The university system is, historically, one of the chief reasons that the West came to dominate the world.
People have always said most of it was useless.
It’s very hard to decide what is “worth” thinking about. Many religious conservatives wanted to strangle embryonic modern science because it did not concern itself with achieving eternal beatitude under God.
This. So fucking stupid forcing the money and students to go to other countries instead.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00550-0?linkId=13118172
Academia has changed radically over the last 30 years.
Publishing papers isn’t that hard. Making real advances is very hard. Different thing. We don’t need 50,000 PHDs every year churning out papers that don’t really move the needle.
There’s a lot of good research being some in the US, much of it funded by the NIH and the NSF.
For instance, the new drug that’s in final stages (or maybe approved) that works similar to opioids on a sodium channel that’s only active in peripheral nerves, and not in the brain, (so you can have a pain killer similar to opioids in its effectiveness that doesn’t get you high, doesn’t put you to sleep, and probably isn’t significantly addictive, and i think it doesn’t even make the user constipated) started out as basic research on neural sodium channels.
Products that continuously monitor tiny quantities of stuff in the blood, that can be used in real time, during surgery, to manage the health of the patient, were developed recently, again with the basic insights coming from federal money, and only the commercial monetization being funded by private companies. I just read a study about how rats remove toxins from cerebral spinal fluid while they sleep (and how sleeping pills interfere with that process) which may lead to actionable insights regarding Alzheimer’s disease. Federally funded. Lots more.
That research money is a major reason the US is at the top of the technological food chain.
I have, and that’s not what they’ve said to me.
Is there also bad research out there? Sure. Most of it isn’t funded by the feds, who have a very good vetting process. My father (who did excellent medical research in two areas) used to rail against some of the better-advertised medical charities, which he said funded much lower quality work than the NIH did.
I mean, do we need medical advances? I suppose not. But I’m pretty happy my friends can have immunotherapy for their cancers, and my friend’s kid has the benefit of recent advances in treating cystic fibrosis, and we have effective vaccines, and better drugs, and … There’s a very long list of recent medical improvements that make life longer and healthier.
There can be both waste and good research happening in academia, it doesn’t have to be binary.
You don’t seem to understand what scientists do.
See now I’m all for that basic research, but how is it the US gvt doesn’t retain some claim on the future royalties to these innovations?
That’s precisely the point. It’s about efficiency. Of course there is good research, but how much is it costing? How much time did it take to get there? If it costs an outrageous amount of money to get medical research results then the healthcare system ends up being too expensive. The cost of medications is a big part of the equation.
With regards to NIH, most Ivy league schools are close to 60% on indirect costs. This is unacceptable imo, considering how large their endowments are. Why should taxpayers fund so much in indirect costs?
Look, I debate you all the time. We basically don’t agree on much. Let’s put it that way. You are not interested in objective reality.
We’re paying millions for researchers to study rat brains and lizard spit ! When will the madness end?
Universities need to get back to the basics: the Bible and scrubbing history books of unpleasant details.
In theory, the US benefits from the investment via increased tax revenues from the business activities stimulated by the results, reduced medical spending, etc, etc.
Would it be nice if there were an explicit return for the federal investment? Yes, but taxpayers are ultimately going to be the source of such dollars, and explicit royalties would potentially retard realization of those returns.
The current mechanic socializes the costs, which may or may not be seen as an advantage, depending on your political philosophy.
Hmm, not sure why my embedded lizard spit link didn’t work above
https://medicine.uq.edu.au/article/2024/04/rise-ozempic-how-surprise-discoveries-and-lizard-venom-led-new-class-weight-loss-drugs
Not necessarily… what if we do basic research and then big company owned mostly by non Americans uses the insights to develop drugs that Americans buy.
We funded the research and pay full freight for the drugs. If the US gvt had royalties on it then those royalties could replace the funding of future research.
In this situation the fed gets tax revenues from the retailer and distributors, as well as from the investment income from Americans who invest in those companies.
I’m not opposed to having explicit royalties in principle, mind you. I just note that there would be a cost for having the additional bureaucracy, and there might be less opportunity to socialize the impacts.
I’m a professional scientist. Based on your comments you’re clearly unfamiliar with the work that scientists do.
Tax revenues in the form of income taxes and sales taxes? Seems small fries compared to actual ownership stake in the underlying product. The owners of those companies are receiving outsized dividends / capital appreciation that should really be in the hands of the original, public investors
Endowments aren’t supposed to be a subsidy for the government.
…and the US operations of those corporations, and many of their investors are supposed to be paying income taxes on those profits, dividends, and capital gains.
I will concede, however, that a defect in this reasoning is the ability to do accounting magic to shift those corporate profits away from the US domestic entities…but there are plenty of defects in US tax law.