Federally Funded Research: The Key to Unexpected (and
Valuable) Discoveries
By John R.
Platt
(Originally published November 2013 in IEEE-USA's Today's Engineer)
One of the
most important discoveries in modern genetics and biotechnology got its start more
than four decades ago with a grant from the National Science Foundation to
study the humble bacteria that live in high-temperature geysers in Yellowstone
National Park. Back in 1969 microbiologist Thomas Brock and his undergraduate
research assistant, Hudson Freeze, journeyed to Yellowstone and discovered a
new bacteria species, which they named Thermus
aquaticus bacteria, in the waters of the Lower Geyser Basin. In the years
that followed their discovery unlocked new fields of study for other
researchers, inspiring new technologies for studying DNA, genetic tests to
diagnose diseases and conditions, and sequencing the human genome.
That's the
beauty and importance of federally funded research, says Freeze, who today
serves as the director of the genetic disease program at Sanford-Burnham
Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California. "You can't predict
where the research is going to go next."
Taking a Chance on the Unexpected
The early
work of Brock and Freeze has not been forgotten. This year they are among the
honorees of the second annual Golden
Goose Award, which was created to recognize scientists and engineers
whose federally funded research led to "significant human and economic
benefits." The award, now in its second year, highlights seemingly obscure
federally funded studies that led to later breakthroughs which had a major
impact on society. The other recipients of this year's award include John Eng,
whose study of Gila monster venom led to an important drug for diabetes; and
David Gale, Lloyd Shipley and Alvin Roth, whose separate research into subjects
as varied as marriage stability and urban school choice programs let to the
creation of the national kidney exchange program.
"The
value of federally funded research has been proven time and time again,"
says Barry Toiv, vice president for public affairs at the Association of
American Universities, one of the organizations sponsoring the Golden Goose
Award. (IEEE-USA helped to sponsor a video about this year's award.) "Economists
suggest that 50% of growth over the last several decades has been a result of
innovation, much of which is in turn a result of federally funded research at
American universities."
Toiv says
this research is important even though "it's impossible to know where so
much of it is going to lead. It's basic research, mostly, and it may not have
some end-result in mind when it takes place."
Federally
funded research is the "only place that you can take that kind of
chance," says Freeze. "Private industry can't do it because they have
to show that they're working on something that will eventually yield a
profit." He notes that the life-saving research being done at his own
organization, a non-profit, would probably not be conducted at all in the
for-profit world.
Thom Mason,
director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, echoes this
observation. "There's not a lot of room for fundamental science in an
environment where people are driven by the next quarterly report." He says
corporations have a hard time justifying investments that "may take
decades to pay off, or pay off in a completely different way than anticipated
and not necessarily in a way that would enrich the company which did the
work."
ORNL receives
its funding through the Department of Energy's Office of Science, as well as
the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Although
the lab does tend to work in areas that Mason characterizes as "not too
far away from some kind of end-use application," the fact that they do not
build or sell anything means they are not restricted to work that has an
immediate commercial application. "We can push things to a point of proof
of principle and then, hopefully, hand it off to the private sector or the
Department of Defense or whoever to really deploy it."
Research for All
Beyond
funding individual projects, federal dollars also help pay for collective
resources that become available to researchers from around the country. ORNL,
for example, hosts the famous Titan supercomputer, the Spallation Neutron
Source and the High Flux Isotope Reactor, among other tools. "It's a big
investment," Mason says. "These are shared resources. They serve a
wide range of communities."
These types
of systems exist outside the scope of most if not all corporate budgets, says
IEEE Fellow Pramod Khargonekar, assistant director for the National Science
Foundation's Engineering Directorate. "Modern scientific and engineering
research involves very sophisticated infrastructure, whether that
infrastructure is physical laboratories, instruments or computational
resources. It's very difficult to imagine that any entity other than the
federal government would have the resources to create and then support and
sustain this kind of fundamental, long-term basic research. I think it's just
too expensive for any single entity."
Beyond
that, Mason points out that the majority
of the research conducted at government facilities is open-literature research.
"It's not proprietary, so again, how would you ever justify a return to
shareholders if the results are just going to be published in the open
literature?" Since most of this research is basic science, it is also hard
to protect it as intellectual property, a priority for corporate research.
Outside
of the research itself, the federal government helps support the development of
young scientists. "We're not just
federally funding research," Toiv says, "we're also funding training
of scientists and engineers, and this has been extraordinarily successful for
the country."
Khargonekar
himself benefitted from that support back in 1985 when, as a young researcher,
he received the NSF's Presidential Investigator Award. "I must say it was one of the best things that
have happened to me in professional life," he tells me. "I still
remember receiving the certificate with President Reagan's signature on it. You
know, I was born in India and I came to U.S. to do my graduate work. But to
receive an award from the President of the United States left a deep impression
on me and was very, very helpful in my early research." He used the
funding from the award to attract "some really outstanding graduate
students" and together they wrote a number of papers which he says have
had a very strong impact on the field of control theory. "That NSF
Presidential Investigator Award was certainly very critical to our success and
I think at the foundation of my professional career," he says.
Despite Successes, Threats Abound
Despite the
proven track record of federally funded research, budgets continue to shrink.
The federal sequester of 2011 and the shut-down of 2013 both hurt federally
funded science, and some politicians see the need to cut things even more. "Research funding is going down,"
Toiv says. "It's not just flat. It's just declining." Many research
labs have had to shutter projects, lay off employees and scale back their
operating hours as a result of these cuts.
Meanwhile a
few politicians even go as far as to mock federally funded science projects,
something we first saw decades ago when then-Senator William Proxmire began
issuing his monthly Golden Fleece Awards. (The Golden Goose Award is named in
part as a response to Proxmire's awards.) "This is damaging to the
public's view of science," Toiv says. "When policy-makers ridicule individual examples of research, when
they look for things that sound funny, when they target and when they try to
de-fund them or even try to de-fund entire disciplines, they are dismissing the
possibilities of discovery. They are, in the long run, damaging the country,
because they are limiting the possibilities of innovation that benefits the
economy, that leads to a new industry and that leads to a new idea that ends up
saving lives."
The public isn't the only group to feel the effect of this dismissal.
Researchers feel it as well. "If the creativity of researchers is stifled,
if they are worried or if federal agencies are worried that they can't fund
research, it could damage the entire innovation enterprise that has made this
country," Toiv says.
While
Sanford-Burnham has ramped up its efforts to attract additional funding from
philanthropists and to license some of its discoveries, that may not be the
most sustainable path. Freeze says funding uncertainty has already created a
brain drain in his organization, as faculty members have left to take positions
overseas. Similar brain drains are happening around the country, as other
nations attract people with promises of more stable funding. Several European countries,
China and Korea are pouring their resources into research and basing their
systems on that in the U.S.
"Other
countries are absolutely trying to imitate this," Toiv says, "because
the magnitude of the success of the scientific enterprise in this country is
unquestionable." He points at countries such as China, which is developing
new research universities at a record pace. "They're not going to match our research universities in the short
run, but in the long they are."
Let's Talk
Although Mason acknowledges that other countries are
overtaking us, he says the U.S. remains the "gold standard" for
federally funded research. Khargonekar used the same phrase when describing the
NSF grant review process, which he calls "one of the very best review
processes anywhere in the world." That helps to support the high quality
of the research being done in this country. "We do the best job we can for the taxpayers and for the public so
that their investments help society as best as is possible."
But do the public and legislators get that message? Freeze
suggests that researchers in general "haven't done the greatest job at the
grassroots level of educating people about science and where science funding
comes from."
Khargonekar
takes it further: "We, the
scientific community and the engineering community, need to continuously make
the case to the public and the policy makers as to why investment in research is
critically important for national progress, our well-being and our society to
remain economically competitive, health of our citizens, and the security of
the nation."
And Mason recommends that emphasizing the value of science in general may
help to alleviate fears about the economy. "A component of solving the
deficit problem has to be growth in the economy," he says. "You've
got to grow the revenues. You've got to grow the economy, and innovation
technology research is a critical part of that."
Toiv
suggests that politicians may need to be better educated about the value of
scientific research. "What
policy-makers sometimes don't realize is that the work that researchers do may
end up leading to some extraordinary innovation, but it's impossible to know at
the time. It is discovery upon discovery, twists and turns. Researchers are
looking for one thing and they find something else. There's serendipity often
involved."
How do we turn things around? Freeze suggests that a well-prepared team
of engineers going out and talking to local groups could help do the trick.
"Just try and think what a thousand scientists could do by going out there
and preaching the value of science. It would be revolutionary."
It may also
help to embrace and promote why we conduct science in the first place. "It
speaks to us as human beings who are curious about our place in the world and
want to know how the world works," Khargonekar says. "Since the dawn
of human civilization that fundamental drive to know and explore the frontier
is part of what makes for a great society."
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