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Wealth of Science

By clock on July 23, 2006.

Phil Plait has an excellent post: Wealth of Science:

Then the author said something that literally startled me:

"Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created."

He's absolutely right. Again, wealth is not the same as money. Scientists take a relatively small amount of money (compared to, say, the cost of an attack helicopter or the building of a bridge) and turn it into wealth. Knowledge. Understanding. A brief moment of awe in the public when they grasp a little bit more of the Universe.

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Academia

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In the early days, DARPA supported people rather than proposals. There was a lot of progress from starting in 1963; for about ten years the kinds of things I am talking about did flourish. And then in the early 1970s there was a kind of funny accident. Senator Mike Mansfield, quite a liberal, decided that the Department of Defense shouldn't be supporting civilian research. So he was responsible for ARPA becoming DARPA, and straining not to compete with industrial and civilian research. So it became much harder for them to support visionary researchers.

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