Why can’t the free market fund scientific research?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0285
Whatever the physics community’s spectrum of political outlooks, would many members disagree that the free market—no matter how agile, efficient, and enterprising—simply cannot support certain scientific research that nations, meanwhile, can and should support?
In recent editions of the Wall Street Journal, that perennial issue has cropped up again, directly or by implication, in two op-eds and a letter to the editor. The topic was biomedicine, but the underlying principles surely apply as well for physics—which in any case is deeply involved.
Last week, Stanley B. Prusiner, a 1997 Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine, and George P. Shultz, the former US secretary of state who is now serving as a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, published an op-ed with a subheadline that declared: “The study of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consumes less than 2% of the National Institutes of Health budget. We can do more.” They began:
The human brain has produced truly remarkable advances in medical science, creating new medical devices, pharmaceutical products, and diagnostic and surgical procedures that enable us to enjoy longer, healthier lives. Consider, just as examples, the Salk vaccine, which has virtually eliminated polio; and the MRI, which makes it possible to do internal examinations noninvasively. But this very success—living longer—demands that we urgently address diseases of the brain that often accompany aging.
Given the increases of neurodegenerative diseases in an increasingly long-lived populace, the authors argued for fixing “the diminutive spending on research.” They predicted that "[l]arge dividends will likely flow if Congress and the president enhance the allocation of ... funds to studies of the brain.” They lamented that “federal funds for biomedical research are reportedly on the chopping block.”
Earlier this week, a letter observed that it was “very interesting to see someone associated with the Hoover Institution recommend increased government spending on the editorial pages of the Journal.” The writer asked: “Why can’t the free market be left to fund this research?”
That challenge to federal support for research called to mind a Wall Street Journal editor’s weekend profile of Dick Cheney: “The Story of Dick Cheney’s Heart: The former vice president opens up about his coronary artery disease, and explains how the march of American medicine saved his life .”
The editor/author, Joseph Rago, detailed at length the medically and technologically remarkable story of Cheney’s many decades as a recipient of progressively improving medical technology. “Cardiology,” Rago wrote, “has improved more in the six decades since [Cheney’s] grandfather died than in all previous history.” Early on, Rago declared that Cheney “owes his life to American medical innovation,” and later quoted the former vice president himself: “We’ve got a system that provides for the kind of research and innovation that has provided these tremendous capabilities.”
Obviously the former vice president would know the federal source of some major proportion of that system’s funding. The Cheney-cardiology profile appeared shortly ahead of the letter about neurodegenerative-disease research. Maybe the letter writer saw it.
