"The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rathole. NIH and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path."
The institution of science is undergoing a catastrophic decline. The reason behind this is simple: it is no longer a growing economy. Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.
And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. It is the riskiest of gambles by definition, requiring inordinate expenditures of time and resources in the present for a chance at some distant breakthrough decades or even centuries in the future. Institutional science is not an economically sound choice in the best of times, let alone during the current span of never-ending recessions.
The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing.
The reality is that, increasingly, we live in a society that does not understand this philosophy of life. People only care about how they will survive tomorrow, and who can blame them, as the world economy gets ever more competitive and cut-throat.
Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes.
> Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.
It's ironic that Silicon Valley owes most of it's existence to investments by the DoD and ARPA. Most of the technology we use in the electronics industry today would not exist except for all the public money that was poured into semiconductor research. Slashing public funding, especially of fundamental research, is one of the worst things we could probably do for our economy's future.
It's OK, the silicon valley companies and other private sector institutions who have benefited so much from investment by the DoD and ARPA are ready to address any investment shortfall to the sciences, right?
I mean, investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place. Am I right?
> investing in a startup that has a value proposition based on real scientific research is the same as investing in the research in the first place
Not necessarily, if invest in science you're investing in the lab producing publishable results, without the constraint of bringing a product to market. The two don't necessarily overlap.
The semiconductor material used by Bardain, Brattain, and Shockley for their Nobel Prize work at Bell Labs was developed by researchers at Purdue University under a grant funded by the National Defense Research Council. Their developments were hardly independent of publicly funded research.
If you want to play this game, you can go back even further and find that they built on work done by privately funded individuals during the Victorian Era and during the Enlightenment. Go back even further and you'll find that much (but by no means all) of the wealth that funded that was acquired thanks to Feudalism.
I therefore credit feudalism for the creation of the transistor.
You seem to have misunderstood the comment, (the sibling comments should help explain, or maybe some light reading about the invention of the transistor).
I have no idea what you are getting at. I am familiar with the invention of the transistor, and understand the comment I was replying to completely. Furthermore, there are no sibling comments to my comment....
What I am guessing went wrong here is that you are unfamiliar with sarcasm, so I'll help you out: I don't actually credit Feudalism with the invention of the transistor.
Don't bother. HN is libertarian leaning thus will defend military spending and fight any criticism of the US military or its massive spending to the death.
I'm not even going to go into how a lot of that spending, if freed up, would go toward endeavors that are not military related and to a parallel timeline we can never know. Imagine NASA with 10 or 50x the budget. Or NSF with 10x the budget, etc. We'd probably be typing this on a moonbase or on a cottage on Alpha Centauri's earth-like planet.
Instead we fawn over the peanuts that falls out of the elephants mouth and praise its generosity for feeding the hungry.
I think you may have responded to the wrong person. I'm just making a point that who you credit with a discovery can change many times if you are willing to point at the owner of the shoulders that the inventor was standing on.
Transistors discovered by a private lab? A private lab with government funding? A private lab building on work done by individuals such as Faraday? Individuals who in many cases received government funding in the UK? Individuals who were building on work by Benjamin Franklin, a self-made and self-funded man? Benjamin Franklin, who doubtlessly was enabled by early work on the scientific method itself by Roger Bacon? Roger Bacon, who was supported by the catholic church? Roger Bacon, who built on work of earlier Muslim scholars?
If we want to play the "who gets credit" game, we need to decide beforehand how many times we are going to go down the "who funded who" tree, and "who researched the prerequisites" tree.
I'm not talking about politics; I am pointing out that you people are talking past each other because you all have different ideas of how to assign credit.
Right, my point is that a lot of people here are invested in the idea of "military solves all" and will try to disingenuously tie all innovations to military or defense financing.
I think what he meant was NOT FOR PROFIT which every single one of those people you mentioned all the way back to feudalism operated under the spirit of.
It's just now all the low hanging fruit is gone and you need million dollar labs instead of an apple and a notebook.
That is debatable. It's kind of a stretch to call AT&T Bell Labs 'privately funded' as ATT was a government-sanctioned monopoly. Technically it was privately funded, but not through a working market system. Kind of like the other great industrial pure research labs (MS, IBM, Xerox).
The transistor development was not done under government direction or a government contract to do the work. It was done by a private company choosing to invest their own funds into it.
>> ...companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research... And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment.
The problem is that this article generalizes "science" to the life sciences. Biology and medical experiments take a long time, are very expensive and reproducing results can be very difficult. Of course there's more pressure for scientists to produce results and you'll see fishier papers to justify their big grants.
Research can be incredibly profitable. What about Bell Labs? 3M? The technology from your iPhone wouldn't have been possible without Apple's big R&D department. There are many examples of successful (and profitable) R&D departments. Heck, Exxon's R&D arm comes out with many innovations a year to make pumping oil out of the ground easier. It just isn't as visible (or linkbait-y) as that new gene they found.
>> "[science] has never made economic sense in the present"
Life sciences don't. It takes decades for new drugs to come out sometimes. So yes, there are a limited number of people who do this. But electronics? Tech? Mechanical/Aerospace engineering? SpaceX, Intel and others are constantly improving.
>> "Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes."
Bullshit. There's financial incentive to go with the fold and do conventional things, but there's also a lot of financial incentive to innovate. However, innovation is hard when there's a higher barrier of entry. Information is the industry that has seen the most innovation in the last decade because anyone and their mother can make software.
The real problem is making the barrier of entry lower for other industries. To make manufacturing, biomedical research and others easier. And guess what? There's economic incentive to do that, too! People who make software development easier are getting tons of money and 3D printing, which will completely change the way manufacturing is done, will probably create some billionaires in the next decade.
The system is fine! In the last decade, we got portable access to all of human information, the ability to always know where we are, advancements in electronics, cars and all sorts of myriad incredible things. Give us another couple decades and we'll make things that will blow anyone from the present's mind.
> The technology from your iPhone wouldn't have been possible without Apple's big R&D department.
It's interesting that you point to Apple. Compared to companies with a more old-fashioned approach to R&D (Xerox, Bell Labs, IBM, Microsoft), Apple spends relatively little on R&D, and does practically nothing of genuine scientific value. I would hold up Apple as an example of the profitable "focus research on specific products, buy research expertise rather than cultivate it in the firm, forget science" approach to R&D.
Apple is the top spender on R&D, as a percentage of its revenue. Second is Google. 3rd Samsung, 4th Amazon, 5th 3M. [1]
Xerox had about 10 years of glorious moon-shot type research. IBM is notoriously fickle about spending on R&D.
The only exception is Bell Labs, which succeeded due to a combination of a number of factors [2]. There wasn't any grand vision underlying it, just the interest to grab the best and the brightest, during a time when there was far less silo-ing and over-specialization than today.
Please look again at the figures in the link you provide: Apple is larger than each of the companies I mentioned (very slightly larger than Samsung by 2012 sales; I'm not sure why 3M is in your list - they are 1/4 the size of Apple in a far lower margin industry), and spends less in absolute terms on R&D than each, and far less as a percentage of revenue.
IBM has an excellent track record of scientific contributions, has an excellent research institute, and I gather is good about things like giving its employees time to write scientific articles and providing support to employees who wish to pursue PhDs. Xerox PARC still exists and still does good, publically visible research. I don't see what "grand vision" has to do with anything.
Note, the rankings are:
> as a percentage of its revenue.
Also, regarding 3M, I am not sure what you mean by 'far lower margin industry'. 3M is a conglomerate. It's like GE, in some sense- doesn't play in any single industry, but in several tens of industries.
I think that ranking cannot be by %age R&D spend. Taking the R&D expenditure from your link, and turnover from the accounts for 2012, we have (money values in $bn):
Yeah, Apple doesn't really invent stuff, they generally just come out with the same incremental technology improvements as every other company. They're mostly just good at combining components into aesthetically pleasing products, and then claiming to have invented every feature from scratch.
Its like if Mercedes Benz claimed "only we could come up with the idea of a steering wheel, seat belts and a motor" when announcing their new model vehicles every year.
I hate to say this, but I regret that I have but one upvote to give.
I can't believe the old "science isn't profitable" canard is being trotted out to full effect on HN. The fact of the matter is that science is imminently profitable, and this is so obviously true that it takes nothing short of a true believer in the benevolence of the government as the superior investment entity and the free market as bogeyman to believe otherwise.
I mean this isn't /r/politics, is it?
The desire for profit is the single largest driver of scientific and technological innovation, period. Yes, NASA and DARPA have created some amazing things, but what about the hundreds of billions which are spent by privately held entities' R&D departments every year? Does all of that research yield nothing of value? The pharmaceutical advances? The electronic advances? The advances in automobiles, computers, housing, information access, and, now, space travel, as well as virtually every other product on the planet - do those mean nothing?
Of course they do. Private funding for research constitutes the lions share of research funding, and that private research leads to the vast majority of scientific and technological advances around the world.
The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot.
> The line that science would not happen absent government funding is so demonstrably false that to even make such a claim is tantamount to shouting to the world that you are a first-class idiot.
The private sector doesn't advance science. Also: you are stupid for claiming so. Maybe even first-class stupid.
See where that exchange gets us? Now cite your data on the majority of scientific advances being privately funded, since you claim to be able to demonstrate it. In particular, I'm interested in basic-science advances, of the kind that CERN and Stephen Hawking and etc. produce. Who in the private sector is producing those?
He and his former research colleague, Jennifer Moyle founded a charitable company, known as Glynn Research Ltd., to promote fundamental biological research at Glynn House and they embarked on a programme of research on chemiosmotic reactions and reaction systems. In 1978 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory."
So, yes, the private sector does advance science, even basic science with no profit value. To claim otherwise is first-class stupid and also ignorance of history.
Josiah Gibbs, Irving Langmuir, and Robert Millikan were all American scientists who ran their research off of largely private (some for-profit as in the case of Langmuir, who did both basic and applied science under the auspices of GE; the others at predominantly non-profit educational institutes) These people are not insignificant - Gibbs rewrote the book on thermodynamics; Langmuir figured out that argon should fill lightbulbs -applied- but in basic science also invented the concept of plasma voltage, made observations describing ocean circulation, and conceived of molecular monolayers; Millikan discovered the charge of an electron). I am sure I am missing other American scientists who did their research with little or no help from public sources.
Totally disagree. Carnegie Institutions, Wellcome Trust, etc. are all 'private sector' and dispense millions of dollars of grants for fundamental research.
You probably mean, 'for-profit private sector'. But then, you disregard the several Nobel prizes that Bell Labs received, the intangible impact of IBM's Deep Blue and other programs on computing, etc. If solving a basic-science problem can result in several million dollars of revenue, you can be sure that a company will throw money and man-power at it. There are several examples even among the non-Bell Labs, non-IBM, non-Xerox companies: Google's search algorithms, pharma companies' Lipitor, Viagra, etc., Intel and AMD's industry-defining minuaturizations, 3M's optical films, etc. etc.
You don't think that private companies regularly form hypotheses, test those hypothesis, and draw conclusions from their results? Applied science is no less worthy of the title of science than is pure science, and the private sector is applied science writ large.
As for pure science and government funding, I'm not against it, and promoting one over the other is not my intention, as they both have their roles to play. I agree that pure science would not occur to the extent that it does now absent government funding. What I disagree with is that science would not happen at all were that the case. That's flatly stupid thing to say, and I'm a little amused that you would make that claim just before calling me stupid.
In a world where the rate of technological advance is larger than it has been at any other time in the history of the world (and is still increasing), it seems obvious that both are playing their roles rather well. The system is functioning. Science is not dead. Hell, it's not even sick.
First off, I'm pretty sure he was trying to make a point about the inefficacy of name-calling in such an argument, not literally calling you stupid.
Second, Intel advances very specific, safe-bet science like shrinking the semiconductor. As plenty of other people have noted, the semiconductor was a public-funded invention and farmed off to Japan before it could be made "profitable" by American corporations. Heck, early American business laughed transistors off the continent before the value proposition was discovered.
Also, as long as I'm commenting here, I'll note that science is not dead, but I believe that our ability to consume information has tainted our ability to understand true science. To me, the quintessential American scientist of the 20th century was Richard Feynman. His Cargo Cult Science [1] essay, which pops up on HN from time to time explains what's happening best: people who claim to follow science, are actually practicing some sort of modern-day witch doctor magic. They wave their hands and claim the data supports their wild discovery and someone bites. Suddenly it takes 10,000 hours to become a master of something "on average."
As far as I know the early ICs were much less reliable than circuits made from discrete components. It's the improvement made by private companies like Fairchild and others that made them practical. There's really a long path from invention to its practical application and the world benefited much from the improvements made by companies.
On the other hand scientific research is an example of a positive externality. According to economic theory the market underproduces this kind of goods. There are numerous measures to correct this including patents and public funding of science. We shouldn't dismiss the private companies nor public funding as both parts have positive contributions to science and are necessary for the science to operate effectively.
> people who claim to follow science, are actually practicing some sort of modern-day witch doctor magic.
Maybe this is just phrased poorly. In that essay Feynman is saying some people (namely advocates of pseudoscience) are invoking "science" to give credence to their claims but are abandoning scientific rigor, this is what he calls cargo cult science. Not all people who claim to follow science.
Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time. (PLoS One) [1]
Seriously? The greater issue here is modern day "scientists" or people who are interested in and consider themselves scientifically-minded, reading something like that and filing it away as new knowledge and not questioning the veracity of things.
As the other child to this comment noted, the problem that Feynman outlines is that no one is doing these tests over again to re-test hypothesis under new conditions or with new devices. The results get published and suddenly it's taken as Truth with a capital T.
"Because there are no facts, there is no truth
Just a data to be manipulated
I can get any result you like" -- Don Henley [2]
If that makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you try out some form of theism. Because if tomorrow I fall through my floor when getting out of bed, all we can do is re-evaluate our knowledge based on new data. And there's probably going to be a lot of new data.
I don't even know what you're trying to illustrate with those links. My point was not that bad science doesn't exist, it certainly does. But Feynman did not have this nihilistic view of knowledge, he believed very firmly in the ability of science to deduce truths about the physical world and that there is objective truth.
Sorry to dwell on this, but this is not a nihilistic view, this is what's called the Pragmatic view of truth and was expounded by 20th Century Chicago School philosophers like John Dewey. Feynman was oft quoted as being a pragmatist, and a key tenet of pragmatism was embodied in one of his quotes:
"We never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong."
In this fashion, we never hold objective truth in the Platonic sense, rather we accumulate knowledge that explains how the world works.
Does fellatio in fruit flies improve sexual reproduction? One study suggests it does. The problem we face now is that a substantial portion of people, including many very well educated folks who would claim to live scientifically-based lives, say "That's amazing!" and run and tell their friends this hilarious new "fact" they've learned.
Unfortunately there are plenty of these new "facts" people learn that are much more than novelty and lead to public policy or destructive dietary changes cough fructose cough.
We could all use to be a little more skeptical, pragmatic and curious in our lives.
you should reread the essay. He then goes on to mention how mainstream physics experiments have failed to do basic things like "repeat an old experiment with the new apparatus" and therefore careening towards pseudoscience.
>> Private funding for research constitutes the lions share of research funding, and that private research leads to the vast majority of scientific and technological advances around the world.
Please reveal your source for this belief.
>>every other product on the planet - do those mean nothing?
Breakthroughs are expensive and do not conform to our short term business cycles, as they rarely result in products, as opposed to breakthroughs. Trivial and immaterial incrementalism perfectly conform to our business cycle.
This discussion is devolving into pointless bickering about where you draw the line between science and technology.
If we stop being fussy about the definitions, it's pretty clear that some research/engineering is profitable in the short term and some is not. A lot of the work that is not profitable in the short term has potential long term benefits that are very important.
Of course science is profitable and corporations spend a lot of money on and make a lot of money from research. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of current technology would probably not exist if it hadn't been funded by governments in the first place. From the top of my head: GPS, the Internet.
Technology is a progression of ideas. GPS and the internet were very low-hanging fruit on the tree. The government was just the entity which was the first to reach up and grab it. If they had not, someone else almost surely would have invented GPS and the ideas that underlie the internet.
We could construct hardly any of the infrastructure on which our developed economies are built without science: our energy systems, our food production systems, our communication systems.
Science has enabled us to separate fact from fiction, and hence develop theories that allow us to manipulate our environment in sophisticated ways.
I don't see how you can argue that 'science' as a whole hasn't paid off as a 'logical financial investment'. That claim is so challenging to my worldview, its hard for me to engage with.
For a start, what might we have invested in instead that might have had a higher rate of return?
You missed his point. Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment. In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.
R&D is a bit different than science. Usually it has a time horizon of 3-10 years to commercialization, sometimes 10-20 at the high end. While much of science is in the 10-100 range. The 20-year patent window is crucially important for industry R&D. The timeframe can be extended a bit by keeping things as trade secrets, if you're very careful, but it gets trickier. Unpredictable and non-application-specific research also tends to be disfavored: improvement on a chemical process is one thing, since it has a clear path to application in a specific area that the company does business in. But new basic physics results are not favored, since it's not clear whether they will lead to profitable applications at all; and even if there was some way of knowing they would, those applications might not be easy for the company to take advantage of if they don't align with its business.
You couldn't directly build a product on Einstein's major results, for example, certainly not within the time window of patent protection (if they were even hypothetically patentable), but they were hugely important anyway. Same with much of the mid-20th-century materials-science work that is now proving useful to chip manufacturers: the tech industry didn't fund that research in the 1950s-70s, because they didn't know at the time which physics results would be useful to them in 2010s chip engineering. But they're definitely using them now! It's important to the tech industry that this pipeline of not-sure-where-this-will-be-applied basic research exists, because it's hard to do things like improving manufacturing processes unless there is an existing understanding of how physics and materials work in the first place. But the case for them funding it directly is weaker, because it tends to have the property that advancing the general level of knowledge benefits everyone, not only you, and you don't know decades in advance which specific knowledge you'll eventually need, anyway.
>Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment.
Respectfully, that statement doesn't make sense. (Bear with me.)
Whether an investment is good or bad is orthogonal to whether the returns manifest in the short or long term:
any calculation of investment return will discount value that we have to wait for.
Maybe you mean that the payoffs don't come in the short term. But, at a societal level, so what? As long as the expected payoff (appropriately discounted) is large enough, that's what matters.
That is my objection to FD3SA's comment that "Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment."
and my objection to FD3SA's comparision to art.
Just because science's financial payoff is long term does not mean it isn't a good investment. To confuse the two issues is illogical, in an important way - which is what I'm trying to object to in FD3SA's comment.
I'd accept the argument that it is difficult to capture privately the return from fundamental science. That might be a reason why much science has been government funded. But, again, that's a different issue.
Governments should continue putting money into science because it is a good investment - it has a high expected return, over the long term.
And, in fairness, substantial public money, globally, is still invested on this basis.
>In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.
How our economy is managed in the short term is a different issue from whether the long term expected return of science is positive.
Maybe you mean that the way our economy is currently managed, it doesn't make sense for private actors to do science. But that's a totally separate issue from whether the societal return is positive. Almost regardless of how the economy is structured in the present, if science has a high enough long term return, its still a good investment, at a societal level.
Someone could argue that funding art has not produced meaningful financial gain - if they were very 'practically oriented' (for want of a better term) - but the same argument would not apply to science which has produced huge returns.
Even today, there is a massive delta between the funding science and arts gets - find me the arts' equivalent of NASA or CERN - because the long term return of science is recognised.
Still, we still favour short term over long term. First because the future in uncertain, and long term predictions are less reliable. That basically introduces a discount rate, which any long term investment have to overcome.
Second, there are other specific mechanisms that favour short term over long term. For private companies, it's the desire of the stakeholders for fast return on investment. They want their dividends now, not in 10 or 20 years for now. We only live so long, after all —for now. For public funding, the government favour anything further than the next elections. That spurs decisions that may be rational for egotistical individuals, but which are nuts at a societal level.
If our society really were rational, it would fund basic anti-ageing research more, and basic AGI and FAI research much more. Not to mention cryonics. But what would you expect? Most people are sufficiently nuts to still believe in the supernatural anyway.
Pssst! Try to keep it a little more secret that you joined the LessWrong Cabal for Taking Over the World! And it's your turn to bring snacks to the next meeting. The password will be, "My birthday is on Schelling Day."
Don't worry, you'll learn to speak Normal again someday.
"science is a creative pursuit much like the arts"
While surprising this statement gets at something missing in science today. Until relatively recently basic science was not dominated by a big institution monoculture but by curious and creative individuals working in a great variety of situations often in near isolation.
I wonder if much of the effort to institutionalize and "professionalize" science has been counterproductive. I can't imagine most of the great figures in history of science thriving in the current environment. Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs?
I know this is a bit of a rant and I know times have changed. But perhaps something similar to the open-source revolution in software can get science back to its roots.
>Much like healthcare is now directed by insurers, science seems to be increasingly directed by bureaucrats. Should we be surprised by the disappointing results and soaring costs?
I think you have really hit the nail on the head with this one.
> The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing.
Are you serious ? It's so obvious that using Science is proving to be profitable for all industries using it. Life Sciences being maybe an exception rather than a rule, because of the complexity to address the issues at hand and the regulatory framework enforcing conservative approaches (we still categorize cancers by "location" rather than protein tracers which makes no sense at all scientifically). All the R&D going on in Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies involved in new technologies are driving innovation forward and proving to provide very tangible returns. The same goes with all the applied sciences done in the automobile industry, the aviation industry with material sciences, and I could go on and on since there is a neverending flow of examples.
"Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research."
It also has a lot to do with the Bayh-Dole Act and the privatization of research. For-profit research centers are one of the fastest growing areas of the economy. While more public funding would certainly help, the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized. If there were less research but if it were still high quality, we'd be much better off.
>the real issue is that under Reagan science became privatized.
and science in America in the 19th century was funded how? Because we sure didn't have the NIH, NSF, NIST, DOE, DARPA, or any of these organizations then.
Even into the 20th century: For example, most of Irving Langmuir's research (in both applied and basic science) was conducted privately, long before Reagan. Same goes for luminaries such as Gilbert Lewis, Josiah Gibbs, Robert Millikan, etc.
The institution of science is undergoing a catastrophic decline. The reason behind this is simple: it is no longer a growing economy. Public funding for science is frozen or being cut, private R&D labs are shuttering their doors, and companies are increasingly concerned with quarterly results at the expense of long term research.
And why should it be otherwise? Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment. It is the riskiest of gambles by definition, requiring inordinate expenditures of time and resources in the present for a chance at some distant breakthrough decades or even centuries in the future. Institutional science is not an economically sound choice in the best of times, let alone during the current span of never-ending recessions.
The truth is, science is a creative pursuit much like the arts. Like the creation of literary masterpieces or profound paintings, it has never made economic sense in the present. Only afterwards, once the impact can be seen, do we understand its significance. And that is why it will always be worth pursuing.
The reality is that, increasingly, we live in a society that does not understand this philosophy of life. People only care about how they will survive tomorrow, and who can blame them, as the world economy gets ever more competitive and cut-throat.
Increasingly, it has become clear that our society does not reflect one designed with its own best interests at heart. Why this is, how it happened, and how we can change it, will be the greatest challenge of our lifetimes.