Government vs. Science

[Brian H]

A co-founder of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine deplores the bureaucratic disease that has struck down honest science:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/commentaries_essays/how_govt_corrupts_science.html

It is remarkable that, after all the billions of years that some say we have been evolving, just at this time – in the few years that comprise our current lives – there have risen up among us men so brilliant that they have unlocked the important secrets of the universe, including the secrets of the origins of life itself. Consider how fortunate we all are to be present during this highly improbable event, considering the time intervals involved. What a long way we have traveled from the humility of Isaac Newton!

Are American scientists corrupt? No, they are not!

Is, however, the custom and culture within the American academic institutions in which they work conducive to the free flow of information between our best scientists and the public? No. These institutions have been co-opted by their dependence on government tax funds.

Are our best scientists blameless in this? Again, no. They have watched passively as their profession, which depends upon absolute honesty, is represented by dishonest people in public forums – and many have not spoken in opposition to these misrepresentations. If they permit this to continue, the inevitable backlash will eventually come. When that happens, the true scientists will suffer right along with the pseudoscientists – a reward they both will richly deserve.

Government money is a poisoned apple.

[Aeronaut]

It goes downhill from there. I just found this in a paid ad while testing this week’s mailing:

http://www.energyandcapital.com/aqx_p/18938?gclid=CNO38aePp6ECFQohDQodaHLYDA .

[Tulse]

And we all know how sterling the research done by private pharmaceutical companies is.

And you can be damn sure that the only reason we have any free flow of information among scientists is because their research is paid for publicly — no private companies would want their material spread to competitors.

[Aeronaut]

Tulse wrote: And we all know how sterling the research done by private pharmaceutical companies is.

And you can be damn sure that the only reason we have any free flow of information among scientists is because their research is paid for publicly — no private companies would want their material spread to competitors.

If I’m helping fund that science, why are universities so uptight about their intellectual property rights, and why do SpringerNet, IEEE, and IOP want $30 per article? I think if their really is any flow of information between scientists, it’s informal or the result of some of them changing jobs. Hopefully I’m misunderstanding this…

[Tulse]

Aeronaut wrote: If I’m helping fund that science, why are universities so uptight about their intellectual property rights, and why do SpringerNet, IEEE, and IOP want $30 per article?

The problem with article costs is the private publishers, and not the government. The open access publishing movement has not come from private companies, but primarily from university researchers.

I think if their really is any flow of information between scientists, it’s informal or the result of some of them changing jobs. Hopefully I’m misunderstanding this…

Journals are where a lot of the free flow of information happens. If researchers were paid for discoveries by purely private companies, there wouldn’t be such journals period, as there is no incentive for private companies to share proprietary information. It is only because universities traditionally have been open with research, and uninterested in asserting control over findings, that we have such a tradition of open discussion of research results. Of course, as you note that tradition is changing as universities realize they can patent and make money off of research findings….

[Aeronaut]

Thanx, Tulse. What journals would you recommend that don’t charge for membership/ access? The 3 I listed above seem to pop up a lot in my searches as the most viable looking result.

[Tulse]

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) publishes a number of very well-respected open-content journals, although their work is all in biological sciences. PLoS is one of the leaders in the movement to open-source research. And the venerable arXiv.org pre-print archive has been around for over two decades, offering pre-prints of articles primarily in physics, math, and computer science.

Journals are definitely a barrier to free access to research findings, but the academic community is rapidly questioning why, in the age of the Internet, they are still giving publishers their work for free and letting them make money from it.

[Brian H]

Tulse wrote: And we all know how sterling the research done by private pharmaceutical companies is.

And you can be damn sure that the only reason we have any free flow of information among scientists is because their research is paid for publicly — no private companies would want their material spread to competitors.

Considering there are many thousands of compounds tested and rejected for each that shows promise, and that full validation trials etc. set back the company by hundreds of millions (much of that due to heavy bureaucracy), there’s some reason for being protective.

In any case, you seem unaware that the purpose of a patent is to DISCLOSE the information in return for limited periods of protection in its use.

As for free flow of information, compare the frustration, and even lawsuits demanding info, over at talk-Polywell (government funded) vs. the openness of LPP and FFS (privately funded). Here are regulars’ comments over there:

I am still convinced that the Polywell has a more sound physics in respect to LPP hypothesis. Yet I have to take my hat off to the accomplishments and openness of LPP people.

They are burning the ground in their experiments, and if Eric Lerner is right they might beat anyone else to accomplish Fusion.

i was about to agree and say, i really like the frequent updates on their site at present (Dr Nebel take note).

[Tulse]

Brian H wrote:
Considering there are many thousands of compounds tested and rejected for each that shows promise, and that full validation trials etc. set back the company by hundreds of millions (much of that due to heavy bureaucracy), there’s some reason for being protective.

Of course there is, but that is the antithesis of open research — in other words, you seem to be agreeing that, in this case, corporations stifle free exchange of research (for perfectly understandable competitive reasons). My point was simply that you can’t expect private companies concerned with profits to be open with research that has competitive implications.

As for free flow of information, compare the frustration, and even lawsuits demanding info, over at talk-Polywell (government funded) vs. the openness of LPP and FFS (privately funded).

I think the critical difference is that the Polywell research is funded by the military. I certainly would not expect that all military research would be presented openly.

And, to be honest, while I am personally delighted that LPP has made so much information freely available, if it were a regular publicly-held company and I were a stockholder, I’d be pretty appalled at the amount of disclosure and the possible competitive advantage that such might give to other, better funded competitors.

[Dr_Barnowl]

If the military are truly there to provide peace, they could do much worse than release the schematics of a working polywell reactor to the world. And then pull out of oil-rich eastern nations.

[vansig]

Open research is about admitting that you don’t have the resources to do the whole thing, yourself.
In this realm, competing research is conducted by adversaries, racing to the same goal.

It’s expensive to conduct research, and if not well-protected, relatively easy to steal it. but if a business desires to patent an invention, it wants to show that the invention is: novel, useful, and non-obvious. So presenting the problem to be solved, information about the market, and even partly disclosing your research direction can be useful, since it promotes healthy discussion and may also attract investors. You just don’t want to disclose too early, or arbitrarily.

Since patents are only valid for 17 years, timing is critical. I still have plans for inventions I thought of twenty years ago, that were infeasible to build at the time. And only today are such things becoming possible.

So work in-progress is jealously guarded. You may not know that a particular direction is going to bear fruit. and everyone has their ear to the ground, listening to the discussion. When another team gets close to your territory, you know it’s time to publish.

[Tulse]

vansig, what you say may be true for commercial research where the goal is to patent, but isn’t the case for much of basic academic research, which often doesn’t have direct commercial application.

[Rezwan]

i was about to agree and say, i really like the frequent updates on their site at present (Dr Nebel take note).

Glad to see SOMEONE thinks our updates are frequent : )

The real problem here is the black swan effect, and that everyone wants to be in on the black swan hit, and not suffer through the bulk of misses (research which reveals “nothing”, also known as “failure”).

There are a lot of ways the pursuit of scientific innovation could be improved in our world. A full factor brainstorm would be constructive. Coordinating collaboration is a major challenge. When is competition best leveraged, what can help reduce the risk and isolation, etc. etc.

[Aeronaut]

Rezwan wrote:

i was about to agree and say, i really like the frequent updates on their site at present (Dr Nebel take note).

Glad to see SOMEONE thinks our updates are frequent : )

The real problem here is the black swan effect, and that everyone wants to be in on the black swan hit, and not suffer through the bulk of misses (research which reveals “nothing”, also known as “failure”).

There are a lot of ways the pursuit of scientific innovation could be improved in our world. A full factor brainstorm would be constructive. Coordinating collaboration is a major challenge. When is competition best leveraged, what can help reduce the risk and isolation, etc. etc.

Research could be a lot faster and more successful in the long run by transparently recording all experiments’ history of development, funding, data, and conclusions for other researchers to analyze.

Consider onion optimization, where most won’t be obvious wins, yet each lab could see which experiments they’d tweak slightly different. Say 5 levels of confidence, where 1 community’s lab/ incubator might like the security of Level 5 “in the bag” confirmation, while aggressive toolmakers may be willing to fund Level 0 or Level 1 experiments at the nearly basic level.

This could cut Edison’s 1,000 filament experiments to perhaps 30 to 100. Savings in time and capital would be stunning. And heads-up companies could ride a decades long tide of competitive advantages by taking the chance that Moore’s Law will apply to aneutronic fusion in this decade- and then making it happen.

Once the business press does a 180 back to our self-reliant roots, a LOT of the world’s problems are going to become a lot easier to manage.

[Brian H]

A significant difference with LPP here, which some commenters don’t seem to have taken on board, is that Eric’s overriding purpose is to get cheap fusion power deployed widely ASAP. By anyone. The point of holding tight control of the FF patents in this case is purely protective — to make sure they can’t be acquired and suppressed. I stand to be corrected, but if another lab were to “steal” his ideas and come up with a functioning generator first and begin promoting and selling it, I doubt very much that Eric/LPP would sue to block them.

So the risk of a bigger better funded corporation stealing a march, so to speak, would be limited to whether it attempted to gain and exploit a monopoly position.

The best and most likely scenario remains, IMO, that LPP comes up with a working prototype and licenses the design to everyone who has the capacity to duplicate/manufacture it, with approximate/reasonable restrictions on over-pricing. That blows the game wide open.

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