A guilty pleasure » « Accurate

What would you tell people who want to gut basic research?

In 1997, Arthur Kornberg wrote an article for the Nobel Foundation, Basic research, the lifeline of medicine. It’s a good read.

The pursuit of curiosity about the basic facts of nature has proven, with few exceptions throughout the history of medical science, to be the route by which the successful drugs and devices of modern medicine were discovered. Though it seemed unreasonable and impractical, counterintuitive even to scientists, to solve an urgent problem of disease by exploring apparently unrelated questions in biology, chemistry and physics, these basic studies proved time and again to be utterly practical and cost-effective.

Then he goes on to give the examples of x-rays, penicillin, polio vaccine and genetic engineering.

The lessons to be learned from these four histories and so many others should be crystal clear. No matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, basic research has proven over and over to be the lifeline of practical advances in medicine. Without advances, medicine regresses and reverts to witchcraft. As in biomedical science, pioneering industrial inventions have not been mothered by necessity. Rather, inventions for which there was no commercial use, only later became the commercial airplanes, xerography and lasers on which modern society depends. Curiosity led to the inventions that became the source of industrial strength. It is imperative for a nation, a culture, a university and a company to understand the nature of the creative process and to encourage its support.

It’s too bad that we have a government that rejects this idea.

Reminder: the Stand up for science rally is taking place next week. The St Paul rally is from 3-5pm on Friday at the state capitol — I’ll be there.

I’m going to have to make a sign this weekend. Any suggestions for what I can put on it? I’m not going to put a copy of Kornberg’s paper on it — I need something short, pithy, and catchy.

A guilty pleasure » « Accurate

Comments

  1. Reginald Selkirk says

    Kornberg makes the point that you can’t translate basic research into actual technology unless you have the basic research. But those examples are all medically related. Maybe make the case more generally and focus on other areas of technology which depend heavily on basic research. Like space exploration. I don’t see how anyone could expect to send people to Mars unless a lot of basic research gets done first.

  2. Matt G says

    Reginald@1- Who needs basic research to get to Mars when you have an über genius who instinctively knows everything you need to know (and who knows more about manufacturing than just about anyone on Earth)?

  3. raven says

    This is a repost from an article in Science on how important science is to the USA.
    It’s basically, the driver of our economy and civilization.
    This is how you increase GDP per capital.

    Once again, it is time to point out that science is the leading driver of our civilization and responsible for the USA’s leading (don’t laugh, it was true up until a week ago) position in the world.
    Attacking science is like attacking your own feet and hands. It is national self harm.

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.342.6160.817

    What’s So Special About Science (And How Much Should We Spend on It?)
    WILLIAM H. PRESS
    SCIENCE 15 Nov 2013

    Yet investments in basic research are variously estimated as ultimately returning between 20% and 60% per year (13).

    I suppose it is time once again to dust off an old study on how science is the main driver of our society.

    .1. US GDP per capital has increased about 9-fold in the last century.

    .2. 85% of this increase is explained by advances in science.

    Our lead in science Research and Development funding explains our lead in the world in terms of the world’s largest economy and…largest military. The military is well aware of the value of science and has a good incentive for spending money on research and development. Better weapons means fewer soldiers dying in battles.

    The world’s leading nations all spend relatively high levels of their GDP on science, about 3%.
    Spending on science is estimated to yield a ROI of 20-60%.

    If we stopped spending public money on science, in the short term nothing would happen.
    The payoffs from science can be short term but most are long term.
    In the long term, we would just fall further and further behind the rest of the world.

  4. Artor says

    So here’s a little story. My grandmother smoked like a stovepipe from an early age, and she never let up, even while carrying my dad. So Dad was born with a congenital heart defect; a flappy valve that would likely kill him in his early 20’s. So at age 18, in 1956, he was one of the first recipients of open-heart surgery. If you know what a Viking Blood Eagle is, I will spare you the details of what was done to him, but that describes it pretty accurately. He spent the rest of his life with a huge scar down his sternum, and under his ribs all the way to his shoulder blade. He was on the operating table for something like 15 hours for this procedure, which miraculously succeeded, keeping him alive to age 80, despite his own never-pausing chain-smoking habit.
    This was part of the inspiration for my sister to go into medicine. She is now a top research cardiologist. studying and developing new and better ways to fix all sorts of ailments. Thanks to her and others in her field, the fix for that same faulty valve my father suffered from now involves 2 tiny slits in the armpit and groin, that each take about 2 stitches to close. The operation takes less than an hour, and the patient goes home under their own power the same day.
    Thanks to Trumplethinskin cutting funds to the NIH, my sister is actually wondering if she’ll be able to continue working, or if her job will exist at all in a few months. I can only wish that Trump or President Musk find themselves suffering some exotic ailment that they killed the funding for researching a cure. Their actions have already sentenced countless thousands to untimely deaths.

  5. StevoR says

    Have you done your research on doing / cutting research?

    (Bit long?)

    Research this sign .. (Can think of a few signs to add pictorally there.)

    Something about research & degrees?

    Without research we won’t know.. / never know… (fill in the blank – or don’t.

  13. KG says

    It’s too bad that we have a government that rejects this idea.

    I dunno. If the USA is moving from incipient to fully-developed fascism, I prefer that it fall behind scientifically as quickly as possible.

  14. Jazzlet says

    I’d shorten Charly’s
    “Science is what made America great!” to
    “Science makes America great!”
    I think the present tense is better than the past tense, but it’s not as nostalgic so I could be wrong.

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