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posted by janrinok on Friday October 30 2015, @10:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the chicken-and-egg dept.

For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. Now Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal that when you examine the history of innovation, you find, again and again, that scientific breakthroughs are the effect, not the cause, of technological change. "It is no accident that astronomy blossomed in the wake of the age of exploration," says Ridley. "The steam engine owed almost nothing to the science of thermodynamics, but the science of thermodynamics owed almost everything to the steam engine. The discovery of the structure of DNA depended heavily on X-ray crystallography of biological molecules, a technique developed in the wool industry to try to improve textiles." According to Ridley technological advances are driven by practical men who tinkered until they had better machines; abstract scientific rumination is the last thing they do.

It follows that there is less need for government to fund science: Industry will do this itself. Having made innovations, it will then pay for research into the principles behind them. Having invented the steam engine, it will pay for thermodynamics. After all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the U.S. and Britain made huge contributions to science with negligible public funding, while Germany and France, with hefty public funding, achieved no greater results either in science or in economics. To most people, the argument for public funding of science rests on a list of the discoveries made with public funds, from the Internet (defense science in the U.S.) to the Higgs boson (particle physics at CERN in Switzerland). But that is highly misleading. Given that government has funded science munificently from its huge tax take, it would be odd if it had not found out something. This tells us nothing about what would have been discovered by alternative funding arrangements. "Governments cannot dictate either discovery or invention," concludes Ridley. "They can only make sure that they don't hinder it. Innovation emerges unbidden from the way that human beings freely interact if allowed. Deep scientific insights are the fruits that fall from the tree of technological change."


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @03:07AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @03:07AM (#256776)

    Some refs to start:

    "Approximately 7x10^15 mature cells are produced in a human lifetime and these could be produced in 53 cell generations (2^53 = 9x10^15). In 60 cell generations a total of 10^18 cells would be produced, enough for over 1000 years of human life."
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25459141 [nih.gov]

    "First, we noticed that these data were typically mentioned in the literature without citing a reference; second, we observed wide ranges among data reported by different sources, ranging from 10^12–10^20."
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164 [nih.gov]

    Just read all the commentary on this claim: "Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue's homeostasis."
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25554788 [nih.gov]

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