I received a letter this week from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) awarding me a lifetime membership.  I guess this is routine for long-term members who turn 65 (I do in December).  IEEE is the major professional-technical body for scientists and engineers outside of the life-sciences.  I have been a member since 1975.  In the back pages of one of the IEEE general publications is an old photograph of a car on a test track.  There is no steering wheel for the driver and no driver in the driver’s seat.  A passenger is seated adjacent to the driver’s place and there are a couple of electronic meters fastened to the dashboard.  This page was a copy of a 1960 advertisement.  Here is the full caption.  “RCA and General Motors are proud to present the future of transport: cars that can drive themselves!  … Using sophisticated magnetic sensors and radio control these cars steer themselves autonomously following guidance wires embedded in the road.  Meanwhile, feel free to read, chat with your companions or get some work done.  Major highway systems could be in place as early as 1975, so we can promise that this technology is coming very soon to a road near you.”  Thank God it didn’t.

Let’s just dispense with the niceties.  Science and engineering is very hard.  You have to be very good at mathematics.  You have to work for years to develop your skills.  Even Einstein complained that the math he had to do to develop General Relativity was very difficult.  And sometimes even the cautiously optimistic scientists and engineers get it wrong.  Fusion and autonomous vehicles are on that list.

There are still some in this political season who promote the idea that big government should get out of the scientific research business.  They claim that industry can do R&D more “efficiently.”  And of course, why use taxpayer money to fund science when corporate profits can do it?  Then to support the argument, they will cite a few colossal failures of government-funded R&D.  The problem with this argument is that some projects, such as fusion and driverless vehicles, are so big and so long-term that no corporation would ever attempt them.  GE and GM would have gone bankrupt had they tried to develop fusion starting in 1939 or autonomous vehicles in 1960. 

So the challenge in government versus corporate funding (both are needed) is picking the long-term, high investment projects for the government and the shorter term projects with a payoff in sight for corporations.  The answer is certainly not to scuttle one in favor of the other.  It is a question of proper balance and recognition and even with that, we don’t always get it right. 

It is noteworthy that after decades of government funding of fusion that it is finally transitioning into the private (corporate) sector.  Autonomous vehicles had to wait until computational abilities were up to the task and such efforts are underway.  These are both examples of successes in the hand-off from government research to corporate development.

My plea here is for us to turn down the polarization in our discussions.  It seems like science has become another football where it must be either all this or all that.  The nuanced truth that some on both sides may not want to hear is that we need both corporate and government funding of science.  All one or all the other is just plain foolishness.