Silicon Valley got little of any of it’s research money from the government. Sematech was a joke among anyone who works in the industry.
]quote]How much does Medicare pay for the treatment of Alzheimer’s patients? I bet you could do a good business case for funding stem cell research on that basis alone.
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Then why aren’t any business jumping on it? Perhaps you could put a company together and scoop everyone on this investment.
Anyway, we probably shouldn’t hijack this thread into a discussion about public vs pricate funding. It just seems to me that if public funding is the way to go, then let’s just nationalize the whole economy and reap the benefits. Otherwise, let’s understand why this research is unique in its need for public funding. Why is this different from the reasearch for new drugs, for which vast amount of private money seems to be available?
Take one step back. Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist if scientists doing (publicly financed) pure research hadn’t studied the band structure of silicon and figured out how to use that knowledge to make transistors.
As a friend of mine once put it, without basic research we’d still be using really well-engineered steam engines. There’s some hyperbole there, but also a lot of truth. With stem cells, the issue is not just applying what we already know to new applications, it’s learning what is happening on a fundamental level so that we can do things we never would have thought of based on what we know now.
Right. That’s why Bell Labs and IBM among others contributed good people to Sematech. I never worked for them, but I was engaged in some of the organizational meetings for my area in Austin, before they had their building, and in some Sematech sponsored studies that have been very important. The ITRS has been very important also. It has outlived its usefulness, I’ll agree, but back when we were concerned about the Japanese eating our lunch Sematech was very useful.
Anyhow, you miss my point. 10 or 20 years from now, assuming that stem cell research pans out and there are products, there should be very little government funding. That is for stuff too risky, too far out for business to fund. That is why big government initiatives in semiconductors makes no sense today.
Ever been involved in making industrial research funding decisions? I have. Here’s how we did it in Bell Labs back when we thought we were a monopoly. There were three classes - development, with results expected 6 months to 2 years out, applied research, with results 2 - 5 years out, and basic research, with results, if any, five years out. This was the Area 11 stuff. As should be obvious, the basic research stuff has dried up, except for monopolies and pseudo-monopolies like Microsoft and Intel. Why would a company put a lot of money into the very risky area of stem cell research. It’s risky in two ways - that you won’t get results, and, if you do, someone will beat you to productizing the results. (Think Xerox PARC.) I am sure that there is research going on, but nowhere near the amount needed.
Strawman. Industry does a great job in productizing and doing applied research - the two year out stuff, much, much better than the government. I’ve observed attempts by the national labs to work with industry and productize discoveries, and have not been impressed.
And I wouldn’t be that impressed with industry all the time. The funding processes I’ve been involved with at NSF (yes, they invite industry people) are much more rigorous than funding processes for Wetern Electric when we were a monopoly - which consisted of a bunch of big execs coming to listen to a few talks, sign a check, and spend the rest of the day playing golf. Ah, the good old days.
I can’t speak for Bell Labs or IBM, but I’ve worked in Silicon Valley all my adult life, in the semiconductor business, and I saw the kind of people the big Semi companies (Intel, AMD, National, etc) sent to SEMATECH. They were paper shufflers more than researchers.
Yes. quite a bit.
While I still don’t accept your premise that government must fund “basic research”, is it really true that stem cell research falls in this category? And what about patents? IIRC, the guys at PARC didn’t patent their ideas, and Steve Jobs just walked out of his visits there with much of what he needed to get Apple started.
Why is it a strawman to ask why stem cell research is different from drug research? Including the approval process, bringing a drug to market takes much longer than the 2 years you say that private industry can handle.
It appears that fear of future government regulation is a key impediment to private research in this field. Not a lot of detail here, but I’d be curious if someone can add more flesh to that assertion.
Well, the Mac, not Apple. If you remember there were plenty of law suits about windowing systems. Metcalfe made a bunch on Ethernet. The point is that unless you don’t let your researchers publish anything or talk to anyone, there is going to be a lot of stuff that slips out before anything can be patented. You’d also have to discover something that the patent would protect 100%. I suspect the stem cells research will yield methods, not products, and the methods can be used by lots of people. It is not 100% sure, but it has to get factored into the risk assessment. I know that I used to go to SRC meeings (no government funding at all) when I worked for companies in SRC. Now that I don’t, I can learn pretty much everything useful that I would have learned in SRC.
The other factor is that government funding lets more companies get at the research, which leads to competition, more innovation and lower prices.
The window is time to something productizable, not time to market. I wouldn’t call the FDA approval process research - there is risk, sure, but no new discoveries have to be made. For computers, figuring out a new architecture or pipeline is research, but the process of developing a microprocessor, which takes a lot more than two years, is not research. The difference is that in X years you know you have something you can sell (if you didn’t screw up too badly) whereas in research you may or may not have anything at all. Funding research is a bit like venture capitalism: you know you’re going to mostly have flops, but the winners give you a good ROI.
I’m sorry if I missed this point in any of the previous responses (I’m getting tired, and the quality of my fast-paced checking deteriorates accordingly), but I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard (admittedly, talk radio) there’s also great hope for the use of stem cells sourced from adults, and that in fact they adapt to the genetic reassignment (i.e., potential curative properties) BETTER than the infantile cells. Can this be confirmed?
Saying that basic research should be federally funded is a far cry from nationalizing the economy. It’s not like all research in medicine is done privately, after all. Drug companies have been criticized lately for not being very innovative, especially big ones. The dividing line here would be a little different, since the drug companies have to go through the approval cycle, which might not pay if a lot of other companies are going to come out with the drug at the same time. You know, thinking everything would be perfect if industry does it is just as unreaslistic as the socialist who thinks everything would be perfect if government does it.
I haven’t heard of anything like this, and I suspect this is politically motivated rumor struggling to become fact. (I’m not saying that you personally are doing this.) Or, perhaps the source is grant proposals asserting that they can do just as well, in order to get funding on the only legal avenue available. You have to be very optimistic in grant applications to get funding.
In any event, even if there are scientists who believe that adult sourced stem cells have as much or more potential than embryonic ones, it doesn’t change the issue. The point of embryonic stem cells is that most scientists agree that they seem to have great potential to solve a wide variety of problems and open up new ways to interact with biological systems. No one can say for sure that some other method will work just as well because no one knows. It’s too early to say. Cutting off the most promising avenue of research right out of the gate because someone somewhere thinks another avenue might work is the height of stupidity, scientifically speaking.
I justed wanted to reiterate this point. There is not a ban on federal research of stem cells in this country OR the funding. President Bush did authorize the study of “already destroyed embryos”. I believe the number of viable cells (that have been reproduced) is in the single digit category. What I don’t know, is how many different cells are needed for long-term basic research.
I would disagree with John Mace about the concept of federal research money. I will grant that governments tend to spend money inefficiently (compared to the private sector) but there is also the concept of recoverable revenue when you think in terms of multi-use funding.
What I mean by multi-use funding is the technology that spills out from one program into another. The transistor, the LASER, etc… I couldn’t even begin to describe the techno-explosion that resulted from just those 2 inventions. When you consider how little money was spent in federal funding of college research and the tax revenue those 2 inventions created it is absolutely the greatest return on investment EVER.
If you consider college funding a purely egalitarian function of government then any return on investment (tax revenue) is pure icing on the cake. There are, of course, the weird “investments” in research we always hear about in the news that make you cringe when writing a check to the IRS. However, stem cell research, combined with the recent achievements in genetic decoding, will surely rock this world in a couple of years.
Agreed. Normally I’m all for shrinking government, but sometimes it takes the public to do big thing. Stem cells, IMHO is one of those projects that we should be going full steam ahead with public funding. I think its that important. It could revolutionize the field of medicine and ‘rock this world’ as you say, in a couple of years.
People seem to be assuming that this research is extremely expensive. Does anyone have any actual facts supporting that stance? I can understand why space exploration is expensive, but why is stem cell research “expensive”? Time consuming, perhaps, but expensive? The only info I found on the subject (per my post above) is that private researches are concerned about potential legislation affecting the legality of their work.
Yep. Bush is vulnerable on this, too. I think the Republicans are grossly underestimating the amount of support there is for stem cell research. This is a truly winning issue for Kerry, and he should emphasize it more.
It really depends on what you mean by expensive. Compared with experimental particle physics, biology is incredibly inexpensive. Compared with not doing any research at all, biology is pretty expensive. You have to pay for salaries and lab space and supplies for each research group you fund, and if you want results you need to fund many research groups. On the scale of the federal budget, it’s peanuts. However, given the fact that years of pure research is needed before applications can be developed, it is probably not viable for private companies to pay for research even remotely comparable to what we would get from public funding. Even if a company did such research, it would be proprietary knowledge, and every future company would have develop the same knowledge and expertise all over again.
Is it? Do you have any figures comparing the cost of building a modern particle accelerator vs a bio-research lab? I’d need to see the nubers to believe your claim-- the more intuitive answer is that the accelerator is more expensive to build, and particle physics is generally more expense than biological research.
Yeah, and buying me a yacht is peanuts when measured against the entire budget. That’s simply not a valid argument, as it’s true of almost anything.
But let’s ask ourselves why the “years of research needed is not viable for a private company” is true (assuming it is) in this particular case. Is there something about the way we structure our laws or our tax code the de-incentivizes companies from doing this type of research? (I already pointed out one obstacle).
Not true at all. Companies license and cross license patents all the time. Besides, you’re assuming only one company would do the research.
We’re not disagreeing here. From your reply, I’m going to assume you misread the word “inexpensive” as “expensive”.
Sorry, I meant to say on the scale of the federal research budget, not total budget. My point being that the cost of federally-funded stem cell research is negligible on the scale of the public research programs we’re already funding, which includes things like particle physics and space exploration, especially when compared with the possible benefits to the public stem cell research may produce.
In my experience, a company’s need to deliver products and make money on short time scales fundamentally hampers their ability to do the open-ended research that yields a comprehensive understanding of how things work and allows for new discoveries. It’s already been shown that publicly funded research works well – why switch? If we have to give tax breaks to companies to get them to do the research, why not just keep the money and do it ourselves, so we can control and guide the research?
I’m asserting that academic research is a far more effective and efficient means of conducting basic research, due to the completely different motivations of companies vs. universities and labs. Academic findings are published and/or publicly presented throughout the research process, and academic researchers constantly learn and build off each other’s research. Researchers working for a private company do not do this.
Granted, companies do collectively fund some academic research, e.g. the Semiconductor Research Corporation. But then we’d have academia doing stem cell research after all, but just making it a lot harder. It’s important enough that we don’t need to put up arbitrary roadblocks.
Which is, well, exactly what he said. Yes, particle physics research is super-mega expensive, and biology research is only expensive.
Investors generally want to see payoffs in a relatively short amount of time (say, within their lifetime). There’s nothing wrong with that. Investors also generally don’t want to fund several competing companies, hoping that one will, some day in the future, pay off. There’s nothing wrong with that, either. Investors do want to fund a company which has a plan to take promising research and turn it into a product. There’s also nothing wrong with that.
Private funding can and should fund applied research. But basic research is another animal. Yes, stem cells are promising for applications down the road, but first we have a LOT to understand about them. That understanding could take a very long time, and it will take the collaboration of hundreds of researchers. And the benefit to be gained is general knowledge and potential, future application–both of which society should be interested in, but private companies are far better served by focusing on applications that are ready or nearly ready to go. Basic science simply works better when it’s a collaborative effort, so it makes sense for it to be funded primarily through the government.
I’d also like to address the existing cell lines issue. Let’s pretend for a moment that all 60 lines promised by Bush were available. That’s 60 individual lines, when we’re seeking to figure out general properties. Would 60 individuals be enough to figure out the occurance of, say, obesity in Americans? Would 60 individuals be enough to figure out the average height of adult males worldwide? Limiting scientists to 60 individuals is, in many cases, pretty much identical to limiting them to zero.
Also, those 60 lines (again, there aren’t actually that many, but we’ll pretend) were made before August of 2001. Would you want to limit auto designers to models made before 1960? Would that serve the progress of automotive engineering? Of course not. Limiting scientists to working with old lines, developed using out-dated procedures, makes moving forward very, very difficult. It’s a policy put into place by someone who does not understand the science involved, for political purposes, which most definitely will hold back the progress of scientists in the US, and, since we’re usually a world-leader in scientific research, will hold back the progress of mankind… unless we can overcome the few who would hold back this research, and base our science policies on science, rather than politics.
