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Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. C1) The salad days of organic salad are wilting in favor of high-tech tomatoes.

As global food shortages threaten to ignite social and economic instability from Nigeria to India, the popular aversion to genetically modified foods is turning into more of a luxury for the wealthy than a practical option for the masses.

This trend is evident in the share price and earnings growth of Monsanto, the world leader in agricultural biotechnology by market share. Its stock has soared 22% this year, trading at a breathless 37 times estimated 2008 per-share earnings.

For the full story, see:

KAREN RICHARDSON. "AHEAD OF THE TAPE; Food Shortage Recasts Image of 'Organic'." The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 25, 2008): C1.

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(p. 82) Venter dubbed the fragments "expressed sequence tags," or ESTs for short.

. . .

Venter was ecstatic. He had veered wildly off course from his approved plan of research, but the risk had paid off. While the Human Genome Project grant committee was still dragging its feet over his X-chromosome proposal, he had already leapfrogged ahead of that idea and found a way to go forward even faster, using his ESTs. Venter wrote Watson to let him know what he was up to, hoping to win his approval and some funding to continue the EST project.

Reference to book:

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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From McCraw's summary of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis:

(p. 453) During the mid-nineteenth century, universities were beginning to teach economics, but "the demand for courses and textbooks produced courses and textbooks and not much else. Does this not show that there is something to one of the theses of this book, namely, that need is not the necessary and sufficient condition of analytic advance and that demand for teaching produces teaching and not necessarily scientific achievement?"

Source:

McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

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Source of book image: http://press.princeton.edu/images/k8618.gif

(p. A13) The space shuttle Discovery arrived safely home over the weekend, and I suppose we are all rather relieved - that is, those of us who were aware that the shuttle had blasted off a couple of weeks ago on yet another mission. Space exploration is attracting a lot of excitement these days, but the excitement seems to have less to do with the shuttle and more to do with private space ventures, like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic or Robert Bigelow's plans for space hotels or Space Adventures Ltd., whose latest customer for a private space trip is Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He bought a ticket only last week.

Robert Zimmerman's "The Universe in the Mirror" serves to remind us that NASA, too, can do exciting things in space. Yet the career of the Hubble Space Telescope has been both triumphant and troubled, bringing into focus the strengths and the weaknesses of doing things the NASA way.

. . .

In addition to telling a thrilling tale, Mr. Zimmerman provides a number of lessons. One, he says, is the importance of having human beings in space: Had Hubble not been designed for servicing by astronauts, it would have been an epic failure and a disaster for a generation of astronomers and astrophysicists. Though robots have their uses, he notes, "humans can fix things, something no unmanned probe can do." . . .

But the biggest lesson of "The Universe in a Mirror" comes from the utterly dysfunctional funding and management system that Mr. Zimmerman portrays. Hubble was a triumph, but a system that requires people to sacrifice careers and personal lives, and to engage in "courageous and illegal" acts, in order to see it succeed is a system that is badly in need of repair. Alas, fixing Hubble turned out to be easier than fixing the system that lay behind its problems.

For the full review, see:

GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS. "Bookshelf; We Can See Clearly Now." The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 16, 2008): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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"A Monsanto researcher, Mohammadreza Ghaffarzadeh, monitored drought-resistant corn technology in Davis, Calif." Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 4) CORN prices are at record high levels. Costs for other agricultural essentials, from wheat to coffee to rice, have surged, too. And many people are stunned, even frightened, by all the increases.

But some entrepreneurs and analysts -- recognizing that relative price increases in specific goods always encourage innovators to find ways around the problem -- say they see an opportunity for creative solutions.

"When something becomes dear, you invent around it as much as you can," says David Warsh, editor of Economicprincipals.com, a newsletter on trends in economic thinking.

Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, adds, "All of a sudden, some things that didn't look profitable now do."

. . .

A study in the 1950s by the economist Zvi Griliches of American farmers' adoption of more productive varieties of corn showed how higher prices reduced the cost of adopting new technologies.

. . .

Ultimately, higher food prices give innovators room to cover the cost of protecting human health. But prices are a democratic signal: when all innovators see them, their ability to sneak up on an opportunity, while others nap, vanishes.

"The bigger the prize people are chasing, the more people go after it," says Paul Romer, a theorist on sources of economic growth. "As people pile into an area, the expected return to any one innovator goes down."

Yet, fortunately, the return to society goes up.

For the full commentary, see:

G. PASCAL ZACHARY. "Ping; A Brighter Side of High Prices." The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., May 18, 2008): 4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

For more on Zvi Griliches's contributions to the economics of innovation, see:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "Zvi Griliches's Contributions to the Economics of Technology and Growth." Economics of Innovation and New Technology 13, no. 4 (June 2004): 365-397.

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In the book The Genome War, the story is told about how the leading theorist proved the impossibility of the gene sequencing technique. It was the Venter group that gave it a try and proved it could work. This story is similar to the one about theory saying that what Marconi was trying, was impossible. (See: Larson, 2006.)

Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986) discuss the case that theory had proven how solid objects fall. But Galileo's experiments proved them wrong. This established the primacy of experiment and evidence, over theory.

When governments decide, they usually do what is safe, which is to follow current theory (or in rare cases, they pick Lysenko).

The entrepreneurial system, takes advantage of the tacit individual knowledge that is out there, but not yet theoretically defensible, and allows it to percolate to success.

References:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

Rosenberg, Nathan, and L.E. Birdzell, Jr. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

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Source of book image: http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/2004/02/20/genome_war.php

The race to decode the genome always seemed like an appealing test case of the relative efficiency of government versus private enterprise. But the results seem muddy because sometimes in the media the outcome has been described as a win for Craig Venter's private Celera corporation, and other times, as a tie.

For years I have wanted to learn more, and now I have finally done so by reading James Shreeve's fascinating The Genome War.

It is clear from the book that the entrance of Celera, greatly accelerated the government's own efforts to sequence the human genome. So one important lesson is that, no matter who "won the race, the consumer benefited from the entrance of a private competitor.

Also clear, is that Venter's group took advantage of public resources and results. Their primary zeal was for sequencing the genome, rather than for promoting private enterprise.

Regrettably, this is a common case: many entrepreneurs take the institutions of their economy as given, and make use of government when it suits their short-run objectives.

Officially the results were announced as a tie. But the main bone of contention had been over Celera's advocacy and use of the "whole genome shotgun" technique for sequencing the gene. The government group had attacked the method as impractical and unreliable.

The proof of who "won" in a deeper sense, was that after the contest was over, everyone, including the government, was using the "whole genome shotgun" technique.

Another lesson is that the usual scientific goal of immediately releasing findings, may actually reduce the information available to the public. If, as with the genome, the information is costly to obtain, allowing a period of proprietary ownership of the information, provides private entrepreneurs with the incentive to discover the information in the first place. Another case of unintended consequences: if we fully follow the alleged idealism of academic scientists, we will end up with less scientific knowledge, not more.

Reference to book:

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

(Note: My comments are based on the whole book. A paragraph on pp. 366-367 is especially important.)

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The following passage provides some evidence of the importance of information from science (viz., chemistry) in process improvement. Speaking of chemists:

(p. 247) . . ., with their aid, the life of a rail increased from two years to ten, and the car weight it could bear from eight tons to seventy in the forty years between the Civil War and 1905. Only a very few new technologies have had equal significance.

Source:

Rosenberg, Nathan, and L.E. Birdzell, Jr. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

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(p. 246) We found . . . a learned German, Dr. Fricke, and great secrets did the doctor open up to us. [Ore] from mines that had a high reputation was now found to contain ten, fifteen, and even twenty per cent less iron than it had been credited with. Mines that hitherto had a poor reputation we found to be now yielding superior ore. The good was bad and the bad was good, and everything was topsy-turvy. Nine-tenths of all the uncertainties of pig iron making were dispelled under the burning sun of chemical knowledge.

What fools we had been! But there was this consolation: we were not as great fools as our competitors . . . Years after we had taken chemistry to guide (p. 247) us [they] said they could not afford to employ a chemist. Had they known the truth then, they would have known they could not afford to be without one.

Andrew Carnegie as quoted in:

Rosenberg, Nathan, and L.E. Birdzell, Jr. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

(Note: brackets and ellipses were in the original.)

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"Modern construction, Difference Engine No. 2, 2005"   Source of caption and photo: http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/overview/

Charles Babbage is best known as the inventor of an early computer, but he also made some early, stimulating contributions to the economics of science.

(p. C6) The oldest computer has landed in Silicon Valley, where they design the newest computers.

The Science Museum in London has built two replicas from Charles Babbage's original design for the Difference Engine No. 2. Planned from 1847 to 1849, the five-ton, 8,000-part system for calculating the mathematical expressions known as polynomials was finally built in 2002 by a team of engineers that took 17 years to complete the entire project. The machine includes a remarkable printing component that almost certainly would have been the world's first automated typesetter had Babbage built one from his original design during his lifetime.

The all-mechanical Difference Engine can handle numbers to 31 digits of accuracy. The printer produces an ink printout but also has the capability of making a mold for a printing plate. It automatically typesets results in columns and employs two separate font sizes.

For the full story, see:

JOHN MARKOFF. "BITS; 1800s-Style Computer Comes to U.S." The New York Times (Mon., May 5, 2008): C6.

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Source of image of the books: http://www.buy.com/prod/the-new-palgrave-dictionary-of-economics-second-edition/q/loc/106/204470936.html

Today (May 30, 2008) is the publication date of the second edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, which includes my "Economics of Science" article. The article surveys the history and current status of research on the economics of science, and the relationship of the economics of science to the economics of technology.

For a much earlier, and much longer, take on some of the same issues, see "The Economics of Science."

References to both articles:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "Economics of Science." In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, edited by Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E.Blume. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. "The Economics of Science." Knowledge and Policy 9, no. 2 & 3 (1996): 6-49.

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The quotes below from a WSJ summary of a Nov. 16, 2007 The Chronicle of Higher Education article, suggests that we do not need to worry about the sometimes-alleged "shortage" of scientists and engineers:

(p. B14) The federal dollars pumped into university science departments has created more scientists and engineers than the market wants, said Michael S. Teitelbaum, vice president of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which sponsors research, at a hearing in Congress last week. Mr. Teitelbaum said the federal government should find a way to adjust how it funds university research so that university departments don't end up using the extra money to add graduate students and postdoctoral fellows

For the full summary, see:

"The Informed Reader; Science; U.S. Faces a Glut (Really) of Scientists, Engineers." The Wall Street Journal (Tues., November 13, 2007): B14.

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   Source of graphic: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1)  JORDAN, Mont. -- Prospecting in Montana's badlands, rock ax in hand, paleontologist Jack Horner picks up a piece of the jawbone of a dinosaur. He examines the splinter, then puts it back and moves on. It isn't the kind of bone he is looking for.

Prof. Horner is searching for something that many scientists believe no longer exists: dinosaur bones that harbor blood cells, protein and, perhaps, even DNA.

"Most people looking for dinosaurs are looking for beautiful skeletons," he says. "We are looking for information."

. . .  

Prof. Horner, a curator at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, is among the world's most influential and offbeat paleontologists. He pioneered studies of dinosaur parent-(p. A12)ing behavior, species variation and bone cells. He is dyslexic, a former Special Forces operative of the Vietnam War era, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" fellow, and a chaired professor of Montana State University who never finished a formal college degree.

"The lenses that people normally use to look at stuff are broken in Jack," says Mary Schweitzer, an assistant professor of paleontology at North Carolina State University, who has worked with him for years. "That's what makes Jack such a good scientist. Every now and then, every field should get a renegade weirdo in it who challenges assumptions."

. . .  

"The chances of finding any [dinosaur] DNA are pretty low," Prof. Horner acknowledges. "I am still hopeful."

In a field mostly outside the mainstream of federal research funding, Prof. Horner has a knack for attracting private grants. Star Wars producer George Lucas, Qualcomm co-founder Klein Gilhousen and Wade Dokken, a developer of Montana real estate, have contributed toward his research, the university says. Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft Corp. and co-founder of Intellectual Ventures LLC, is helping to underwrite this season's fieldwork.

This summer, in Montana's Hell Creek Formation, Prof. Horner is searching the last landscape inhabited by dinosaurs. More than 65 million years ago, this plain was a wetland where herds of horned Triceratops watered. Today, it is an arid outwash of boulders, cactus and sage. The red and gray soil is littered with white shards of petrified wood that ring like bone china when tapped together and countless crumbs of dinosaur bone.

. . .

"As long as you are not bound by preconceived ideas of what you can find," Prof. Horner says, "there are an awful lot of things you can discover."

For the full story, see:

ROBERT LEE HOTZ. "Dinosaur Hunter Seeks More Than Just Bare Bones; Prof. Horner Searches For Traces of Blood, DNA; Lucky Break From T. Rex."  The Wall Street Journal  (Fri., August 24, 2007):  A1 & A12.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

     At top, Prof. Horner; at bottom: "Sarah Keenan, 21, an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who is working this summer for Prof. Horner, covers the fossilized triceratops frill in a protective jacket of plaster."  Source of caption and photos: the online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

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    Source of book image:  http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/big_larsonthunderstruckdrm_1.jpg

Larson's book plays off a murder mystery against Marconi as the innovator who brought us communication through the air. 

I'm most enthused about hte Marconi part.  It shows how he proceeded against the theorists of the day, whose theories told them that what he was trying to do was impossible.  He was more entrepreneur, than scientist.  And it turned out that it was a good thing that the theoretical scientists did not rule, as they might if all decisions about technology were made by the government.

What happened here is an example of what Taleb would call a Black Swan.

Source:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

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    Source of book image:  http://palmaddict.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/big_larsonthunderstruckdrm_1.jpg

Larson's book plays off a murder mystery against Marconi as the innovator who brought us communication through the air. 

I'm most enthused about hte Marconi part.  It shows how he proceeded against the theorists of the day, whose theories told them that what he was trying to do was impossible.  He was more entrepreneur, than scientist.  And it turned out that it was a good thing that the theoretical scientists did not rule, as they might if all decisions about technology were made by the government.

What happened here is an example of what Taleb would call a Black Swan.

Source:

Larson, Erik. Thunderstruck. New York: Crown, 2006.

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   Dr. Terence Kealey is currently Vice-Chancellor at England's only private university, the University of Buckingham.  Source of photo:  http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/publicity/academics/vc.html

Terence Kealey argues that science would be better done if it were all privately done, without government support.  As you might expect, Kealey has not won any popularity contests among those receiving government support. 

At the January American Economic Association (AEA) meetings in New Orleans, I heard a paper by Belenzon and Patacconi that presented evidence that scientists at private firms publish more research than Belenzon and Patacconi had expected to find.

Sounds like a bit of grist for Kealey's mill?

The reference to the AEA paper is:

Belenzon, Sharon, and Andrea Patacconi. "Firm Size and Innovation: Evidence from European Panel Data." Presented at meetings of the American Economic Association. New Orleans, Jan., 4, 2008.

The reference to Kealey's book is:

Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.

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   The Berkeley Pit was once a copper mine, and now holds a lake of toxic waste.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Here are a few paragraphs from a fascinating story about a couple of people who seem to be practicing what Taleb is preaching in The Black Swan:

BUTTE, Mont. — Death sits on the east side of this city, a 40-billion-gallon pit filled with corrosive water the color of a scab. On the opposite side sits the small laboratory of Don and Andrea Stierle, whose stacks of plastic Petri dishes are smeared with organisms pulled from the pit. Early tests indicate that some of those organisms may help produce the next generation of cancer drugs.

From death’s soup, the Stierles hope to coax life.

“I love the idea of looking at toxic waste and finding something of value,” said Ms. Stierle, 52, a chemistry researcher at Montana Tech of the University of Montana.

For decades, scientists assumed that nothing could live in the Berkeley Pit, a hole 1,780 feet deep and a mile and a half wide that was one of the world’s largest copper mines until 1982, when the Atlantic Richfield Company suspended work there. The pit filled with water that turned as acidic as vinegar, laced with high concentrations of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium and zinc.

. . .

Mr. Stierle is a tenured professor at Montana Tech, but his wife gets paid only for teaching an occasional class or if there is a grant to finance her research. From 1996 to 2001 they applied for dozens of grants, but received only rejection letters. So they financed their own research, using personal savings and $12,000 in annual patent royalty payments. In 2001, they won a six-year, $800,000 grant from the United States Geological Survey.

“Their work is considered a very high-risk approach,” said Matthew D. Kane, a program director at the National Science Foundation. “It takes a long time to get funding, and some luck to find active compounds.”

Unlike scientists at large research universities, who commonly teach only one class a year and employ graduate students to run their laboratories, Mr. Stierle teaches four classes each semester at a college with 2,000 undergraduates and no major research presence.

. . .

The couple said they were negotiating privately with a pharmaceutical company to test some of the compounds they have discovered and possibly turn them into drugs. As they wait, they open another Mason jar filled with murky pit water, draw a sample and return to work.

“The pit very easily could have been a complete waste of time,” Mr. Stierle said. “We just had luck and worked our butts off. We take that first walk into the dark.”

For the full story, see:

CHRISTOPHER MAAG.  "In the Battle Against Cancer, Researchers Find Hope in a Toxic Wasteland."   The New York Times  (Tues., October 9, 2007):  A21.

(Note:  ellipses added.)

   In the photo immediately above, Don and Andrea Steirle work in their lab.  The map to the left shows the location of the Berkeley Pit.  Source of the photo and map:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

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   Source of book image:  http://store.43folders.com/books-3-1400063515-The_Black_Swan_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable

This is part entertaining rant and part serious epistemology.  I've finished 9 of 19 chapters so far--almost all of my reading time spent smiling. 

Historians of Greek philosophy used to tell the story of one of the first philosophers, Thales of Miletus, that he once was watching the stars, and fell into a well.  The citizens of Miletus made fun of him being an impractical philosopher.  To prove them wrong, he used his knowledge to corner the market in something, and made a fortune. 

Not a very plausible story, but appealing to us philosophers.  (Like Thales, we like to think we could all be rich, if we didn't have higher goals.)

Well apparently Taleb is the real Thales.  He wanted to be a philosopher, got rich on Wall Street using his epistemological insights, and is now using his wealth to finance his musings on whatever he cares to muse on.

Beautiful!

Here's an amusing sentence that broadened my grin.  (It was even more amusing, and profound, in context, but I don't have time to type in the context for you.)

(p. 87)  If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in "prestigious" publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conferences.

Reference for the book:

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007.

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   Genentech CEO Dr. Arthur D. Levinson.  Source of image:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

(p. B1)  WSJ: You have multiple blockbuster biotech drugs on the market and more on the way. In such an uncertain business, how do you manage scientists to achieve that kind of success?

Dr. Levinson: We are first and foremost committed to doing great science. If a drug can't be the first in class or the best in class, we're just not interested. We're not looking to achieve incremental advances or extend patents or do X, Y, Z unless it is going to really matter for patients. That allows us to bring in phenomenal scientists and encourage them to do the basic and translational research.

We decided 15 years ago that we would be committing (p. B2) to oncology, which at the time for us was new. We are now the leading producer of anticancer drugs in the United States. We took a lot of risks. In many cases, those risks paid off. We are now also in immunology. Again, the role of management here is to set the broad direction and then hire absolutely the best scientists and bring them in and say, 'Do your stuff.'

For the full interview, see:

MARILYN CHASE. The Wall Street Journal "How Genentech Wins At Blockbuster Drugs CEO to Critics of Prices: 'Give Me a Break'."   The Wall Street Journal  (Tues., June 5, 2007):  B1 & B2.

    Source of graph:  online version of the WSJ article cited above.

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The following excerpt from a summary of a May 17th Nature article, has a message that complements what I found in a paper published a couple of years ago (see the reference at the bottom of this entry).

Do charities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation produce better medical research than institutions supported by the government?

. . .

. . . , some scientists believe philanthropies make better use of that $5 billion than corporations or governments, says Nature's Meredith Wadman. Many researchers have stories about nonprofits who rescued risky but useful projects that had been shunned by government-backed institutions. Charities can make decisions more quickly and can take bigger risks. Philanthropists also tend to closely monitor their investments and want the satisfaction of a mission accomplished.

For the full summary, see: 

"Informed Reader; PHILANTHROPY; Do Charities Outdo Research By Federal-Backed Agencies?"  The Wall Street Journal  (May 18, 2007):  B6. 

(Note:  ellipses added.)

The reference to the Nature article is: 

Meredith Wadman.  "Biomedical philanthropy: State of the donation."  Nature  447, (May 17, 2007):  248 - 250. 

My related paper is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr.  "The Relative Success of Private Funders and Government Funders in Funding Important Science."  The European Journal of Law and Economics 21, no. 2 (April 2006): 149-61.

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Melanoma has taken many human lives, including my father's on April 15, 2000.  Government licensing and regulations reduce competition in medicine and slow the pace of medical innovation.  Animal health care is less regulated.  Is it an accident that dogs are being cured for melanoma before humans?  

Vet Philip Bergman remembers the first time he tried the vaccine in a dog.

"That was a dog that thankfully underwent complete disappearance of his tumor," says Bergman.  "It was remarkable, obviously, to us."

Since then, more than 100 dogs have been treated, including Lawana Hart's Lucky, who last June appeared to have only a few months to live.

For the full report, see:

Robert Bazell.  "Treatment for canines with cancer raises hopes; Researchers encouraged by melanoma vaccine's success on dogs."  NBC Evening News Report; online print version updated: 6:36 p.m. CT Oct 26, 2006.

For the video version, go to:

http://video.msn.com/v/us/msnbc.htm?g=d7f603e0-86bb-44db-bad0-524ec79b02c8&f=00&fg=copy

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  Source of the book image:  http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/P/1400082137.01._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V52133117_.jpg

Economists have debated whether patents mainly provide incentives, or obstacles, to innovtion.  In the story of the development of sulfa, the first powerful antiobiotic, the desire for profit, through patents, was one motive that drove an important part of the development process; this, even though, in the end, sulfa turned out not to be patentable:

(p. P9) Mr. Hager follows a group of doctors into postwar German industry -- specifically into the dye conglomerate IG Farben.  These men, having witnessed horrible deaths by infection on the battlefield, picked up on Ehrlich's hypothesis by trying to synthesize a dye that specifically stained and killed bacteria.  Led by the physician-scientist Gerhard Domagk, they brought German know-how, regimentation and industry to the enterprise.

Year after year the team infected mice with streptococci, the bacteria responsible for so many deadly infections in humans.  The researchers then treated the mice with various dyes but had to watch as thousands upon thousands of them died despite such treatment.  Nothing seemed to work.  The 1920s turned into the '30s, and still Domagk and his team held to Ehrlich's idea.  There was simply no better idea around.

Then one of the old hands at IG Farben mentioned that he could get dyes to stick to wool and to fade less by attaching molecular side-chains containing sulfur to them.  Maybe what worked for wool would work for bacteria by making the dye adhere to the bacteria long enough to kill it.

. . .

The IG Farben conglomerate expected huge profits from Prontosil.  But then French scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris dashed these dreams.  The German scientists -- all of them Ehrlich disciples -- thought that the power to cure infection rested in the dye, with the sulfa side-chain merely holding the killer dye to the bacteria.  The scientists at the Pasteur Institute, though, showed that the sulfa side-chain alone worked against infection just as well as the Prontosil compound.  In fact, the dye fraction of the compound was useless.  You could have Ehrlich's magic bullet without Ehrlich's big idea!  This bombshell rendered the German patents worthless.  The life-saver "drug" turned out to be a simple, unpatentable chemical available in bulk everywhere.

For the full review, see: 

PAUL MCHUGH.  "BOOKS; Medicine's First Miracle Drug."  The Wall Street Journal  (Sat., September 30, 2006):  P9.

The reference for the book is: 

Thomas Hager.  The Demon Under The Microscope.  Harmony, 340 pages, $24.95

  A medic in World War 2 aids a wounded soldier.  In such situations, sulfa was a great help in reducing infections.  Source of photo:  online version of the WSJ review cited above.

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I’ve slogged through enough reports from the National Academy of Sciences to know they’re often not shining examples of the scientific method.  But — call me naïve — I never thought the academy was cynical enough to publish a political tract like “Beyond Bias and Barriers,” the new report on discrimination against female scientists and engineers.

. . .

I consulted half a dozen of these experts about the report, and they all dismissed it as a triumph of politics over science.  It’s classic rent-seeking by a special-interest group that stands to get more money and jobs if the recommendations are adopted.

“I am embarrassed,” said Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, “that this female-dominated panel of scientists would ignore decades of scientific evidence to justify an already disproved conclusion, namely, that the sexes do not differ in career-relevant interests and abilities.”

. . .

After decades of schools pushing girls into science and universities desperately looking for gender diversity on their faculties, it’s insulting to pretend that most female students are too intimidated to know their best interests.  As Science magazine reported in 2000, the social scientist Patti Hausman offered a simple explanation for why women don’t go into engineering:  they don’t want to.

“Wherever you go, you will find females far less likely than males to see what is so fascinating about ohms, carburetors or quarks,” Hausman said.  “Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.”

For the full commentary, see:

JOHN TIERNEY.  "Academy of P.C. Science."  The New York Times   (Tues., September 26, 2006):  A23.

(Note:  the title of the online version was "Academy of P.C. Sciences.")

(Note:  ellipses added.) 

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