William wrote: > Private business is funding applied research to, say, build a more > efficient automobile, when the real goal should be to eliminate private autos > altogether while improving universal transportation.
But that's not a science question, it's a policy question, and you have already framed it in terms of a preferred resolution--which may be good as a strategy for policy making but is not good for forming a hypothesis to study. The frontier or boundary between applied science and pure research is about as vague and diffuse as the boundary between high taste (art) and middle(brow) taste (art). At what point does the search for an applied scientific solution to a problem become a matter of basic research? Are "buckyballs" and nanotubes found by pure researchers and then DARPA or Big Business stumble across the paper in a journal and think, "Hey, that could be a way to develop X"? Or does the funding source with a desire for an incredibly small, lightweight, and yet incredibly strong substance pour money in a commercial research laboratory, which teams with a university science department and together they develop nanotubes? The spread of research incubator parks, such as the Research Triangle Park or Silicon Valley and others, exemplifies the widespread value placed on a merger of "pure" research, on one hand, with entrepreneurial businesses of "applied" research, on the other. Those fundamental questions do get asked, but they may come after a technological proposal triggers the search for the underlying principle revealed in the applied use. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
