This is a recent idea, dating back to the late 70s and implemented through the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. Before that research was research; development (and private research of course) was the province of business.
The Gradgrind mentality that all research must be commercialized has impoverished basic research; of what use is looking for gravity waves or new branches of mathematics (just look at the contortions university press offices go to to justify some new paper on quantum mechanics).
Speaking of which, QM is a perfect example of something that would have advanced very slowly had this attitude existed 150 years ago…yet it is at the heart of the semiconductor revolution!
If so, I don't think that really applies to what the article is talking about. The article is talking about Alphabet potentially using large amounts of data from other researchers, mostly academic, who were funded by the government and commercializing it. That's more akin to how it was before Bayh-Dole: a private company taking government funded research they were not involved in, adding their own privately funded research, and making something commercial.
This means, for example, that David Baker licenses Rosetta for free to academic and government, but commercial users have to obtain a paid commercial license. Baker (his lab, or LLC, or whomever vends Rosetta Commercial) benefits monetarialy from all the data that Rosetta includes, which is decades of structural biology funded by NIH and others.
My comment was in reply to this comment by MauranKilom:
> > Maybe I have a wrong conception of what research is supposed to achieve, but commercializing new insights is absolutely one of the intended outcomes. One would sure hope that taxpayer money isn't funneled into research to... just enable more research.
And further on your comment:
> The article is talking about Alphabet [commercializing results from public datasets without needing to pay for them] That's more akin to how it was before Bayh-Dole:
Indeed, pre Bayh-Dole, publicly funded research was public (consider it public domain, or at least "MIT licensed") and anyone could use it.
Now everything has to be licensed from university licensing departments, typically with an expensive exclusive. Which has had a distorting effect on research, not merely restricting use (have you ever tried to work with a university licensing office? They consider even the most trivial results to be Nobel prize class) but, because they are a source of revenue, bending resource allocation, tenure, etc much as sports teams do for the schools that have them.
I don't think federal funding of research is that much older in the US, only really starting in the 50s apart from military research. How exactly were the early QM researchers funded anyway? (apart from Einstein's famous day job at the patent office). I know at least a few of them had fellowships at universities, meaning rich benefactors.
US government support for university research dates back to patent holder Abraham Lincoln who even in the middle of a war got legislation passed to support land grant (mostly ag) colleges and universities (and of which MIT was one of the very early beneficiaries). However it was small and you are right that in WWII the model of the US modern research university was explicitly created by James Conant, with MIT again being the largest beneficiary (note that all tuition and student expenses are about 14% of MIT's revenue and 16% of expenditures, and the number of staff is greater than that of the student body -- it's a huge government research lab with a small school attached).
The problem with this model is that unless you are MIT (/Stanford/Harvard/Cornell/CMU et al -- maybe 25 institutions, if that) licensing revenue matters, and affects who gets tenure, departmental budgets etc.
> How exactly were the early QM researchers funded anyway? (apart from Einstein's famous day job at the patent office). I know at least a few of them had fellowships at universities, meaning rich benefactors.
In Europe, in the 20th century funding came primarily from governments (and benefactors, more early in the century), under varying institutions (the big research institutions in Imperial and post-WWI Germany, "Institutes" in France, Oxbridge in the UK, etc). In The USA it was the institutions themselves, some benefactors and, as I said, some government funding (like Fermi and Lawrence).
Everything we do is built on top of what came before.
For example, research is paid for by the public, but then the products that affect people are completely captured by monopolists and spooned out in such a way to make sure only the monied sections of the population get them until the public protests enough to create a program like medicaid.
If we paid most of the cost, we should get most of the benefit. The monopolists should be happy to make any money at all, not their superprofits. Fair right?
I agree with your sentiment, but I also think it's worth thinking carefully about two of the main points that stuck out to me:
- Access to compute for large models
- Access to large datasets (in this case mostly taxpayer funded academic research)
Every company and/or research group has access to the data, but some have a huge advantage in terms of compute. If there's a question about commercializing research, the scales are tilted toward those with more compute.
In this specific case, I think the intention to make AlphaFold open source and available to the community is obviously the best solution. But my question is, what happens if a less altruistic for-profit entity uses its huge compute advantage to develop new techniques and insights, and then patents everything before it becomes available to the community?
I understand that is the basic mechanism for how medical/pharmaceutical research gets translated into life-saving treatments, but if we're approaching a generalized model that can pump out "patent-worthy" discoveries only bound by the amount of data and access to compute, there's an obvious opportunity for a winner-take-most scenario.
While that kind of semi symbiotic relationship can (and has been observed to) exist, it does so best in an an environment that looks different than what is described here (few large near monopolies, legislative regulations that are best navigated using wealth, a market that has inelastic bargaining qualities).
Perhaps with some interest, since the grants are high risk (many grants fail)
Or we could do like before: let the church help the poors, the nobles take decisions and the peasants make the food. Like that, everyone has its clear and simple role and you wont complain of taxes: you ll have no revenue :)
So long as any profits from these investments are not ploughed back into general revenues, your concerns are moot. For example, you could establish an independent body—let's call it INVEST1—to oversee these investments. INVEST1 would be required to divest ownership of successful enterprises at a threshold that ensures money spent roughly matches money earned (and thus self-funding). Once it reaches a stable equilibrium, you spin off INVEST1 as a fully independent not-for-profit. Government then establishes INVEST2 and the process starts again from the beginning. Rinse and repeat.
So when people build off humanity's past knowledge and they pay for the privilege I assume the new knowledge that is created does not belong to humanity any longer and belongs to individuals?
https://sbir.nih.gov/about/what-is-sbir-sttr
neither were at play here but the idea is pretty darn normal.
The money will be made by private companies that have no connection to the researchers who received the grants, but simply use the published research in something they build.
It's hard to see a good way to build a system to make the private companies pay back the grants. It would be an accounting and tracking nightmare to try to figure out how much money is actually being made from the research that any given grant paid for.
There’s a reason for the saying ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’
Yes indeed. The public. Not capital, not private concerns, but the public.
I think there's a legitimate argument taxes exist for this sort of thing, but (1) taxes arguably are avoided in various ways to the point it's a currently broken system, and (2) this is a rare case where the government has a clear case for a specific amount of money owed by a specific company — why not keep it simple?
If the grants aren't worth paying back at zero percent, the corporation shouldn't be taking them.
The public absolutely should have some ROI, and in fact does in the form of taxes.
Maybe I have a wrong conception of what research is supposed to achieve, but commercializing new insights is absolutely one of the intended outcomes. One would sure hope that taxpayer money isn't funneled into research to... just enable more research. At some point the public should tangibly benefit from it, which is not achieved by writing more papers.
This all notwithstanding the fact that DeepMind intends to make AlphaFold open source and available to the community.