> 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?
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.
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.
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.
> >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.
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.
(UCSD, Berkely, UMich, and University of Utah, among others, are research powerhouses too).
You are mistaking privately owned universities for privately funded. Scientists in privately owned American universities still mostly apply and receive funding from public (federally owned) funding agencies.
In America these privately owned universities use their own money to hire the best people. Private money does an infinitely better job of selecting the best people than government money.
Then the government notes the historical success of these private institutions and sends funding their way, which the excellent individuals they chose can use to create excellent research. This system has made America produce orders of magnitude better science than the rest of the world put together.
My point is that the question of how the government can best direct money has already been solved. Let the private sphere decide who is the best.
this is just not true. They just hire the best of the best but if one deep-dives into any kind of research one can see an ocean full of universities producing valuable research. And most of the time the basic breakthroughs came from universities you didn't think of or you didn't even know.
This is simply untrue. When on deep-dives into any kind of research on sees an ocean full of universities polluting the sea with absolute crap. The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse. For example, I know researchers who simply will not bother to read anything written by anyone working for a Chinese university.
But this:
> The more bureaucratic and government funded, the worse
is definitely untrue. You are thinking too much of hollywood-movies, this is not reality.
Just think of ML and Deep Learning. The university of toronto is publicly funded, as is the technical university of Munich, where schmidhuber (and hochreiter) produced a lot of the groundbreaking research we are all relying on. Or the university of montreal with joshua bengio. And the technical university of munich is not even in the states! SHOCKING! No private universities to be seen anywhere.
There's certainly a lot of fad-chasing in biomedicine. There are strong incentives to flock to the latest technique (RNAi, optogenetics, single-cell-seq, organoids) or stick close to an established hypothesis (beta-amyloids for Alzheimer). It might better if there were some countervailing incentives to stick with older techniques, or break away from established dogma. For example, optogenetics has been a very powerful tool for understanding the brain, but it also means that we've moved away from many animal models in favor of mice, where the tools are most tractable. As a result, we know more about brains that are, in some ways, less relevant to human health. A-beta, on the other hand, has been an absolute tire-fire and the field should have shifted ages ago.
The NIH tends not to 'steer' the field in particular directions, but they could. DARPA programs, for example, sometimes explicitly fund several competing ideas to see if a clear winner emerges.
On top of all that, we should also be building a workforce of diverse researchers.
e.g., the government will match any private money 2 to 1. Then, for example, the government can take a cut of patents that result (to prevent grants simply subsidizing research that would have occurred anyway).
Anyway, mechanisms like what you're proposing do exist (MITACS in Canada, for example). However, the problem is the other end of the pipeline. How can you pitch investors on something that might not be a product for decades, if at all? Government R&D primes that pump.
Messenger bias?
But anyway, the article states clearly that Kariko floundered for years until 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.
There is a reason why something like 10 privately funded American universities make more scientific breakthroughs than the 10,000 publicly funded universities around the world put together. It's right in front of everyone's faces, and no one is talking about it. It is seriously and elephant in the room.
Then the article comes up with a "solution" like this
>My answer? Bend over backward to fund a more diverse range of people and ideas, even deliberately including ideas that are currently perceived as unpopular, unworkable, obscure, and the like. After all, many scientific discoveries can be traced back to origins that didn’t seem promising
Seriously, is this the best you can do? Regardless, this idea would be impossible in the first place at a government funded institution so why even bother mentioning it.