[CWuestefeld]

How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products...

Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general?

Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great example in head-to-head competition. In the competition between private and government-run science in the Human Genome Project, it seems pretty clear which side played the greater role.

[dylandrop]

The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest. (Imagine if the only crop research was done by Monsanto.) Capitalism hasn't caused basic research to go away, but if we only rely on science from capitalism, there will undoubtedly be a ton of problems to face there.

[jerf]

"Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest."

It actually does have an incentive to be internally honest, that is, to speak honestly within the corporate entity doing the research. If it isn't honest, it won't work, and what doesn't work can't be monetized (to a first approximation, anyhow; I can come up with crazy exceptions too, but they really are the exceptions). It does have an incentive to be externally dishonest and/or externally silent.

Public research, by contrast, appears to have no particular incentive to be honest either internally or externally. And lo, there's been a whole slew of problems lately about the problems that the largely public research community is facing with honesty, reproducability, and the skewed incentives around publication.

Personally, I think the only defensible position is that both approaches have shown to have serious problems with incentives, and the idea that public researchers are above corruption and have no negative incentives and are just generally "better" than private ones is a point of view that can't stand up to five minutes serious examination. And contrary to naive beliefs about the incorruptibility of politicians controlling the public research funds, both systems have a serious problem with needing to flatter the opinions of the one with the purse strings and make sure not to disprove them too hard. Very, very serious problems.

[CWuestefeld]

Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment.

Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children.

the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest

Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results.

Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.

[dylandrop]

> real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children

Certainly everyone's mother was killed by cancer who works on cancer. And no, not everyone who works at a Big Pharma company is terrible, but the problem is more that Big Pharma is concentrated on improving their current prescription systems, rather than finding a cheap one-off cure. If Big Pharma wants to stop acting like a giant faceless evil monster, I will stop treating it as such. But how can you really justify current medical costs without saying that someone, somewhere in that industry is doing something disingenuous?

> The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.

The problem is that there isn't enough demand to justify the cost, if we're doing it in a "if a person is diagnosed, they pay for it" manner that capitalism demands. Cancer research costs many, many billions of dollars due to many factors [1]. Say we're talking about leukemia research. 40,000 cases were diagnosed this year [2], but should each of those cases have to pay for the extremely high costs of research? Or, could we distribute it in a way such that each citizen pitches in a much smaller amount to help cancer research? In my opinion, the latter makes more sense, rather than punishing those who get sick.

Lastly as for credibility in the research world, there are definitely lots of examples I could look up. And also plenty of examples to look up for your cases that you mentioned as well. I think it would be too hard to count, no? But when you see things like the Tobacco Institute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute#In_popular_cu...) it's hard to say that we should research everything privately, because the conflict of interest is just too high. In my opinion, publicly funded research could / should be reformed, but there's not as obvious of a bias one way or the other there.

[1] http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jan2011/nci-12.htm [2] http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/leuks.html