Funding Science

 

In a short piece in Nature the authors discuss the increase in private funding or research, especially in the biotech arena. They note:

 

And US tech entrepreneurs have a penchant for experimentation in how they structure their investments, says Keith Yamamoto, vice-chancellor of science policy and strategy at the University of California, San Francisco. When it comes to philanthropy, private donors are more able to take risks with their investments than are government funding agencies, which are beholden to taxpayers to ensure that their money is spent wisely. “Public money limits your activities,” says Harold Varmus, a former director of the NIH, who has also been on advisory boards for the Gates Foundation and the CZI. “There is a freedom of motion that is associated with private money.” Some tech titans have experimented with various ways of structuring their grants. The Arc Institute, for example, boasts a “no-strings-attached” funding system that gives its investigators more freedom than do standard government grants awarded to biomedical researchers. Philanthropists are also able to fund long-term, interdisciplinary projects that can be difficult for government grants to take on. Convergent Research, a non-profit organization funded in part by Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, is forming ‘focused research organizations’ that bring teams together to solve important scientific or engineering challenges that could benefit a wide swathe of research. “We’re looking for the pieces of critical, fundamental infrastructure missing from a particular field,” says Anastasia Gamick, a co-founder and president of Convergent Research, which is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 Targeting research is a difficult process. One of my favorite targets was Multimedia Communications, now embodied in the current Internet world. But then many in management had no clue. A phone call was enough. Thus a good researcher will go for long term high impact work whereas the funders may have conflicting ideas. It should be interesting to see how this evolves.

 

 

Business Schools

 First let me state I have no MBA. In fact I had just one course in economics as a undergrad. But I spent a year at Columbia as a visiting Professor at the Business School and a couple of years at NYU/Poly. Now how did that happen?

Simple, I think. In the late 70s at  I was at COMSAT and Gene Jilg, a VP of Satellite Systems, asked me to write his business plan. Never did one. Especially the financials. So one Friday I went to a local bookstore and bought a book on Finance. Read it over the weekend and on Monday I started the financials. You see as an MIT EE PhD these were just simple equations and I just asked around for the data. Done in a few weeks. 

At Warner I had plans for  interactive video, managing a staff of a few dozens, marketing, tech, valuation. Then deals. Again not a single business school class. 

The NY Times notes:

The modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization. This mind-set has escaped containment and has spread to the wider world. Business-educated elites increasingly populate political leadership, bringing with them a transactional view of public life. One investigation found that out of 45 current heads of state who had studied in the United States, 10 were business majors, and six of those also earned M.B.A.s. President Trump, a Wharton undergraduate, has treated foreign policy and government itself as extensions of deal making and personal gain. Surely, not every business graduate governs this way. But recent research by the Nobel laureate economist Daron Acemoglu and colleagues shows what tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge. In both the United States and Denmark, firms that appointed managers with business degrees cut wages and reduced labor’s share of income. Yet these companies didn’t become more productive, nor did they grow sales, investment or employment any faster. What registers as managerial acumen turns out to be wealth transfer — value moved away from workers and toward profits, shareholders and executives.

 In contrast I have seen High School Grads in retail have a better understanding of the customer, inventory, and turnover than many a B School grad. I gained more insight by doing than by studying. It was getting in the line of fire and surviving. The most complex one is selling a new business. One has to be a dream merchant of sorts, and then defend your proposed valuation. I do not think you get that in class. 

It is a bit like Med School. Two years of "theory" then two years of real people, death, fear, mistakes, and cures. There are no pre-cooked case studies. There is a 2AM ER case of a 65 year old mother and her 38 year old daughter, her pain but more so her fear. It is the 12 year old with Leukemia and you must tell the parents, see their horror about their child. Creighton wrote a great book, 12 Patients, his last two year at Harvard. It was not academic class, it was life and death. There is nothing like that in B School. 

Thus one wonders if B School has value.  

Unionized Grad Students

 

The MIT Tech discusses the Graduate Students Union. They note:

Since April, MIT’s bargaining team and its graduate student union (GSU) have held multiple meetings to negotiate a second collective bargaining agreement, reaching tentative agreement on three of 26 proposed articles. The original contract expired on May 31, leaving around 5,000 graduate research assistants, teaching assistants, and Instructor-Gs working under the terms of the expired agreement. After months of stagnant bargaining, the GSU launched a pledge on September 9 to strike if necessary. In a press release dated Sept. 11, 2026, the union announced that over 1,000 graduate workers have signed. It is not clear when exactly the GSU is planning to strike, but the last bargaining session in the month is planned for September 25.

Now back in my day, mid 60s, you never would have time for this.We were all to busy on our research. We all got the same salary, $400 per month, plus MIT Health Service. You survived, barely and worked 24 by 7! If you were lucky, as a junior faculty, you got a day a week for outside consulting, and that could be $125 a day. You could double your salary. But it still was 24 by 7!

More than half of these folks are foreign students, getting free tuition, and almost $5,000 per month! Plus they want full health care. Many may need complex medical care, costly as well.

Just the site of this massive group, in my opinion, of proto-Marxists, is terrifying (namely the appear to be class oriented, Grad Students vs the Institute). So do we have a problem with higher education, you betcha! 

But the bottom line in the "old days" was that you tried to be better, more creative, ahead of the crowd. The last thing you sought was group compliance.  Frankly you tried not to be equal as a group. You tried to be better as an individual. Unions, as I have experienced, are possibly good if the class of people are doing the same task. Say a bus driver, chicken plucker, garbage collector. But an MIT Grad student is doing a one of a kind, research, pushing the frontier forward.