"Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science"

[applegrove]

Billionaires With Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science

By WILLIAM J. BROAD at the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html?hp&_r=0

"SNIP......................


Absent from his narrative, though, was the back story, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America. In fact, the government initiative grew out of richly financed private research: A decade before, Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, had set up a brain science institute in Seattle, to which he donated $500 million, and Fred Kavli, a technology and real estate billionaire, had then established brain institutes at Yale, Columbia and the University of California. Scientists from those philanthropies, in turn, had helped devise the Obama administration’s plan.

American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise.

In Washington, budget cuts have left the nation’s research complex reeling. Labs are closing. Scientists are being laid off. Projects are being put on the shelf, especially in the risky, freewheeling realm of basic research. Yet from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, science philanthropy is hot, as many of the richest Americans seek to reinvent themselves as patrons of social progress through science research.

The result is a new calculus of influence and priorities that the scientific community views with a mix of gratitude and trepidation.


....................SNIP"

[okaawhatever]

1. K & R nt

[Wounded Bear]

2. While I appreciate the philanthropy...

the conversion of R&D to fully private funded orgs is troubling to the max.

There are some billionaires I would trust, but there are many more that would undermine the integrity of the errorts.

[applegrove]

3. And what too if the findings of said research

are only shared with people who can pay for it. Will it not make for inequality in so many more ways.

[Cha]

4. K!