THE FREE MARKET FAIRY & HEALTH RESEARCH

The wingnuts LOVE to claim that the free market will take care of the looming health care crisis. One of their favorite arguments is all the good things the companies have brought us. OF course, this misses the point. The NIH and the NSF provide almost all the money for basic research and that's where the advances come from, not from working on a knock-off of Levitra. There was a time when major companies funded their own research labs but that day has past.

Bell Labs Is Gone. Academia Steps In.
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY
Published: December 16, 2007

In the bygone days of innovation, large corporations — like RCA, Xerox and the old AT&T — maintained internal laboratories like Bell Labs. These corporate labs were essentially research universities embedded in private companies, and their employees published academic papers, spoke at conferences and even gave away valuable breakthroughs. Bell Labs, for instance, created the world’s first transistor after World War II — and never earned a dollar from the innovation.

Almost no corporate labs based on the Bell or Xerox model remain, victims of cost-cutting and a new appreciation by corporate leaders that commercial innovations may flow best when scientists and engineers stick to business problems.

The obsession with marrying research and markets, while generally a strength of American capitalism, leaves some needs unmet. To fill them, “companies need boots on the ground at universities,” says Henry Chesbrough, a business professor who studies innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

Jean Stéphenne, president of the vaccine division of GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, says university partnerships with corporations will grow “because technology is changing so rapidly.” Even if companies have the resources to finance their own research and identify the right academic problems to tackle, they usually don’t have the time to assemble a staff to pursue these problems. Without help from university professors, Mr. Stéphenne asks, “How can we cope?”