In the FY-2008 omnibus spending bill, the US Congress has decided to zero out all funding for ITER, the international fusion reactor to be built in Cadarache, France. While unilateral withdrawal of US funding for international organisations is hardly news (just ask these guys), this still raises a lot of big question marks over many planned international science projects.
Firstly, US withdrawal from ITER makes it a lot less likely that the ILC, the next-generation international particle collider intended to suceed the LHC, will be built in the US. In fact, since US funding for ILC development has been essentially zeroed out as well, and since the British government recently also did a unilateral withdrawal, shutting down its participation in the ILC project, it is becoming increasingly likely that the ILC might never be built, putting the future of experimental particle physics beyond the LHC, and thus our best shot so far at understanding the innermost workings of the universe, into doubt. It might seem a bit premature to worry about the fate of the LHC's successor when the LHC isn't even online yet, but these kinds of projects take very long (as seen with the LHC) and funding problems can doom them.
Secondly, the purpose of ITER is to develop controlled nuclear fusion as a new source of energy for humanity's future, a clean source of energy that does not cause any direct CO2 emission and only small amounts of very slightly radioactive waste, a sustainable source of energy that does not depend on nearly-exhausted fossil fuel or uranium resources located in politically volatile regions.
If this kind of applied research that has an obvious tangible short-to-mid-term benefit that even politicians should be able to grasp is in danger of losing funding from a nation that only recently declared science to be one of its top priorities, what hope remains for more open-ended fundamental "blue-sky" research, whose benefits are less obvious to outsiders?
But if funding for CERN had been cut 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee might never have developed the WWW, and we would have no Google, no Amazon, no Facebook, no eBay, no scientificblogging.com; millions upon millions of jobs would never have been created, and the world economy would be a couple trillion dollars or so smaller.
If politicians have become so short-sighted that the benefits of having a clean, sustainable energy source within reach are not clear to them, what new WWW will we be missing out on because of the more fundamental research they will never even consider funding?
Comments
Personally, I think the best model is robust government funding of basic research at universities, coupled with effective cooperation with corporations that can transform these discoveries into something that really benefits society. I don't see how government funding has been driving out private funding - companies will sensibly invest in research that promises to benefit their long-term bottom line. Any funding these companies make for researchers like me (there are corporately-funded postdoc fellowships, but there is room for a lot more) is essentially charitable giving - nothing I do is likely to generate intellectual property for them. However, the stuff I do is very likely, in the long term, to lead to something that corporate labs could develop into real intellectual property. As government steps away, the corporate world is unlikely to (and hasn't been) stepping in to fill shortfalls in basic science.
Congress and Clinton determined to double the NIH budget in the late 1990's; that doubling was completed in 2003; but since then, the current administration and Congress have allowed the NIH budgets to stagnate, not even keeping up with inflation. The result is that 9 years ago, universities started investing heavily in training and infrastructure, anticipating the budget doubling, but now there is not enough money to sustain that investment - at a time when expensive but powerful genomic tools are becoming available to rapidly advance our understanding of things like the genetic basis of disease.
It's a real shame that in an era of record US corporate profits, and at a time when the US defense budget is 100 billion more than the rest of the world combined (having increaced from $350 billion in 2002 to $623 billion in the 2008 budget, with only about half of this increase attributable to military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan), we can't rearrange our priorities enough to ensure sustainable funding (government or corporate) for basic scientific research. Recent science budgets in the US, including a flat NIH budget since ~2003, and major cuts for physics projects, are going to adversely impact the long-term health of US basic science.
I don't think corporate profits or funding are evil, nor do I advocate gutting the DoD. But the money for the ITER (~$5billion, shared with France, Japan, and other nations), or the NIH budget (which is currently around $30 billion), or the NSF budget (less than $10 billion I believe) is really small potatoes compared to the kinds of money floating around in our society for the Defense Department or in corporate profits.
Michael White | 01/05/08 | 13:41 PM
I don't see how government funding has been driving out private funding - companies will sensibly invest in research that promises to benefit their long-term bottom line.
Well, that's mixing basic research, which I interpret as having no (immediate) commercial value and regular research. Companies will always invest in research for the bottom line but not in basic research because government involvement drives the cost up - and not just in salaries, which any scientist can attest are not high, but in the 2X amount in government salaries it takes to collect the money to pay the scientists.
I was summarizing my point from a rather long article and I probably didn't make it clearly in a comment. If a Republican congress and Democrat president doubled the NIH and a Republican congress and a Republican president boosted NASA, both parties care about science. It just becomes an issue of prioritization (war funding bad, science funding good, unless you happen to be someone who doesn't care about science) and basic research, with no immediate tangible value, is at risk in government budgets just like it would be at risk of outsourcing if it were commercial.
Oil became a strategic resource precisely because the government did not invest in it but rubber companies, oil companies and automobile companies got together (suspiciously or not is not for me to determine) and made it so for capital gain. The US leads the world in semiconductor research where, in defiance of economics, product prices come down every year, because the government does not control it.
Honestly, if the government were in charge of computer research RAM would be $1000 a GB by now.
For many reasons, I think science should be designated a 'strategic resource' the same way food and oil are. It just becomes an issue of subsidizing it ( like we do with food ) or not (oil) and facing the risk of price increases if global competitors buy it up.
The last time we had huge oil increases, in the late 1970s, the government invested heavily in synthetic fuels. OPEC dropped prices until 6 years later it was not viable and the program was dropped.
If we designate science a strategic resource and task it with energy research in the same way, we can't lose. Either it works and we get new fuel sources, like what Georg is discussing, or at least the price of oil drops again which is at least an economic stopgap.
If the ILC is going to get funded by the US, someone needs to put forth the energy aspects. Dark matter, origin of the universe, etc. are never going to be sexy enough to appeal to politicians.
Hank Campbell | 01/05/08 | 15:09 PM
Most people have no appreciation of just how much hard basic research went into making the modern world. Sure Eddison invented the light bulb... but how many people did it take to invent galss blowing, making wires, discovering and perfecting our understanding of electro magnetism, etc. etc. Things that may not have had an immediate payoff.
What we need is to figure out what the immediate pay off of such a project could be. In WWII the big pay off was getting the Atomic bomb before the Nazi's. Then getting to the Moon before the Communist. Now who do we worry about? Al-Qaeda... they find creative ways to use low tech things. Perhaps if we say that by building the ILC we can prevent terrorism that will get it funded?
I am only half joking.
Hontas Farmer | 01/05/08 | 15:19 PM
But in designating science as a strategic resource to solve some major societal problems like energy (which could involve subsidizing university and corporate research), I think we also need to allocate a certain chunk of money that should go into basic research that should be judged purely on it's scientific merit, and not on whether we can immediately justify it's societal payoff to Congress.
Obviously not all science should fall under that category. But given the projected costs for this kind of research (tens of billions tops), especially compared with what we spend on other things in our society (for example, hundreds of billions in defense spending), I think we should reorient our spending priorities to fund more research projects like the ITER (which, in the big scheme of things is really not that expensive) without worrying about anything more than sheer scientific merit. We're rich enough to afford this, and historically, this strategy has consistently led to big payoffs for society, even in cases where the payoffs were not obvious at the outset. (Quantum mechanics is a great example of an initially obscure and esoteric field that has transformed out society. I don't think that even Bohr in 1913 could have forseen how this field would pay off 50 years later; he would have been hard-pressed to justify his work to the US Congress at the time if he was being funded by the US government.)
Michael White | 01/05/08 | 15:39 PM
But in designating science as a strategic resource to solve some major societal problems like energy (which could involve subsidizing university and corporate research), I think we also need to allocate a certain chunk of money that should go into basic research that should be judged purely on it's scientific merit, and not on whether we can immediately justify it's societal payoff to Congress.
This is my big concern. I am a fiscally conservative guy but I like basic research, and not because I am somewhat in the science field but because I think it has a lot of value. I want some people to get paid to just think and to try off the wall ideas and see if they can come up with something great.
However, government funding of basic research funding was in the 70th percentile when I was born and it's under 60 percent now, so the government still funds a lot, and the private sector funds a lot, but universities fund almost nothing. Government is prone to fashionable/political budget cuts and industry is prone to efficiency outsourcing but universities, many of whom share multi-billion dollar sports agreements and have been allowed to raise prices wantonly thanks to unlimited student loan guarantees, have neither limitation.
They will argue that they don't have enough money but we all know that is suspect. If industry makes science a strategic resource, they will pay for work that is already done. That is an incentive for universities to pitch in more than the <10 percent of basic research they are funding now.
Back to Georg's point, if I had been in charge of ITER funding, I would have pulled out too. Staying in our physics motif, it is a black hole for money. However, the ILC is not out of the question. The mentality change that has to occur is modern scientific arrogance that says 'we have to fund this or we lose our leadership position' (what???) coupled with 'it will cost whatever it costs.' Most congresspeople are there a long time and 1994 and the SSC fiasco is a fresh memory.
A company in India makes a $4 microscope out of bamboo. If we lose our leadership position it will be because other countries find creative ways to do things with the money they have, not because they won't try unless they get unlimited funding.
Hank Campbell | 01/05/08 | 16:32 PM
I think my personal situation is a perfect example of how little universities contribute to day-today research costs. My salary and health benefits are entirely paid for by the NIH, and my research expenses are entirely paid for by the American Cancer Society. Money for our lab space also comes from the ACS and other grants my mentor gets. Basically, the university gets my work for only the small cost of handling my administrative issues (like accounting services for my paycheck and supply orders, human resources people who handle my healthcare, etc).
The same is true of most grad students and postdocs. We get paid crap, the university has to spend little of its own funds, and it benefits from the good science that is done.
Universities do contribute more when it comes to infrastructure (all of the fancy new buildings I've worked in were paid for by university donors or endowments), but they could more for the day-to-day costs of research.
Michael White | 01/05/08 | 17:13 PM
I don't think private funding can replace public funding for fundamental research, since companies are only interested in research that yields marketable results within a relative short timescale (months to maybe a couple of years, not a decade or more). Institutions such as the old Bell Labs or IBM Research were the exception rather than the rule, and I've been told that researchers there have been taken on a much shorter leash now.
Companies are great at developing products, but they rarely if ever discover new fundamental principles that allow for entirely new kinds of products. Giant magnetoresistance has allowed for the iPod, but it was discovered by Grünberg (at a National Lab in Germany) and Fert (at a university in France), not by Apple researchers. Apple probably would almost certainly never have dreamed of supporting their research, since it looked unlikely to bring marketable results at the time. That is one of the important things to keep in mind about fundamental research: you cannot predict where the unexpected will happen -- a truism, but one that has important consequences nevertheless. Companies cannot be expected to fund research that might quite likely "lose" lots of money from their point of view, but a technology-based society cannot afford to give up on fundamental research which has proven time and again that it will ultimately lead to important new technologies (transistors, NMR scans, GPS [which would not work without General Relativity], high-capacity harddiscs and so on). The solution is public funding of fundamental research, both because it has a value of its own (people want to know how the universe works) and for the benefits the research results (or even side effects such as the WWW) will have for society as a whole.
Georg von Hippel | 01/07/08 | 11:22 AM
I don't think private funding can replace public funding for fundamental research, since companies are only interested in research that yields marketable results within a relative short timescale ... Companies are great at developing products, but they rarely if ever discover new fundamental principles that allow for entirely new kinds of products.
I think that's the conundrum. We don't know because we are in our third generation of government-funded basic research so we are predisposed to the belief that it's the only way. But the greatest products in history were created primarily without government money. People got science awards or they created projects with industry money or benefactors.
I just think we should pick a direction and accept the consequences. No political body will ever turn over funding without accountability so budgets are fickle. We should make science a strategic resource the way we do weapons - companies do their own legwork, including the basic research needed to come up with new advancements, and get the prize if they win - or we should get out of it entirely. Companies will do basic research to stay competitive. The downside is we risk outsourcing that way. That's why I say 'accept the consequences.'
The way we are doing it now, collecting money from taxes, gestating it in bureaucracy, then doling it out to universities or companies, is wasteful.
I only applied for a DARPA grant one time - a $32 million pool for a 3D IC software analysis tool. After doing the whole dog and pony show, they gave it to Agilent and IBM, two companies with tens of billions in revenue each that had zero need for DARPA money. 9 months of government-sponsored time wasting. They should have just given the money to Agilent and IBM, since the Stanford professor running the DARPA committee apparently thought no small company could do it, in defiance of the $120 billion semiconductor industry that all started as small companies.
Since then, the number of software companies I made successful - 1. Actual software created by Agilent and IBM from that $30M taxpayer expense - 0.
Basically we don't need to subsidize mega-corporations who only aren't funding basic research because the government is.
Or at least that's what I think. :-) Either way, we should cut out the middleman.
P.S. You're right about Apple - given today's basic research climate they had no reason to look into magnetoresistance and their stock price would not be 10X over what it was 6 years ago if someone hadn't. Yet outside government financing, do companies still want a 10X increase in their stock price? They do. What we should not be doing is basically subsidizing Apple any more than Agilent or IBM.
Hank Campbell | 01/07/08 | 19:34 PM
We seem to have gotten off the topic of basic research and started talking about developing products. Why would a private company (other than perhaps a consortium of energy companies) ever fund nuclear fusion research?
Right now from a hard economic standpoint ITER is not really necessary. We have enough fission fuel that if it were used in Breeder reactors we would not run out of energy for 100's of thousands of years. From a hard economic standpoint it would make sense to stop spending money on controlled fusion and focus on building more fission power plants.
As for the ILC. I don't see corporations ever providing the funding for that kind of device. It would produce nothing that could ever be sold at a profit.
Remember PROFIT is all that drives corporations.
The truth is in the future governments will still be the best patrons of science (as the kings and nobility were in the past). I am afraid that the governments that provide the funding and award the jobs in science in the next couple of generations at least will not include the United States. As a people we have decided that basic research is not a worthy pursuit.
Dont tase me bro
Hontas Farmer | 02/12/08 | 10:34 AM
Congress mostly either funds sizzle nationally or something in their district - and a lot of Congress feels burned by the SSC, which quickly went from $4 billion to $12 before being cancelled.
Can anyone give an estimate on what the ILC would cost? Nope, not a reliable one.
Is that a ton of money? Well, every billion counts (ha ha) and that's why someone needs to find the sizzle.
Environmentalists all along the Delta filed lawsuits over levee improvements and the government was happy to put the money for those into something else - until Hurricane Katrina happened, and then they threw bags of money at a problem engineers had been warning about for 10 years. Katrina was the sizzle.
Global warming can't be the sizzle because it's already been hyped up too much. Fusion is a tough sell since no one can spec out how it will work.
In Should Science Be Designated A Strategic Resource? I tried to lay out the issue, namely whether science should be regarded as a strategic resource the way food and oil are ( without invading Switzerland to take over any labs - ha ha) but I get the feeling that the problem is a deep cultural one.
Somewhere it became fashionable to think that big business was evil, even though the vast bulk of 'basic' research had been done by the private sector prior to the mobilization of WW2 and the 1960s - and we invented a lot of great stuff in the years prior to WW2 - so the fallback was government funding. Perceptually, business had an agenda and government was somehow objective, though that baffles common sense.
But this shows the downside of government funding. Bush has thrown a lot of money at science, the NIH doubled and NASA budgets are up 20% after being down 5% during the president before him but the government won't analyze budgets the way the private sector will.
Private corporations have their own scientists tasked with cutting waste - the government simply assigns a budget based on estimates, and if they look at the LHC and add $9 billion for the ILC, that's a metric but if things go wrong and the budget skyrockets, society has to walk away from the investment or write a blank check. No one in Congress wants to be remembered for writing a blank check on the ILC.
THe private sector never lets it get to that point.
So maybe the issue is not the ILC itself but having the government funding more science than ever, effectively driving the private sector out.
Could anyone convince a private company to fund this? If so, that's the person that should be spearheading the PR campaign to get this built.