I began this blog three years ago with a post, “Bayh-Dole Under Attack Again,” and apparently the time has arrived for yet another attack in the mainstream business press. Readers will know that I am capable of deep skepticism or even cynicism about the motives of our university sector, but this particular attack seems wrong-headed to me. The central assertions — that academic research is now overly influenced by get-rich-quick dreams — is entirely unsupported, and there’s a great deal of confusion besides. Let’s “Fisk” a few key quotes:

For the first time, academicians were able to profit personally from the market transfer of their work. For the first time, academia could be powered as much by a profit motive as by the psychic award of a new discovery

Yes, but that misses the fundamental point of Bayh-Dole, which addressed the motivations of the licensee as much as those of the licensor. The law proceeds from an understanding that for-profit licensees will fully engage in commercializing discoveries made at universities and financed by federal tax dollars only when the rights thus licensed accrue to them and them alone. That was the reason for clarifying who could license out a federally financed discovery (the university whose faculty were performing the work at the time of discovery) and on what terms (exclusive, if necessary). That these transactions involve royalty payments and that academic inventors could make money (from their statutorily guaranteed minimum “inventor’s share” of royalties collected) was a minor grace note to the overall thrust of the law. To further assert that this means that academia has become powered by the profit motive is entirely unsupported in my view.
More on Bayh-Dole, again

Science Debate 2008, to which I earlier signed on with some reservations, has posted Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s answers to the “top 14″ questions organizers culled from issues suggested by the petition’s 38,000 signers.

Overall, the questions were decent: a few could be called leading, but no more so than is typical for candidate questionnaires by other special-interest groups. And make no mistake, the Science Debate signers are a special interest group, a list dominated by those who make a living performing federally funded research or leading research institutions that are themselves heavily dependent on the federal government, or representing either or both category in Washington. I have nothing against that; I just still wish the organizers were a bit more frank and self-aware.

I was pleased to find that the answers provided by the Obama campaign team were solid and workmanlike. They certainly didn’t sound much like the candidate’s own rhetorical style, but that again is typical in such situations. The answers committed no obvious errors, and I was particularly impressed that in the final question (on the role of science and research in improving healthcare), the Obama team forthrightly cautioned, “These are difficult problems, and science and technology can solve only some of them.”

In fact, it seemed to me that the questions led the answerers into some temptation to confuse policy informed by research with research itself, and technology diffusion with technology development or “use inspired research.” And then there’s the usual ambiguity on whether “technology” means just “information technology” or something broader (both uses can be found). Overall, the answers bear some attention, and it will be well worth waiting for the parallel submission from Republican candidate John McCain.

As I indicated in an update to my earlier post, the organizers have taken steps to qualify as a public charity, and their credibility rises somewhat in the process, even as I watch motives carefully.

Today word passed rapidly among the history-of-science community of the sudden death of Professor Michael S. Mahoney, one of my undergraduate advisors in the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Princeton University in the mid-1970s. It was in Mike’s classes on the scientific worldview of the middle ages and antiquity and the origins of modern science that I placed my interests in science and technology in a historical context, and in his graduate seminar on problems in early modern mathematics that I was lucky enough as an undergraduate to get a taste of real humanistic scholarship, alongside an incredibly talented collection of graduate students.

For the last 10 or 15 years, Mike had been struggling along with other scholars to create the new discipline of the “history of computing and software,” a topic on which he once very kindly solicited some artifacts and mementos from my own software business venture of the 1980s (though these trifles do not figure at all in his much higher-level thoughts on the topic). He will be sorely missed at Princeton and among his past students and until-recent-days collaborators. UPDATE (7/30): official obituary. I will also monitor changes the websites linked above.

And it was only in today’s paper that word appeared of the death of Professor Victor McKusick, who was one of my wife’s teachers at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. I know that my wife saw him as a committed guardian for much of what was beautiful about the Hopkins medical tradition: exceptional science and scholarship combined with a deep and humane concern for patient care and teaching. Although I once saw him up close at a faculty event, I knew him mainly through her eyes and press coverage.

Somehow I had always linked him in my mind’s eye with another figure whom I knew much better, William O. Baker, the late materials scientist, and former chairman of Bell Labs who was also vice chairman at the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology, where I worked in the 1990s. Baker and McKusick — the surnames alone speak of a different time in American science when it was predominantly a WASP enterprise, at least at the highest levels of institutional authority — were both great scientists, complete gentlemen, and so far as I can tell entirely committed to achieving a fuller diversity in American science.

Though Baker died in 2005, my tendency to link the two was oddly echoed in the obituaries: I had not realized until reading McKusick’s that another trait both men shared was primary education in a one-room schoolhouse, McKusick in Maine, and Baker in Maryland. So with two deaths this week and another one linked in my mind, it has not been a good week.

I’ve finally signed up as a supporter of Science Debate 2008, a few days after it didn’t take place, and not without some misgivings. Yes, it’s probably a good thing that the presidential candidates start talking about the role of science, technology and innovation in economic recovery (and in fact it’s a theme I’ve heard creep into Sen. Clinton’s speech in recent days).

But the Science Debate organization itself raises a few concerns. I can’t find it listed on Guidestar as as a charitable organization, and actually it bears the strong marks of an “astroturfing” operation put together by DC lobbyists for the major research universities. [UPDATE 8/9/08: ScienceDebate now says clearly that it is applying for charitable status. See their donation form. I still have some misgivings.] Please, prove me wrong in the comments if you will, but if you want to get the sense of how astroturf looks different from a venture motivated by the genuine joy in science, check out Prof. Brian Greene’s World Science Festival planned for here in New York later this spring. Both have impressive steering committees, but there’s a big, big difference in tone. Which do you think will be more effective at building public support in the long run?

It’s not that the organizers of Science Debate 2008 are wrong to focus some public attention on the reasons national governments in the industrialized nations fund scientific investigation, even in relatively hard times. These are well understood: above-average economic growth owes to innovation, and innovation looks to basic science, and the positive externalities of basic science are so strong that private industry will not itself fund it adequately.

And yet, these are hard times. And there’s something more than a little troublesome about one sector of the economy among the many dependent on public support presuming that its needs are so much more obvious and compelling than those of the others. Almost, er, elitist, one might say.

More on OK, let’s have a ‘Science Debate’ . . . but a full one