Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, Proctor and Gamble, General Electric, 3M… these are all exceptions?
As mentioned upthread a lot of biotech research is government funded. I’ve applied to jobs at companies that get by entirely on NIH grants, like this one for example. The NIH gives boatloads of money to individuals and companies that conduct research that may be of benefit to public health. There was a public effort to decode the human genome, though it got sort of clobbered by Celera, but the management there decided to play nice and say that officially both operations finished at the same time.
I once attended (as an outside vendor) an internal conference at Proctor & Gamble where the keynote speaker talked about the absolute necessity of the company performing its own basic research. His message:
Failure to perform basic research in-house would guarantee that the next major breakthrough in the field - and there will be one - will be made by somebody else. Probably the competition. The long-term survivability of the company depends on it, despite the high costs.
Universities do a lot of basic research where there is no guarantee of having success that will make money. Businesses do some basic research but it’s mostly the really big places like IBM, Dow, GE, etc. that can afford basic research.
It’s common for a university professor or other staff member to quit and found a company based on research they did that was funded by their school. Silicon Valley is full of places that started out that way.
This is precisely why only the government is capable of funding fundamental research effectively. Only a foolish business would poor money into strange projects that aren’t succeeding and yet many of the great discoveries aren’t made because the researcher set out to find them. What you call a failure of government research, is the success that is unique to what the government can do. By the time a business gets into something without government help, most of the risk has been absorbed.
If you want to make a new polymer, you have to start with the knowledge that is published in journals and 99% of that is funded through government money. The big chemical compasnies are rarely producing anything that is actually new. All they are doing is tweaking what the publicly funded research has found.
Antibiotics are a great example of something that wont be worked on without public money. Antibiotics are always a monetary loss for a pharmeceutical company (cite: C&E News April 14th 2008). It takes billions of dollars to come up with a new class of antibiotics, but your patent only lasts so long. Ironically, with antibiotics, the more you use them, the less effective they become due to antibiotic resistance. Missuse accelorates resistance, but resistance is inevitable. The only way to keep your antibiotic effective is to not use it and take a loss on the billions you poured into it. For this reason, ony two new classes of antibiotics have been discovered in the past 40 years: lipopeptides and oxazolidinones.
Currently, the government is pouring money into nanotube research like mad, so any company doing nanotube research is pretty much guaranteed to be using government money. Conductive polymers and the best way to make them is a product of government funding. Most of your synthetic reactions used to make drugs and polymers are from university research.
For small businesses doing research government funding is essential. I won’t get into the specifics, but my wife is working for a company that is getting millions in grant money. When the research is finished, their main customers will be Intel and 3M.
You don’t have any idea whether or not these companies are getting government funding.
Of course, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t using government money to do it.
Don’t get me wrong. There are types of research that are suitable for private industry, but most of these things fall under the category of tweaking existing technology. The real technology leaps are dependant on public funding.
If the military invents something, they cannot patent it, they must give it away for free. Not sure if that is true for the government as a whole.
That’s not true at all. The military can and does take out patents on things all the time. (Richard Feynman talks about this in his Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.) What the military cannot do, is charge an excessive fee for the patent license (private corporations do it all the time). The military also has the authority to yank anyone’s patent if they feel that it will enhance national security in some manner by the government taking control of the patent.
I guess I read bad info, because I read that somewhere not long ago. I read it because we have a local Army office that is involved with getting their technology used by others. Guess you can’t trust the papers now.
It all depends upon who does it and what it is. There are some things that the military doesn’t want patents on, because without a patent on it, people are more likely to adopt the technology. In some cases, if a technology is developed jointly with a company or an educational institution, the military will allow the other party to own the patent.
Quoth Bijou Drains:
You seem to be under the peculiar misconception that schools fund research. In fact, to a large extent, it’s the other way around: Research funds schools. A researcher at a university gets funding whereever e can find it (usually some government agency or another), and then the university skims a large chunk off the top (sometimes as high as 50%) to cover “overhead”. If the researcher teaches, e might get paid by the university for that, but that’s a separate job, and a significant number of professors don’t get paid one cent by their institution, relying entirely on so-called “soft money” from grants.
Weather forecasting.
Yes, I am well aware that some professors bring in a lot of research money at big schools. But as you agree they also are paid by the university to teach. I also know some professors are 100% funded by grants and don’t teach, my wife used to work with some. Of course it’s also true that a big part of the research money they bring in is money from the federal government. (In some fields it’s 100%, in others they can get private money)