I was intentionally against science because I kept hearing how they used back then was alot like 15 million to measure the milk enzymes in a cows hair and other stupid stuff. But I have changed.
Because it’s run by business majors
That and the staunch anti-science from the religious right, and you’ve got your answer.
So historically the US government has been a dominant source of funding for basic science. Various government agencies offer grants to scientists to study things that are very “pure science” like the example you gave, to very “applied science” such as ways to use that basic science info to aid national security. The US government funding of basic science grew out of the manhattan project (an example of basic and applied science serving a national security application).
Vannevar Bush, who helped initiate the manhattan project, advocated for a significant role in funding science by the US government after WW2. He’s the reason the US has historically been a titan in scientific research. PhDs from other countries wanted to move to the US because that’s where the best opportunities to continue their research were. This was true even just a few years ago.
The current overhaul and politicization of basic science and the government organizations that fund it has significantly damaged that strength in the US. There have been catastrophic funding cuts in basic science. Many young researchers are looking for jobs in private industry (non research) or moving to other countries. We will suffer the consequences of these cuts for years at a minimum.
It’s important to remember that the US government isn’t a democracy – it’s not ruled by or for the populous. The interest of the elites who control the government is first and foremost to retain and accumulate power. That’s not to say that elites are anti-technology, but rather they’re more interested in avoiding taxes and securing technologies for themselves than in recklessly funding wide spread innovations. The current system does that by taxing the bottom 95% of the population to fund basic research at universities (which even accept poor people as scientists) then allowing elites to attempt to control the innovations as they walk them the last mile to implementation. Of-course, these attempts at control have had a uncomfortable fail rate - often spawning new oligarchs. It seems like some portion of the current batch of oligarchs is having second thoughts about allowing any innovation at all, and thus going after universities.
I should emphasize that not all of this is conscious reasoning, rather there’s a lot of “this direction is not in my self interest therefore it’s bad” reasoning from oligarchs, which manifest in a system that effectively operates under this reasoning. Of-course, let’s not pretend the oligarchs are stupid either. I have no doubt that this is a conscious and deliberate push for some of them. Doesn’t really matter.
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Also, I’m a structural biologist, so let me judge your research proposal: 15M funds 6 people for 4 years, and understanding the molecular structure of enzymes is really important for drug development. Proteins (including enzymes) often come in families with related functions, so understanding “milk enzymes in cows hair” might actually shed a lot of light on an entire family of enzymes with broad biological effects. In fact studying many variants across many species is a component of how we got alphafold and the current claude attempt to compete with pharmaceutical companies to develop small-molecule drugs.
A lot of people think like you used to. Also, plenty actively don’t want citizens to be smarter, whtether they say that out loud or not. The former are generally the ones voting in the latter. Because people who question what you say don’t necessarily go along with you. They just want people to believe what they say, no questions asked.
What is always burnt into my mind is I think it was NDT who showed a dollar bill and used a red pen/marker and the amount that goes to nasa and scientist. But as a society we cannot invest in scientific groups to better society. We just throw money at these corps and expect results. But that money goes from top down. Trust me I know it’s why I lied on my taxes for like 10 years and gave the money to my uncle who is a safety coordinator. The thing is I don’t get is how he went from a pepsi saleman/deliver for 15 years to nasa. And how they gave him a safety coordinator job.
You are asking the right questions. You’re even drawing the right conclusions. Keep pushing.
There have been limits on funding science just for science’s sake. The oversight has been the peer review process: other scientists reviewing grant requests on merit, reviewing methodologies and findings on merit, checking the math, and building of reputations of researchers among peers. If you do good science, you get more grants. If you do shoddy science, you get called out and you get fewer grants.
Yes there was abuse, yes there was waste, yes there was nepotism, yes there was duplication. This was friction on the system, but the system fundamentally worked. It needed to be adjusted, not shattered.
Now the whole thing is being actively upended, and a veritable politburo is being established to decide what science gets funded. Politics entered the chat. Its chilling research, and we in the US are losing one of the benefits of our society, such as it is.
It used to! When we were terrified of the Soviet Union and there was some intense competition between our engineers and their engineers. Lockheed and PG&E and Raytheon all wanted university grown STEM folk.
But then the USSR broke up and the US was way ahead of all the rival nations, and the government lost interest.
See also the GOLDEN AGE OF ISLAM.
Because the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit, and publicly-funded science is harder to exploit.
See that’s what I don’t get. Not calling you a liar or anything cause I hear the argument a lot. But if they are aligned with the government wouldn’t it behoove the government to dump a shitton of money into these companies scientists so that way they can come up with more drugs, generic or name brand, and the companies would have about 100 year life span.
Companies that are leading the market are already profiting from existing science, and new discoveries threaten to disrupt the market—it’s often in their interest to prevent new advances from coming to market even if they’d be the ones selling them. (Say, a cheap vaccine that prevents a disease they sell highly profitable drugs to treat.)
If they make these potentially disruptive advances privately, they can patent them to preemptively keep anyone else from introducing them. But if the advances were made using public funding, they have to make the case that whatever they do with it is in the public interest (which can conflict with their own).
The more important factor isn’t the funding or lack thereof, it’s the ability to control the results.
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Because long-term strategy in the current US basically doesn’t exist. Voters want the results immediately and if they don’t see them they don’t vote the representative back in. The next representative wants to do their own thing and thus tears down what has been done to put their own stamp on it.
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companies don’t want to do the starting line work that leads to a product. Failure rate is too high. Companies come in once government and academic scientists have developed things to a greater point. The guy who invented the blue led did a whole bunch of experiments in direct contradiction to his company execs following the results of an academic scientist.
Generics are not anything new, they can only get made once a patent has run out.
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The largest “public” scientific institutions in the United States are the national labs. Most famously, Los Alamos, but also INL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, NREL, NTL and some others I am forgetting. From my experience, their mission tends to be less aligned with “doing science to benefit people,” and more aligned with, “doing science that’s too expensive or risky for businesses to do themselves.” Or, “doing science for ‘national security.’” You see very much the same thing at NASA, where they consult and do science on technologies expressly to benefit the business.
In comparison, the largest scientific institution in Europe is CERN, and is rather equivalent to the US’s national labs. Though I have no direct experience with CERN, from what I have seen from their experiments and practices, they tend to do science more for the sake of science compared with the American labs.
Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of the topic, but the point still stands, “the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit.”
To be fair in absolute numbers I believe the US out spends the EU (for now) in education and research combined.
Back in the 50s scientists were respected and society listened to the smart people. Then came Fox News and the right wing media sphere, which convinced people living in poor, rural areas that they were smarter than the scientists and black people were trying to mooch off them.
