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by whatshisface 372 days ago
It's impossible to discover a basic fact, such as "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell," and monetize it fully within the same organization. A million scientists can take a look at that basic fact and involve it in their own research in ten million ways.

It's also not practical to keep those facts as trade secrets over the several decades over which their applications need to develop. Even if an industry consortium was willing to discover that clouds are made of water droplets, it would certainly leak before the science of meteorology had progressed far enough for that consortium to offer saleable rain forecasts.

Finally, companies are unwilling to train people about basic facts. Academia is the only system where "and then you tell everybody" is a part of the incentive structure. Privately, you have a strong incentive to reveal nothing and punish leakers.
1 comments
throwawaymaths 372 days ago
that's a pretty funny example you gave, because the discovery of the chemiosmotic effect was not funded by the government, it was privately funded by a guy who raised money and holed himself up in a regency estate with an assistant for a few years to prove it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_D._Mitchell

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whatshisface 372 days ago
Private and public philanthropy both contribute to science in the same way. If you're asking why private philanthropists can't replace federal funding, it's the same as the reason why we can't just make billionaires pay all the tax: the NSF budget would bankrupt Bill Gates in 13 years.

More realistically, what would happen would be that rather than sacrificing themselves for the greater good in some kind of voluntarily socialist outpouring of wealth, they'd ask us to look to China for our scientific future.

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throwawaymaths 372 days ago
Stop doing expensive science? Some things can just wait for tech to catch up and make science easier by lowering costs.

An example is the superconducting supercollider. Chemistry and pharma industry were making NMRs cheaper and the cost of the supercollider components went down. So the LHC was a much more effective "buy" than the SSC.

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