[jackpirate]

Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.

[mbreese]

The human genome sequencing didn't really get going until they had to start competing with Celera. In the end, the HGP ended up adopting the same techniques to keep up.

So, that probably isn't the best example to use.

The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many smaller labs.

[tensor]

This is very misleading. Celera used techniques born from academia to sequence the genome quickly. While it did prove that the method was both feasible and preferable, it did not cause the genome to "really get going." The genome was nearly finished already by the time Celera got close to completion.

The public draft was also of much higher quality then Celera's, and as hindsight shows, also born of better scientific technique. Celera secretly used only one person (very nearly) to sequence from, rather than a collection.

If Celera never existed, the human genome would still have been completed in a similar timeframe and shotgun sequencing would still have been adopted. If nothing else, academics are just as competitive as anyone else and thus some lab would have loved to show the feasibility of shotgun sequencing, albiet on a different species.

Disclosure: I worked on the public draft and also had access to the Celera draft right around the time that the genome was "completed". Our lab was using and comparing both the public draft and the Celera draft at the time. We were even fusing the two to get the best possible "up to the minute" draft for a specific chromosome.

[scarmig]

The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy.

When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I guess is your point.

[neutronicus]

It's not like looking for the Higgs is the only thing people have done at the LHC. For instance, there's another big experiment going on investigating Quark-Gluon plasma, and the OPERA experiment was using LHC neutrinos.

The LHC is a big, expensive piece of infrastructure that groups have to share, but there are multiple groups.

[yen223]

Could the smaller projects have the expertise and resources to discover something like the Higgs-Boson?

Centralization of resources is not necessarily a bad thing.

[SoftwareMaven]

The more important question is could multiple smaller labs have come up with something more valuable (to science or society) than weighing the Higgs Boson (the discovery was expected, the weight was an unknown)?

[me2i81]

You can like Celera or hate it, but you can't just pretend that it didn't exist...

[pmb]

It was, however, founded by a guy who left the human genome project and took his hard-won expertise elsewhere.

[angersock]

i mean all weve accomplished is connecting over a billion people and letting you see the person you want to talk to in real time on a device smaller than a hotpocket

yeah i guess industry isnt really accomplishing much these days

(How are your examples actually useful?)

[mbreese]

And most of that was driven by academic research 10-50 years ago. The fear is that we aren't currently funding the academic research that will drive technology in the next 20-50 years.

[angersock]

If you take that timeframe, fair point.

[sthatipamala]

Sibling commenter explained it fine, but to elaborate... your example relies on the existence of wireless networks, LCD technology, assorted networking protocols, cryptography (for secure logins, etc), and video compression algorithms. All of those have been advanced in some part by academic research.