File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/current, message 27


Date: Wed, 14 May 1997 20:47:41 PST
Subject: Re: M-I: Kasparov's defeat
From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant)


Yesterday's New York Times had an interesting article 
concerning the role that government investment in scientific
research has played in industrial development in the
United States. 
  
Louis in his post on Kasparov's defeat quite correctly notes that it is 
a myth to believe that the rise of great computer firms like IBM or
Microsoft
is mainly an expression of 'free market' capitalist entrepreneurialism
rather than "... a study in the benefits of privatizing technology
created
in the public sphere."  The article I am forwarding IMO strongly
supports Lou's point.

                        James F.


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Subject: Study Finds Publicly Financed Science Is a Pillar of Industry
Date: Tue, 13 May 1997 19:26:02 -0700
Message-ID: <337922BA.F77-AT-gis.net>

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Study Finds Publicly Financed Science Is a Pillar of Industry By WILLIAM J. BROAD A new study has found strong evidence that publicly financed scientific research plays a surprisingly important role in the breakthroughs of industrial innovation in the United States, suggesting that impending cuts in the federal science budget might eventually hurt the economy. The study, prepared for the National Science Foundation by a private research group, found that 73 percent of the main science papers cited by American industrial patents in two recent years were based on domestic and foreign research financed by government or nonprofit agencies. Private companies paid for the rest. Such publicly financed science, the study concluded, has turned into a "fundamental pillar" of industrial advance.

Advocates of federal spending on scientific research are seizing upon the study to bolster their position. The science foundation finances much basic research, and its officials acknowledged that they had questioned the wisdom of cuts in the science budget. But they said the patent study was part of continuing research on science trends that began long before the current push to trim the deficit.

Democrats and Republicans are generally united in earmarking government financing for science for sizable cuts as part of a plan to reduce the federal deficit and balance the budget by 2002. This year, the federal research and development budget is about $65 billion. Budget analysts say the Clinton administration wants to shrink it 14 percent in the next five years, and Republicans want to reduce it by about 20 percent.

The study, to be published in Research Policy, a bimonthly journal based at the University of Sussex in England, a leading forum for this kind of analysis, is starting to circulate in the United States in manuscript form. Science policy groups say no previous study has addressed the intellectual foundations of American industry in such depth and with such rigor.

"It's a watershed," said Dr. Martin A. Apple, executive director of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, a policy group in Washington that represents 65 science organizations and lobbies for more money for science. "It's a wake-up call for federal investment policies."

Charles F. Larson, executive director of the Industrial Research Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington that represents large companies, said the report would be widely influential. "It's going to make people realize something they should have known all along -- that public investment in academic science through government-funded programs pays dividends to society," he said. "It pays off handsomely."

On the other hand, budget cutters seem unlikely to find the report so persuasive as to set aside the ax. They argue that much fat can be sliced from the federal science budget without damaging high-quality work at universities.

Basic science, the kind that pursues fundamental knowledge for its own sake with no clear vision of how it might be practically applied, has long been considered a prime source of military and economic power. Yet the exact relationship between science and innovation has been murky since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In recent years, as private industry in the United States has grown big and sophisticated enough to surpass the government in overall spending on research, some conservatives have suggested that public support of basic research is passe. Publicly financed research gave birth to high-technology industry, they say, but it is no longer so important. The new study sharply contradicts that view. It examined one of the most vivid expressions of industrial creativity: patents, the main way that companies and inventors reap commercial rewards from their bright ideas. Once granted, patents give the holder a monopoly to produce, sell or profit from an invention for a period of years. Patentable ideas include new kinds of machines, methods, processes and material compositions, including drugs and computer chips. The Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that patents could also be granted for genetically engineered forms of life.

The new study, the most thorough examination to date of the scientific foundation of American patents, strongly suggests that public science lies at the heart of most commercial innovation. The study is the culmination of 17 years of patent investigations by CHI Research Inc., a consulting firm in Haddon Heights, N.J., that analyzes contemporary science for industrial and government clients around the world.

Its customer for the most recent round of patent work is the National Science Foundation, a federal agency. The foundation's budget is up about 1.5 percent this year, to $3.27 billion from $3.22 billion, an increase that almost matches inflation.

CHI Research, starting in 1980, while working for the National Science Foundation and other clients, began examining the role played by research in American patents. The main clues came from the scientific reports that patents cite on their front pages as evidence of their intellectual foundations.

For instance, patent No. 4,565,785, assigned to Harvard University in 1986, lists 52 scientific reports in journals that include Science and Nature. The patent shows how bacteria can be turned into tiny factories for the production of insulin, human growth hormone, interferon and other pharmacologically active agents.

An early CHI Research study examined patents issued from 1975 to 1986 and found that patented inventions were increasingly drawing on pure science, as measured by the growing number of citations of articles in scientific journals.

The new study, by Dr. Francis Narin, Kimberly S. Hamilton and Dominic Olivastro, sharpened this analytic tool by investigating the sources of the scientific reports. It tracked down and analyzed the institutional ties of the authors, which patent citations ignore.

The CHI Research team examined the science references on the front pages of American patents in two recent periods -- 1987 and 1988, as well as 1993 and 1994 -- looking at all the 397,660 patents issued.

It found 242,000 identifiable science references and zeroed in on those published in the preceding 11 years, which turned out to be 80 percent of them. Searches of computer databases allowed the linking of 109,000 of these references to known journals and authors' addresses. After eliminating redundant citations to the same paper, as well as articles with no known American author, the study had a core collection of 45,000 papers. Armies of aides then fanned out to libraries to look up the papers and examine their closing lines, which often say who financed the research.

That detective work revealed an extensive reliance on publicly financed science. For instance, biomedical papers cited the National Cancer Institute for financial support 7,970 times, the American Cancer Society 2,131 times and the March of Dimes 293 times. Physics papers cited the National Science Foundation 1,072 times, the Navy 708 times, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 255 times and the Sloan Foundation 22 times. Some research projects were financed by multiple public agencies.

The overall role of public support was impossible to tally because some papers made no mention of their source of funds. That was especially true for reports from industrial laboratories, where the source of funds was often implied but not stated.

Further narrowing its focus, the study set aside patents given to schools and governments and zeroed in on those awarded to industry. For 2,841 patents issued in 1993 and 1994, it examined the peak year of literature references, 1988, and found 5,217 citations to science papers.

Of these, it found that 73.3 percent had been written at public institutions -- universities, government labs and other public agencies, both in the United States and abroad. American institutions represented 43.9 percent of that figure and foreign ones accounted for 29.4 percent.

Over all, only 20.4 percent of the science citations in American industrial patents referred to papers from American industry, and 6.3 percent referred to reports from foreign industry. Even International Business Machines -- famous for its research prowess and numerous patents -- was found to cite its own work only 21 percent of the time.

"Regardless of how the data are arranged," the study said, "it is quite clear that public science plays an overwhelming role in the science base of U.S. industry."

The study found that industry's dependence on all science was soaring. It compared the number of science citations, both public and private, in the two study periods and found that they had almost tripled.

The rise, the study concluded, is "truly remarkable, and indicative of a rapidly increasing dependence of patented technology upon contemporary science."

Expert reaction to the study so far is favorable. David C. Mowery, a business professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies technology policy, said the CHI Research team "has gone further than anybody else" in probing the inspiration behind patents.

Wesley M. Cohen, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who studies American industry, said some experts might question whether the rise in citations was simply based on changing habits of source documentation, for instance, as the advent of electronic databases eased the tracking of journal articles, or actually indicated an increasing reliance.

But, he added, his own research, involving nearly 1,500 interviews with industrial lab managers, suggested the rise was real. "The effects of academic research may be much more pervasive across industries than previously thought," he said.

Larson of the Industrial Research Institute said, "Industry depends considerably on academic science for new knowledge."

Narin, the lead author of the patent study, said he hoped his work would help dull the budget ax. "Look at the things that are coming out of the research pipeline," he said. "We'd be fools to close it down."


Other Places of Interest on the Web
  • National Science Foundation
  • CHI Research

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