Are there any wealthy individuals likely to trump Darwin or other “gentlemen” scientists of the 18/19th centuries with results from research funded by themselves and not some kind of “share issue” paper chase?
Has science become so expensive that the prospect of one guy, working largely alone, coming up with world shattering results become virtually impossible?
Why bother? We have governments and corporations willing to pay people to do research. If you’re any good, you can get paid to do it.
Although I have known a few grad students who didn’t have any research grants, and were supported by their own money and their parents’. I guess that counts as self-funded research.
Somebody’s going to come along and say it, so I might as well be first: it depends on your definition of science.
Mathematicians can still go off by themselves and come up with great results. Andrew Wiles did it with Fermat’s Theorem.
And Stephen Wolfram made a fortune from his Mathematica software and went into a closet and came out with nothing less than A New Kind of Science.
Theoretical physicists can do more or less the same thing, but already we’re at a crossroads. No one theoretician has made a huge breakthrough as an individual since Alan Guth reinvented inflation. The various theories competing for theories of everything are the result of dozens of individuals taking one another’s work and refining it, testing it, expanding it, and elucidating it.
And more importantly, physics can’t truly advance without the experimenters confirming (or rejecting) the predicted theoretical results. And experimental physics is seldom anything that can be done outside a well-funded laboratory, even when supercolliders are factored out.
The same kind of split is more or less true in other disciplines, although to a lesser extent. There are theoretical biologists - try reading a paper on, say, population genetics - but most, like Darwin, spend much of their time in the field, and need the backing of a major institution to afford fieldwork. Or the government, which is what Darwin did.
Darwin, of course, wasn’t truly rich: he received an offer to work as a naturalist on the Beagle, but it was an unpaid governmental position. His father had to put up the money to support him and pay his expenses, 30 pounds a year IIRC. A goodly sum of money in those days, but not real wealth.
In short, if that’s still possible, it’s yes and no. Yes, science is more expensive, but no, then as now other people put up the money. No, science is collaboratory because there is so frigging much more of it to comprehend, but yes, individuals, now as then, can still do major individual theoretical work.
Wait’ll Greenspan hears about this!
It really depends upon what you’re researching. Some things can be done by a person of modest means in their spare time, other things simply require gazillions of dollars to be able to accomplish.
Technological improvements to many things can, and have been, done by the lone inventor, other things, like discoveries of new properties of matter or medical research, have to be done by large corporations/government bodies because the necessary gear to accomplish these things is so bloody expensive.
Exapno Mapcase writes:
> Mathematicians can still go off by themselves and come up with great results.
> Andrew Wiles did it with Fermat’s Theorem.
Well, yes and no. Yes, Wiles worked essentially by himself for seven years doing the research to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, and he didn’t use anything except his own pencils and papers (and maybe looking up things in the math department’s library). But he was able to do that because he had already made full professor at Princeton. He had to teach classes during that time (not a hugely onerous task, I suspect), but he spent all his spare time working on F.L.T. In some sense then, Princeton was paying him so that he could spend that free time on his research.
On the contrary, Darwin was truly rich. He came from a wealthy family and married into another (closely related) one.
Precisely because the Beagle job was unpaid, his acceptance was dependent on the fact that his family could support him. £30 a year is a very serious underestimate of what they were forking out to him during the yoyage, though it’s just possible as some sort of allowance. For a start, he was paying Fitzroy £50 a year for food during the voyage and Syms Covington £60 to be his servant. Merely paying for his equipment prior to departure came to £600. En route, Charles merely billed Robarts, Curtis & Co. in London and the bank fowarded the matter to his father - he seems to have run up about £1200 over the course of the voyage, all of which was duly paid from Shrewsbury.
But Robert Darwin could easily afford this sort of expense. He was from a wealthy family, was running a massively successful medical practice and had married into one of the richest families in the land (Susanna Wedgwood had an inheritance of £25,000). During this period his income was on the order of £10,000 a year and he was lending massive sums to acquaintences. On his death, his estate was comparable to the likes of Boulton or Watt. Not quite the Bill Gates of his day, but undoubtedly one of the new rich. (This is worth remembering when, as often happens, either Erasmus or Robert Darwin are cited as examples of provincial doctors in the period. They are very untypical, though handily documented.)
On his return from the Beagle voyage, Darwin married Emma Wedgwood - another of the Wedgwoods - and they set up house in Gower Street in London (on a site that’s now the UCL Biology Department). On Charles Booth’s famous 1889 map of London, this is classed as “Middle class. Well-to-do”. Not bad going for a newly married man with only an academic reputation.
On his father’s death in 1848, Darwin inherited £51,712, about a quarter of his father’s estate. He had already bought Down House - not a stately home, but a substantial purchase by any other standards, with a nice tract of land attached - and several other properties. He was to invest heavily in highly risky/profitable railway stocks and reap much of the rewards. Throughout most of his life after the Origin he could rely on nearly £10,00 a year. His will left £34,000 to each of his girls and £53,000 to the sons. For comparison, Browne use a conversion factor of 50 to convert to current UK pounds: that’s therefore an income of about $750,000 a year from investments and land. Overall, Darwin was filthy rich.
Most of these numbers have been extracted from the biographies by Desmond and Moore and by Browne.
As for the OP, there were people through the 20th century who made significant contributions to science while independently wealthy. To take perhaps the richest example: Victor Rothschild. But even he followed a fairly standard academic career by Oxbridge standards.
However, there are still those who have managed to be widely heard while funding themselves out of alternate careers without holding academic positions. Wolfram is sort of the obvious example (he hasn’t convinced many with A New Kind of Science), but currently or recently, there’s more respectably James Lovelock, Julian Barbour and David Levy.
From my observation of the scene in British theoretical physics, most departments will welcome someone of talent with independent means. Typically what they offer are deskspace (though this can be a limited, bitterly fought over resource in some circumstances), a computer terminal, library access and the right to use the university’s address on journal submissions. Usually, they will regard the situation as win-win. As far as the researcher is concerned, the big advantages are almost certainly the library rights and the institutional affliation. The other big thing they need is routine access to others interested in the same thing. In principle, private money can buy them attendence to the relevant conferences and hence the gossip.
I have to say that I haven’t seen anyone I know manage to get anywhere with this route, but that may ultimately be a matter of motivation.
If you want world shattering results on the cheap, I’d recommend materials engineer over research scientist.
I appreciate the correction. But the fact that Darwin came from a wealthy family did not automatically make him wealthy. Like many who have just graduated from college even today, he had no funds and no income. He famously was considering a career as a clergyman, not a route to riches at any time. As a country parson he could have pottered around doing gentlemanly studies of nature, and eventually inherit from his father, but that was presumably well into the future. The offer of the job on the Beagle was a golden opportunity.
But though the position, being unpaid, was aimed at gentlemen who did not need to support themselves, Darwin himself couldn’t afford the position, which required paying for everything, even the basic cost of his food, out of his own pocket. I took the 30 pounds a year from this site just to have a number. If it’s wrong, again thanks for the correction.
But this is all much beside the point. Darwin did not commission a boat with his - or his father’s - money to do science. The British government had already understood the importance of sudsidizing and encouraging science, as many other governments of the day were also doing, and that governments have wisely continued to do to the present. That’s not at all to deny that being a gentleman who did not have to work for a living was an important basis for many of the scientists of the day, and that world is largely gone. But it’s not quite as simple as that.
While it’s true that the family fortune was in the control of his father, this made little practical difference to the young Charles, who had developed the habit of spending freely over and above his generous allowances knowing that his father would cover it.
While Robert Darwin would have preferred his sons to become doctors like himself who could augment the family’s wealth and was a great one for complaining about their spending, there was never much question of them being forced to pay their way. His greater concern was that they do something useful and respectable, rather than waste their time in hunting and shooting. In the one period where Charles did worry about his financial prospects - when deciding whether to get married after he returned to England - his father expressly assured him that he need not worry. And that was pretty much the arrangement until Robert’s death: he just paid for everything, either in the form of allowances or sums to cover property buying. That was what was already happening with Charles’ elder brother.
The phrasing on the site (fixed link) is:
which is slightly ambiguous. As noted above, Browne states that he was paying £50 a year just for food on board. Everything else - the servant, bed and board on land (which was most of the time), travel, expenses relating to the specimens, etc., etc. - was extra and in total he was spending about an order of magnitude more than this.
Agreed. Nor is it the case that Darwin - even in the years slaving away in the isolation of Down House, living off his investments - could ever have been said to be “working largely alone”. But the family wealth always meant that he had a very different life from the likes of Huxley or Wallace who had to scrabble away in their attempts to be professional biologists.
My understanding is that Darwin did not even sign on as the ship’s naturalist - one Robert McKormick, the ship’s physician, already occupied that role for all intents and purposes. Rather, Darwin signed on, unofficially, as “Captain’s companion”. One of the informal requirements for such a position, seeing as how Fitzroy himself was something of an aristocrat, was someone of a proper social class to dine with the captain (the captain typically did not dine associate sopcially with those lower in his command). The “naturalist” angle was more of an official justification for having a private passenger on board.
Unfortunately for McKormick, however, Darwin had all the advantages of gentlemenhood: he had his own servant, he had the money to hire porters and native colectors, and in general was simply able to do more collecting than was McKormick. McKormick ultimately left the expedition in May 1832, when the Beagle stopped by Rio de Janeiro, at which point Darwin became the de facto naturalist for the remainder of the trip.
Regardless where Darwin got his money from, he did have it, and it contributed signifcantly to his being able to formulate his historic theory.
[nitpick]That should be McCormack.[/nitpick]
This was why the post was unpaid. It wasn’t part of the Admiralty’s mission and was entirely a private arrangement initiated by Fitzroy. Any suitable gentleman could be expected to support themselves.
When Huxley sailed on HMS Rattlesnake, it was as an Assistant Surgeon. Like McCormack’s job, this was a paid position. For Huxley it had to be.
Inevitably, I also get the spelling wrong: it’s actually McCormick.
On top of which, I note that Stephen Jay Gould consistently went for McKormick. However, the more recent Darwin biographers all agree on McCormick as the preferred spelling.