I know the legislature has been sitting on it and some there (Chairman Bosley) say the plan needs a lot of work. I’m sure it does. In any event, I hope Beacon Hill can engage in a transparent process considering the life sciences initiative against other investment options – as opposed to cutting deals behind closed doors. This is too much money to mess around with.
Please share widely!
to the order of 1 billion pounds? Just wondering if you’re reading the same bill I am?
đŸ˜‰
Perhaps she should get thee to weight watchers … lol
Sorry, I couldnt resist
Haven’t I read a number of fine comments about how too much stuff on the internets focuses on women’s bodies rather than women’s ideas?
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I happen to agree with those comments.
..about the Queen of England being as rich as Oprah is, using her currency. Maybe. this week, anyway.
I dont get it?
…this proposal sounds similar to what the federal government does with basic scientific research. Much of the FedGov’s research money goes to universities (Hahvahd and MIT probably wouldn’t exist without it), but a lot of it goes to the National Labs, and some goes to private corporations.
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Regarding the US$1B figure, I doubt very seriously that that would be raised or disbursed in just one year. Given government contracting procedures–not only in MA–it is highly likely that it will never come close to reaching that amount.
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Actually, I’ll make a short remark about the Queen’s poundage. I’m not sure, but I suspect that most of it is illiquid–an estimated value of the real estate that she supposedly owns, but that can be expropriated by the British government, just as happened in much of Western Europe.
I havent realy been able to peg your sentiment here.
I think you can already figure out my opinion on the topic of the … umm, efficiency of government funded research in general, but when funding bumps down to the state level …. where do you fall?
Isnt this kind of a way to let corporate america off the hook for paying to do their own research?
In the old days the corps would put some of their profits into R&D and with that, open new markets for new products and the world turned on just fine.
Now they put their profits into their pocket and leave it up to the government to foot the bill for the R&D. If the research yields something useful the corps sell the patent to some behomoth like GE (the “even though we werent there” people) and while wall street cheers the production is farmed out offshore.
Why should taxpayers be the ones taking the risk?
Just my 2 cents ….
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Back in the dark days of 2001-2002, Advanced Cell Technology came to the State House with a stem cell bill. ALL THEY WANTED as a research shield, which would guarantee that their current activities – paid for by the private sector – would not be made illegal. California had passed such a bill, and even though ACT had invented cloning, they were considering having to leave Worcester, as our Legislature was so erratic that they were having trouble attracting private-sector investment.
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Finneran squashed the bill like a bug as immoral. That’s before he went to WORK at the Bio-Tech council, of course.
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NOW, a simple research shield has been replaced with a billion dollar capital investment. Why? Is the industry short of investors?
ACT wanted the Bill but actually a fairly unknown Senator from Newton I think (Cynthia Creem) sponsored the first piece of legislation on Stem Cell, which eventually became the Bill that passed in 2003-4.
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And California voters did pass a state initiative authorising $3 billion in bond funding for life sciences so Massachusetts in using capital to fund this type of research would not be unique in doing so.
…were it not for the US FedGov’s sponsorship, via ARPA (more recently DARPA–the Defense Advance Research Project Agency) you might not be communicating over the Internet today. That was a contract to the private company of Bolt Beranick & Newman (which is no longer in business).
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Were it not for CERN (the European particle science agency), there may be no WWW.
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Were it not for Bell Labs–a government supported monopoly of the old AT&T–it is highly probable that telephony would not be as reliable as it is today.
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Were it not for IBM’s Thomas J. Watson lab (IBM was then a virtual monopoly) and the Bell Labs, you would probably not have the integrated circuits that are powering the computer you’re using today.
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Were it not for the research at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), you might still be using the C> command line interface, instead of windows (windows was invented at Xerox PARC). They were financed by Xerox’s presumed government-facilitated monopoly over copiers, even while the jackasses in the DoJ’s Antitrust Department was attacking them.
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I haven’t even gotten to the FedGov’s support for the National Institutes of Health.
Do you support or oppose corporate welfare?
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http://www.bluemassg…
…Wal-Mart purports to perform basic scientific research, I’ll sit up and listen. I haven’t noted that they had.
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Try again.
Seems to me that they have developed and implemented a means for many to cut their grocery and sundry exepnditures by half, producing more economic benefit than a trillion dollar boondoggle particle accelerator.
…apply existing technology to merchandising. They did no basic research. There’s a difference between basic research and even applied research.
…were it not for the development of computer technology, much of which was supported by government, Wal-Mart would not have been in a position to control inventories and shipments;
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were it not for the development of communications technologies (shipments, billing systems, etc), much supported by government regulated monopolies such as Bell Labs, Wal-Mart would not have been in a position to control shipments;
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and, were it not for the development of tax incentives, by which localities (cities and towns) bid for the opportunity to have a Wal-Mart in their environs, Wal-Mart would never have been in a position to prosper.
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Now, let’s look at your little snide remark. It is obvious that you know little if anything about basic science. Basic science is not something like that described in James Burke’s public television series Connections–which, although interesting has been widely lampooned. Basic science oftentimes leads to dead ends, and that’s why competitive private industry isn’t going to undertake it. But competitive private industry has to rely on its successful results.
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I’m sorry if you don’t understand that, but apparently you don’t.
I only reacted because you seem to support that absurd white elephant boondoggle in Texas as evidence of “commitment to science.” The only greater waste of “science” money than the supercollider is funding NASA.
…funding of basic science oftentimes leads to advances in applied science, which, in turn, leads to development of products. Not necessarily directly, but certainly indirectly.
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The superconducting-supercollider (the “Texas boondoggle”) had nothing to do with science; it had everything to do with politics. I’m sure that you are aware of just exactly why the SSC was cited in Texas. For the same reason that NASA’s Houston Space Center is cited—in Houston, instead of Cape Canaveral. Money.
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The SSC could have been sited in the Fermilab area (near Chicago) or in the middle of nowhere, but there’s no money there to buy votes with.
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Irrespective of that, basic science is increasingly going abroad, as I have written here. If you approve of that, please say so.
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Further regarding NASA, if they didn’t pretend that throwing people into space was their mission, they could perform their basic science mission on a much lower budget. It costs quite a bit to throw people into space. NASA’s budgetary priorities are terribly skewed–for political reasons–but that says nothing about the utility of federal support for basic science.
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Regarding my first paragraph above, it might surprise you to learn that the failure of Michelson and Morley to detect the luminiferous aether (1887)–which eventually led to Einstein’s general relativity (1915)–has made the Global Positioning System (GPS) (god knows when–the 1990s?) substantially more accurate than it would have been otherwise. That was my point, when I wrote that experimental failures in basic research can be beneficial. If you wish to ignore that, you will do so at your detriment.
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But, do you really believe that private industry would have financed the Michelson-Morley experiment if they had known that it might not yield useful products for over a century?
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That’s exactly correct… and sometimes even directly. Einsteins research, all of it in ‘basic science’ has led directly to the atom bomb and the laser.
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Michael Faraday worked on phenomena that people thought was magic as did men with names like Ohm and Volta… but if you gave Allessandro Volta a billionth of a penny for every instance of technology used in the last hour that derives from his basic science he’d be the richest person ever, anywhere.
The questions you’ve been asked about the UTILITY of research have been downright cordial compared to what could be expected of the public at large.
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A common scientific phenomenon is that something is studied for many years, for many dollars, and it turns out to be a blind alley. For the scientist, this is good news – now, it is known that is NOT the way. For the taxpayer, this is bad news – all that money spent and nothing to show for it. The fact that ‘nothing’ is a result in and of itself is not widely appreciated.
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Whenever I hear gripes about product cost due to recovery of R&D – usually with pharmaceuticals – the blind alley phenomenon comes to mind. You think the PRODUCT is expensive? Imagine paying for research – productive and non-productive – as well! THAT is why God made investors and venture capitalists!
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Ernest Rutherford was using data from a couple a fellows (Geiger and Marsden) that had a surprising result (that many disbelieved…) Same with Einstein who won the 1905 nobel prize for explaining the photo-electric effect (without which we wouldn’t have TV, thank you Philo T) which was a result of basic science research that was similarly unexpected and perplexing. No failure is ever permanent, or insurmountable, in science.
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By and large, investment in science is, to paraphrase, a small leap for (a) man, but a giant leap for mankind. I’m all for it.
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Any taxpayer who pays for their childs (and/or grandchilds) college education will be quite content with this pay-off, methinks…
…Brahe was a Danish nobleman and Kepler was in the employ of the emperor of Austria. It sounds to me as though there was more than a bit of government subsidy for basic science in days of yore.
…upon reading your reply, however much may be lost in the brevity, that venture capitalists, along with weathermen, stock brokers and baseball players, (not least among other ‘ordinary’ endeavors) all have an abysmally poor record of what you term ‘pay-off’. I don’t hear cries to stop funding the Red Sox because Big Papi hits less than 3 out of every 10 at-bats or because weathermen are correct only 20% of the time… indeed, stock brokers, worse even than weathermen, with a roughly 17% accuracy are rewarded very very handsomely.
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I know of know statistics available with which to judge, but having spent much time in academia with many excellent scientists, I’d be willing to bet that their payoff, either individually or as a group, is much much greater than even Big Papi provides at Fenway…
“Irrespective of that, basic science is increasingly going abroad, as I have written here. If you approve of that, please say so.”
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Raj;
Applied science is also increasingly going abroad, I think at a much faster rate, no?
I am tempted to be the one to say let it go …
Maybe we would be better served to focus on the applied and let someone else break the rocks for us …
While certainly government sponsered research has yielded some fine accomplishments, it has also yielded volumes of useless trivia and warehouses of never to be accessed records.
Endless studies into the migration of spotted newts and mating habits of salamanders. Why cant you find an affordable nuetron bomb when you need one? ..
On whole .. has any one kept track of how much WASTE was a result of federal INTERFERANCE in the open marketplace.
Didnt the awarding of those GRANTS you specify, fuel monopolization of those sectors? Wouldnt the private sector have been willing to fund the same research if it wasn’t forced to compete with the deep pockets of uncle sam and his magical printing press?
And what I really want to know is … didnt Steve Jobs really invent windows? I saw the documentry and am left unconvinced đŸ™‚
Ultimately – federal research funding has more than paid for itself and certainly has provided great benefit for Massachusetts.
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I understand the point about not interfering in an open marketplace but the reason basic research funding is necessary is because the private sector often won’t fund it – so without Govt “intervention” its not gonna happen. Venture finance and private capital usually won’t get in until some type of product looks likely to come to fruition.
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And yes, for every amazing research finding the Govt has helped fund there are many studies and projects that lead to nothing (which is why the private sector won’t get involved) – but that’s science and God bless it – failure is part of the game.
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…if the Michelson-Morley experiment had not been a complete failure–they were trying to detect the luminiferous aether, but failed to do so–it is likely that there would have been no Einstein. The work of both Michelson and Morley was direcly or indirectly supported by the federal government.
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Failure is, indeed, part of the game. But failure is instructive–in basic research.
The older you get the more cynical you become.
It is true. I am experiencing it now.
Here is an example why.
The “evolution” of research these days.
How many kids do you know who bust their tails to get degrees in some science related field only to hit the wall upon graduation when they find zero opportunity in the private sector and the lure of an “internship” back at the university where they will get to pay off some portion of their outrageous and mounting tuition by working on professors such and such’s research grant?
And how many of these professors do you know who are too busy to actualy teach the classes that they are paid to teach because they are so busy on their research grant, thus defer the actual teaching to the TAs?
And if you actualy get lucky enough to worm into a private sector position, how relient are these companies on Co-ops to staff their own research in some type of undisclosed partnership with universitys who channel them the fodder?
It is like the entire system has been subverted into some type of government-university driven guild, to the detriment of all who participate.
This is not a free market system and its overall results illustrate that.
And what I really want to know is … didnt Steve Jobs really invent windows? I saw the documentry and am left unconvinced
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…the windows paradigm was invented at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). They made use of extensive experimentation in the hand (mouse) eye (icons) interface. That was in the 1970s, before the advent of the personal computer. If you’re interested, do a Google search for Xerox Star. Here’s a place to start: http://en.wikipedia….
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Xerox apparently refused to patent the paradigm (roughly speaking). In the early 1980s, I actually worked with people from PARC.
Thanks for sharing that. I had never heard of the Xerox Star before. You have succesfully dashed my illusion that Apple was first … ah well …
So why didn’t Xerox patent the technology? Any idea? One major boner there, aye?
Revolutionize the world and get to watch Bill Gates rake in zillions marketing cheap knock offs … lol/
Raj;
Back to the main subject of this thread … Your Bell example serves to illustrate my point.
The federal taxpayer (us) got the priviledge of footing the bill for research that one day led to the advent of Windows! Wonderful!
Except….
What was the return to the inventors (us)?
The yielded technology, that we paid for, got manipulated out of the system (stolen) by a hen house fox (Gates), who now uses it through monopolization to hold the consumer (the same us) over the roasting coals by overcharging us for each and every unnecesary upgrade.
If we didnt pay for the research we might not have Windows, sad, but we did pay for the research and we still dont have it. Gates has it …. so how was this wise on our part?
if your comment is criticism of science funded with federal grants or the “free market” forces that result in your having to pay top dollar for the applied technology. Note that you pay for your internet access, but you do not have to pay tolls to use the protocols (http, ftp, etc) because there is no patent for those technologies that allows any private industry to bilk you for your use of them.
“Note that you pay for your internet access, but you do not have to pay tolls to use the protocols (http, ftp, etc)” ….yet! đŸ™‚
Keep an eye on that one and who falls on which side of the issue. The “free market” is not your friend in this case.
Free market is theoretical. In a free market the conditions we see today WOULD NOT have occured. What we have instead is SO CALLED free markets.
You cant blame one for the other no more than you can critisize the patriots for the patriot act.
BRING BACK TEDDY ROOSEVELTS GHOST!
seems evoke this concept of the “free market”. I understand that a true economic “free market”, just like the state of peak market efficiency, is a hypothetical construct that has no representation in the real world, and I'm glad that you recognize that too.
Markets need to be regulated because they are not free, never were free, and never will be. Sometimes that regulation comes in the form of legislation and law enforcement, sometimes it comes in the form of public research to develop new technologies that can be used for the benefit of us all rather then the profit of a private company. Think Windows vs. Linux.
In any game there need to be players and referees.
When the referees become players everything goes down hill in a hurry IMO
You'll also notice that most referees are not immune from observer bias.
You state another fine case against “managed” global trade.
Why should we be forced to alter our internal rules of engagement merely because we entered into treaty with nations that engage in state subsidized industry.
Since you recognize this as a race to the bottom would it be wiser to adopt their rules or simply abandon the treaty?
We also engage in state subsidized industry. I think that's beside the point. Our trade agreements should protect our workforce. Current agreements that do not protect our workforce should be retooled or abandoned.
Can you honestly point to a single instance where such an action has been justified … when the subsidy was anything other than political graft guised as a kneejerk protectionist REACTION to subsidized imports?
If an industry is obsolete it should simply fade away. If it is made obsolete due to unfair foreign cometative practice it should be protected not by domestic subsidy but by import tarrif. Cheat and pay a penalty, not cheat and we will cheat more …
Its what we should think of when we think of national defense. Todays war is economic, not the holy crusades.
To counter a wrong do we always need to be WRONG-ER?
When does it end?
…do an Internet search for MIT’s Project MAC. A good place to start is http://en.wikipedia….
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BTW, I know full well why Xerox lost interest in PARC. It was because of the FedGov’s anti-trust suit against Xerox started in the early 1970s by (IIRC) Richard Nixon over their patents regarding the copying technology. That went on for years, and ultimately led to a consent decree that benefited Japanese copier makers (thanks Dick!). But that diverted management’s attention from the PARC developments.
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If you want more details, see if you can find a copy of the book Fumbling The Future at your local library.
“Fumbling the Future”.
Sounds entertaining, I will jot that one down đŸ™‚
…At least a part of Fumbling The Future is online here: http://books.iuniver…
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BTW, Xerox also invented the Ethernet, and patented part of it. The primary inventor was Robert Metcalfe, a PARC employee.
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Science is all about waste. That’s what science is… That’s why the best scientists are often people of great character: they are often confronted with their own fallability on a daily basis. The search for the contours of physical reality is mostly a tale of dead ends, half-baked assumptions and fully-baked misconceptions.
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OTOH, capitalism isn’t much different… Hhmm..
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BBN remains in business, though long since it’s been run by either B, B or N. It’s been through some iterations, but it’s still a company.
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Peel that onion one more layer: Bell Labs was where Unix and the C programming language were invented. If not for that, CERN might still be using Fortran!
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GUI (graphical user interface) was what was invented at Xerox PARC which is distinctly not the same as windows. And I still use a command line interface (not DOS, linux) everyday…
Peel that onion one more layer: Bell Labs was where Unix and the C programming language were invented. If not for that, CERN might still be using Fortran!
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I can read C, but am not confident enough to program in it. I learned Fortran (Formula Translation) ver. IV, and it was actually quite easy to use when I was at university in the middle ages.
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With one caveat. I don’t know whether this is true in subsequent versions, but with Fortran IV, variable names beginning with some subset of the alphabet were automatically interpreted as being fixed point, others floating point, and some subset of function names (“alog” vs. “log”) were also interpreted differently. I stayed up for hours trying to debug a program written by an upperclassman until it occurred to me that he had not used the proper syntax.
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C came after my (engineering) uni days.
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It is correct that the windows paradigm developed for the Xerox Alto and Star is not precisely the same as that now used for MS Windows, but it cannot be denied that they were the precursors for MS Windows–Jobs has been reported having said so. Advances occur in increments. In point of fact, the hand/eye coordination for use with computers might go back as far as Doug Engelbart, who invented the mouse.
The plan is for the spending to be disbursed over ten years – with the Bill authorising the Government to issue bonds for the purposes of funding research, building/enhancing research facilities and infrastructure, etc..
I’ts important to invest in developing businesses that produce good living wage jobs for our children. Especially those businesses that are prepared, in turn, to “invest” their profits in the form of property tax dollars to our communities and corporate taxes to the entire state. And if we choose to bond those investments which will be paid off by our children, than we should get some guarentees that the businesses stay around long enough to hire our children and be good corporate citizens and pay their fair share of taxes to our communities and our state.
The part where I get hung up is where you state “than we should get some guarentees that the businesses stay around long enough to hire our children and be good corporate citizens and pay their fair share of taxes to our communities and our state.”
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Is it in some way legaly possible for a state who issues such bonds for corporate benifit to become a legal owner of some percentage of a private corporation?
I’m thinking in the lines of if these were publicly traded companies …. if you invest something in them, in return you get SOME (however small) stake in the fortunes of that company. What I gather here is that the state will invest in a private concern and be satisfied with a verbal statement of goodwill? Hmmm …. sounds shaky to me …
just my 2 cents
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Happens all the time. Local and state governments do everything from offering property and corporate tax breaks to building new access roads and sewer lines to recruit new businesses to locate and to keep business from relocating. Is there anyone out there who remembers the tax break we gave to Fidelity a couple of years ago? They’re still here at least. Go Abby!
I just don’t get how progressives reconcile tossing not just tax breaks but actual cash at this well-heeled industry, at the behest of their Gubernatorial Pied Piper, with their usual droning zomie chants of ‘Close Corporate Tax Loopholes!’, which was how everything was going to be paid for before they discovered casinos.
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It must be like it’s bad to invade Iraq, but OK to invade Darfur.
for every “Progressive” Organization’s report denouncing tax breaks and cash giveaways as corprate welfare that never results in a measurable increase in jobs, I’d be a rich woman. Go ahead Google corporate welfare.
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and I am a research scientist on an NSF grant [not in bio-anything].
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I don’t think that, generally speaking, states ought to be spending money on basic research. That’s federal territory by and large — and it makes sense there, since scientific advancement tends to benefit the nation at large as opposed to any particular state. Exceptions can be made, particularly for research on local issues [local agriculture, local meteorology, local geology, local biology, etc].
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If the state wants good jobs, then invest in infrastructure that creates and supports good jobs. Invest in UMass. Invest in public transportation and dense business districts. Invest in housing stock that incorporates smart growth, thereby reducing future infrastructure woes. Invest [through finances or legislation] in mo’ better bandwidth throughout the state, for more, faster and more reliable communications. Improve the quality of the train lines toward NYC and Providence in particular, providing robustness in transit to other economic centers. Invest in renewable energy to offset increasing costs of electricity, heating fuel, and pollution.
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Don’t choose a technology. Choose to provide the infrastructure necessary for people to choose to live and work in Massachusetts. Feel free to put up barriers to businesses we don’t want [casinos, coal fired power plants, whorehouses, etc]. The rest will take care of itself.
Provide people with the tools they need to succeed and they will. You point to my idea of what the true role of government should be.
I argue against state funding of academic research because it’s role is far more nationalistic — it’s a long term investment in public health and safety, efficiency, and defense, among other things. All of those things have national roles, not state roles. Therefore, the Feds should be paying for them — it’s more efficient that way too, because individual states often don’t have enough separable laboratories to do independent research in parallel.
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We need national research. We need it for it’s results in medicine, transportation, construction, manufacturing, defense, finance, agriculture, and so on. We simply can not rely on industry to perform this long view research when they’re naturally focused on their next quarter earnings report, and the executive board will have retired two or three times over before a particular research project bears profit. Universities and research laboratories don’t bear this burden, and therefor are a natural fit for long term research, funded by (national) government agencies.
Its seems we agree then that this is not a role for the state government …
As to the federal aspect … My understanding is that the federal government has been DOWNSIZING research funding for some time, thats why guys like Deval might feel the urgency to jump into the breach.
I still cant swallow that it is a basic function of any level of government to fund research that will be used to spur economic activity.
This responsibility needs to be returned to the private sector that will profit from it, either by tax incentive or prefered financing but not in the form of GRANTS. Any entity should be free to enjoy the same benifit. With grants you get a game as to who will recieve what funding ,,, purly an invitation to evil IMO.
It does not seem that way. I specifically pointed out that there are situations where the state should be funding research — please don’t misrepresent what I wrote.
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As for responding to federal funding of research: in fact, loads of science isn’t profitable, relative to the investment cost and risk. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
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earthquakes
pollution
ecology
vaccines for rapidly mutating viruses
space exploration
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This list could go on and on. In cases where the science is too financially risky or where the desired outcome isn’t easily profitable, it makes sense for the government to fund research that is likely to benefit the country. A free market will not pursue all valuable areas of research due to market failures, and your insistence that the free market will accomplish what academia and research labs have accomplished, if only they had a tax break or preferred financing underscores your lack of economic training among other things.
This list could go on and on.
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A case in point. Developments in computers (and computer science) has made it easier for pharmaceutical companies (and I include among them biogen companies) to develop advanced pharmaceuticals. That was known as recently as the early 1990s.
…I actually do believe that the GWBush malAdministration has irrevocably upset American science. Among their defunding of domestic basic research, their making it more difficult for foreign science students to gain student visas, and their making it significant more difficult for foreign scientists to enter the US for conferences (making conferences go abroad), they are debillitating US domestic science. Science will be going ever more toward Europe and (shudder) the Far East.
of course it’s a good investment, and its not an either/or: I have never heard any one talk about basic infrastructure so constantly as Deval did all trough the campaign. but with the decrease in national funding, states have to pick up the slack. this is where we’re very strong, and the other primary purpose was to support the public universities in the process. (the original plan at least was solely that method, though I’m not sure of the current plan and how it’s going to be carried out). but yes, yes, yes: this is important.
Interesting that today Deval counseled patience on his ideas for an auto insurance regime, saying that the Legislature is moving too quickly on that issue against what he wants, and we should just give the process in place a chance to play out. I’m starting to think that his big problem is that the Legislature exists…kinda like the President.
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At what point is the naivete a matter of volition rather than inexperience?