Category: Economics of Science

Amateur Leeuwenhoek Made Huge Contribution to Science

(p. 40) Antoni van Leeuwenhoek was a scientific superstar. The greats of Europe traveled from afar to see him and witness his wonders. It was (p. 41) not just the leading minds of the era—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Christopher Wren—but also royalty, the prince of Liechtenstein and Queen Mary, wife of William III of Orange. Peter the great of Russia took van Leeuwenhoek for an afternoon sail on his yacht. Emperor Charles of Spain planned to visit as well but was prevented by a strong eastern storm.

It was nothing that the Dutch businessman had ever expected. He came from an unknown family, had scant education, earned no university degrees, never traveled far from Delft, and knew no language other than Dutch. At age twelve he had been apprenticed to a linen draper, learned the trade, then started his own business as a fabric merchant when he came of age, making ends meet by taking on additional work as a surveyor, wine assayer, and minor city official. He picked up a skill at lens grinding along the way, a sort of hobby he used to make magnifying glasses so he could better see the quality of fabrics he bought and sold. At some point he got hold of a copy of Micrographia, a curious and very popular book by the British scientist Robert Hooke. Filled with illustrations, Micrographia showed what Hooke had sen through a novel instrument made of two properly ground and arranged lenses, called a “microscope.”  . . .   Micrographia was an international bestseller in its day. Samuel Pepys stayed up until 2:00 A.M. one night poring over it, then told his friends it was “the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.”

Van Leeuwenhoek, too was fascinated. He tried making his own microscopes and, as it turned out, had talent as a lens grinder. His lens were better than anyone’s in Delft; better than any Hooke had access to; better, it seemed, than any in the world.  . . .  

(p. 42) Then, in the summer of 1675, he looked deep within a drop of water from a barrel outside and became the first human to see an entirely new world. In that drop he could make out a living menagerie of heretofore invisible animals darting, squirming, and spinning.

Source:
Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The example above is consistent with Baumol’s hypotheses about formal education mattering less, in the initial stages of great discoveries. (And maybe even being a hindrance).
See:
Baumol, William J. “Education for Innovation: Entrepreneurial Breakthroughs Versus Corporate Incremental Improvements.” In Innovation Policy and the Economy, edited by Adam B. Jaffe, Josh Lerner and Scott Stern, 33-56. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

The example is also consistent with Terence Kealey’s claim that important science can often arise as a side-effect of the pursuit of business activity.
See:
Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

The Benefits from the Discovery of Sulfa, the First Antibiotic

I quoted a review of The Demon Under the Microscope in an entry from October 12, 2006. I finally managed to read the book, last month.
I don’t always agree with Hager’s interpretation of events, and his policy advice, but he writes well, and he has much to say of interest about how the first anti-bacterial antibiotic, sulfa, was developed.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be highlighting a few key passages of special interest. In today’s entry, below, Hager nicely summarizes the importance of the discovery of antibiotics for his (and my) baby boom generation.

(p. 3) I am part of that great demographic bulge, the World War II “Baby Boom” generation, which was the first in history to benefit from birth from the discovery of antibiotics. The impact of this discovery is difficult to overstate. If my parents came down with an ear infection as babies, they were treated with bed rest, painkillers, and sympathy. If I came down with an ear infection as a baby, I got antibiotics. If a cold turned into bronchitis, my parents got more bed rest and anxious vigilance; I got antibiotics. People in my parents’ generation, as children, could and all too often did die from strep throats, infected cuts, scarlet fever, meningitis, pneumonia, or any number of infectious diseases. I and my classmates survived because of antibiotics. My parents as children, and their parents before them, lost friends and relatives, often at very early ages, to bacterial epidemics that swept through American cities every fall and winter, killing tens of thousands. The suddenness and inevitability of these epidemic deaths, facts of life before the 1930s, were for me historical curiosities, artifacts of another age. Antibiotics virtually eliminated them. In many cases, much-feared diseases of my grandparents’ day—erysipelas, childbed fever, cellulitis—had become so rare they were nearly extinct. I never heard the names.

Source:
Hager, Thomas. The Demon under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor’s Heroic Search for the World’s First Miracle Drug. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.

When Embracing Science is a Matter of Life and Death

MonsantoStockValueChangeGraph.gif

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.

Venter’s Use of ESTs “Leapfrogged” his X-Chromosome Proposal

(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.)

Schumpeter Saw that the “Demand for Teaching Produces Teaching and Not Necessarily Scientific Achievement”

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.

NASA Suffers From “Utterly Dysfunctional Funding and Management System”

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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.)

The revised edition of the book under review (including an afterword added by the author) is:
Zimmerman, Robert. The Universe in a Mirror: The Saga of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Visionaries Who Built It. revised pb ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

High Prices Provide Incentive to Innovate

MonsantoCornResearcher.jpg

“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.

“Theory” Said Gene Sequencing Technique Was “Impossible”

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.

The Role of Private Enterprise in Sequencing the Human Genome

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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.)