- Does scientific research drive innovation? Not very often, argues Matt Ridley: Technological evolution has a momentum of its own, and it has little to do with the abstractions of the lab...
The implications of this new way of seeing technology—as an autonomous, evolving entity that continues to progress whoever is in charge—are startling. People are pawns in a process. We ride rather than drive the innovation wave. Technology will find its inventors, rather than vice versa. Short of bumping off half the population, there is little that we can do to stop it from happening, and even that might not work.
I got my BS in physics, my PhD in medical physics, and have worked in a biomedical research lab for almost 15 years. There is a lot of truth to what you are saying. The funding model is broken, and it encourages scientists to sling a lot of BS to get funded. That said, I don't think the distinction that Ridley draws between tinkering and basic research is as clear as he lets on. Tinkering happens under both types of funding. Public funding of science isn't just about technological advancement, it's also about increasing the scope of human knowledge and the training of new scientists. Publicly funded science is assumed to be wasteful from an economic perspective (in the short term). If it weren't, public funding wouldn't be needed. The US has done very well with both public and privately funded research, and it seems odd to argue that we need one and not the other. I would argue that our model for public funding leaves much to be desired, however. I actually work on treatments for brain tumor. Some of my research regards a unknown mechanism of chemoresistance, and I am testing methods to overcome it. Oddly enough, some of my work is in collaboration with a physicist that models tumor cell migration. It was actually from this theoretical-based work that we came to identify a miRNA with a very unique property, and we are looking at the presence of this miRNA in patient blood as a possible diagnostic. But, I stress, you are correct about the funding model. It is awful and needs to be overhauled. Personally, I think there should be a tiered system whereby scientists advance or fall in funding levels based on their previous work. No grant writing, just climbing a funding ladder if your work is good, or falling down it if it is not. More work should be done promote resource sharing rather than putting large capital expenditures under one or two PIs. I dislike patents, but his criticism of patents seems to be tangential to the issue, since it is privately funded research that has the stronger incentive to patent.
Would we have modern machinery, and space travel without Newton's laws? Modern electronics without the discoveries of Faraday, Maxwell, and others? Computers without quantum mechanics? GPS sattelites without general relativity? Unforeseen world changing invention X without the discovery of the Higgs boson? If you thought the answer to any of these was yes, then you probably took this article seriously. While he makes a valid point that technology will continue to grow in the absence of scientific input, it will be severely limited. Science and technology create a positive feedback loop with each other, and if one ceases to grow, the other will follow suit after some time.
The way the author tries to make technology out as an organism with a mind of its own, independent of humans, is silly. He's got it backwards. People drive invention, we direct it, we guess where it will go. It's only when you see things in a macro-scale that things tend to look almost organic, like almost every other chaotic process. Additionally, the author is pretty much wrong. As others have pointed out, most world-changing innovations were first done in a lab, not in a workshop. The author tries to employ the argument that more public funding of research is worse for science. This is demonstrably untrue, even using his own examples. The Germans in the 30s and 40s had by far the most advanced military technology in the world, probably due to their heavy public funding of basic sciences. Sputnik might have been based off research done with philanthropic funds, but in the end it was public funds that put a man on the moon and got us pictures of Saturn. And finally, he claims that it's unlikely private funding of sciences would devolve into "cloning people's pets," except that this sort of genetic research seems to be exactly where corporate science is going.