibliometric studies are often flawed because they make a lot of false assumptions and ignore realistic dynamics, with corruption and gaming of metrics.

[jltsiren]

> At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too.

Grants like that are rare, because there is very little industry funding for basic research. Private funding usually comes from various trusts and foundations that operate in similar ways to government funding agencies.

> I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most.

Alexander the Great didn't win battles on his own. He needed a lot of soldiers for that. Similarly, scientific breakthroughs are meaningless on their own. You need a massive amount of grunt work by ordinary researchers to connect them to the real world and make them useful.

[bsmith89]

> > > Drew Weissman working at the _privately_ funded University of Pennsylvania picked her up. You wouldn't have even needed to look up if the University of Pennsylvania was privately funded, because just about every important breakthrough in science in the last 30 years occurred at a privately funded American university.

> >1. Drew Weissman's research was (almost certainly) majority funded [by public money]...

> At least where I live, many government grants are only available to people who have also managed to get private industry funding for their work too.

I don't believe this is true at Penn, or other universities that I'm aware of in the US. I don't doubt that Dr. Weissman is able to get private foundation funding or corporate sponsorship, but that's very likely an effect of his private funding, rather than the other way around.

> > > something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together

> >2. Also very false, although arguably hard to prove one way or the other. [... How do you define breakthroughs? Press releases from university PR departments?]

> You have to understand that it is in the interest of the tens of thousands of people doing work doing non-sense research to pretend their research is important. Just because you hear about them telling you how important their worki is in the media, doesn't mean it is.

Yes, this is basically my point. Just because you can bring to mind "breakthroughs" from major private universities, doesn't mean that most valuable research is conducted there.

> Anyone who has actually worked it research knows every field is filled with 10's of thousands of garbage research papers that are of no value, and that all the key work is produced by just a hand full of people.

As someone who works in research I agree that there are many garbage papers. I absolutely do not agree that the key work is done by a handful of people...unless hundreds or thousands of productive researchers (depending on the field) counts as a handful.

> I remember also reading some researchers that looked at dozens of fields and breakthroughs and found the same thing. All the real work in any breakthrough is done by just 2 or 3 people at most. so this is incorrect, what I said is actually very provable.

I still don't know how you're defining breakthroughs. I suspect that you are referring to how much work any of the (let's say 10) authors on a single paper did in that publication. Yeah, 1-3 people on any given paper sounds about right. But most/all of those (7-9) other folks are the key people on other publication. This does not mean that most researchers are not contributing to science (although how we allocate credit in authorship could certainly use some fixing).

> > > Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it.

> > I'll point out that private money can go to diverse people at diverse institutions (including government funded universities).

> Yes, that is my point...? You are calling my comment a knee jerk reaction yet you have responded without seeming to understand any of it.

I read this part of your comment (and, in fact, all of it) as saying that public universities are inferior because people working there cannot pursue ideas that the _government_ deems unacceptable because they are government funded. Throughout my response, I'm pointing out that the public/private status of the university has little bearing on where researchers' funding comes from. Not only do most researchers at private universities get public funding, but there's nothing stopping researchers at public universities from receiving private funding.

I believe that you have a fundamentally incorrect understanding of how research and research funding (in the US) works.

[sabas123]

Side note, looking at patents to identify #breakthroughs doesn't really work as

1. It requires quite a large investment which disfavors smaller institutions

2. The distribution of patents that actually make money is so incredibly skewed that university patents should considered such a bad investment, that it wouldn't be a good metric anymore.

[selimthegrim]

Caltech is and always has been a private institution even when it was Throop College of Technology. To my knowledge the only public institution ever privatized in the US was Tulane (for reasons having to do with Jim Crow).

[bsmith89]

Ah, thanks for the correction. I was mistaken. Don't believe that it affects my argument, but sub in ...(quick search)... University of Oxford.