We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

Re:We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised ... by dnautics on Monday March 09, 2015 @03:05AM (#9169610)

>I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.

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Re:We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised ... by robotresearcher on Monday March 09, 2015 @01:14PM (#9172207)

The Celera example is a good one, and you are right they did speed up genomics in a specific way. I'm certain they used many people trained-in-NIH-funded-labs and built directly on NIH-funded work, but it's still a good point.

The "idiotic and immoral business model" is seriously not cool though. Clinton banned patenting human genes directly, which might make pure capitalists cross.

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Re:We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised ... by nmrm2 on Monday March 09, 2015 @10:04AM (#9170945)

> “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

The author met that they've benefited in the sense that we all have benefited.

I very much doubt that there are many people in the world who have directly benefited (i.e., received grants from) all of NASA, the NIH, and DARPA.

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Re:We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised ... by dnautics on Monday March 09, 2015 @02:44PM (#9172902)

Even if the benefit is indirect, it's still hard to see how alternatives are possible, even when the evidence is right there in front of you. Did you even know we eradicated two diseases without the NIH (Smallpox, eliminated in the US by 1897, long before the NIH existed) - and Polio, eliminated through the private nonprofit March of Dimes.

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