This landed for me the same week I read your colleague Jordan Dworkin's FY26 obligation data over on Stuart Buck's newsletter, and the two pieces braid together in a way that actually sharpens your argument while complicating one of its premises. (Maybe you planned this; if so, nice job.) Your diagnosis rests on a vanishing customer: Apollo's sponsor no longer exists, Bell Labs' patron wouldn't survive modern antitrust, etc. But Dworkin's numbers suggest that in the US federal case, the customer showed up for FY26: bipartisan appropriations broadly rejected the administration's proposed cuts. NIH got a raise. NSF received more than double what the White House requested. The problem isn't demand; it's that NSF is 70% behind on new awards and NIH is 50% behind on new awards. The shop is refusing the sale.
Which I think makes the "independent research ecosystem" case far stronger than your essay even claims. If the well-funded dependent system can't obligate the money it's already been given, the comparative argument for an alternative metabolism that simply… works… doesn't need organic-produce marketing. It needs witnesses.
I'd add one thing from my vantage at a public Belgian/Wallonian university — this pathology is not confined to US federal plumbing. The same pattern shows up in any "underfunded" public research institution: support admin that is fragmented, defensive, and structurally needy, and researchers who are overwhelmed, hiding, and quietly routing around their own organisation. It’s the same metabolic acidosis you're describing, just at a smaller scale and with EU money instead of NIH money. The good news, which I think underwrites your ecosystem bet, is that there are solutions at the institutional level that don't require waiting on the federal plumbing to unclog. I've been building some of them. Curious whether you'd treat executive/administrative capacity as endogenous to the "customer" question or as a separate failure mode. I suspect it matters for how the new ecosystem positions itself.
This is exactly the kind of question the research ecosystem needs right now.
And I'm not sure it has to mean betraying independent science as radically as it might seem.
There's a new opportunity here. Whoever learns to build the infrastructure - the systems that allow knowledge to move, reach the people who need it, and influence real decisions - will find new ways to sustain themselves financially.
Yes, it requires more than awareness. New skills, real effort, a different way of thinking about what research organizations actually do. But I think it's worth it.
1) Idealistic views about pure research in fact motivated lots of research production before WWII. In the U.S., many top native-born workers were the children of post-Great-Awakening clergymen, and they made a sort of religion out of truth-seeking and discovery. If you haven't read Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith, which embodies this ethic (his science adviser was the romantic scientist Paul de Kruif, author of the equally romantic book The Microbe Hunters), you should. Much of the book is about the conflicts and difficulties of doing good science in a world where publicity and funding are major concerns.
The main moral/ethical message of that book is that true, honest scientific research is written for the small coterie of fellow specialists chasing discovery in the same narrow area, and no one else, not journalists, donors, downstream users of potential technology, etc., who are incapable of understanding or appreciating the technical difficulties or the quantitative meaning of research. Pure researchers are like monks, undistracted by anyone or anything outside their moral community. And I think that Lewis described a partial truth, though obviously not the whole truth.
2) Your discussion of knowledge flows in the scientific metabolism leans heavily into the "sticky information" regime where the big problem is communicating and transferring understanding from one locus of problem-solving to another. That is also the regime that most management scholars are concerned with.
But the other half of the story is the problem of "mobile information"--the appropriability problems that lead to secrecy, the institution of IP laws, etc.--that are more often considered by economists studying R&D. No discussion of independent research institutions and finding customers can be made coherent without confronting these appropriability issues head-on.
3) Private foundations like Rockefeller essentially created a number of fields in the U.S., such as geochemistry, by their funding choices. They did so based on their own notions of pure-research value and potential. As my college history of science prof noted, those decisions were contingent rather than determined; the world might look different today had they instead chosen to fund, say, colloidal chemistry. But the private foundations were not research monopsonists as the government has constantly striven to become since WWII (V. Bush being a particular offender here).
I believe the problem that has to be acknowledged as well in this discussion that you can also monetise research by bamboozling investors, promising a perpetuum mobile, selling snake oil, create atmosphere of fear which forces others to buy yours or else and et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera. The ways outlined in this article are all ethical and genuine ways to monetise research that both promote science, enrich global human body of knowledge and generate value for the people doing the research. Yet in my opinion, one of the worries about what can happen to the research ecosystem is due to that -- there might be created a situation in which doing actual research is not the correct play, thus the total amount of knowledge generated is severely diminished while the raw amount of people doing "research" increases
Nice reframing... It strikes me though that there's many more vectors for selling beyond existential risk. Threat avoidance is a classic sales pitch... Others include enhancing status, enabling a first mover, illuminating a frontier etc etc
Bravo!
Well said. Research must have customers. The difficulty is finding enlightened ones
This landed for me the same week I read your colleague Jordan Dworkin's FY26 obligation data over on Stuart Buck's newsletter, and the two pieces braid together in a way that actually sharpens your argument while complicating one of its premises. (Maybe you planned this; if so, nice job.) Your diagnosis rests on a vanishing customer: Apollo's sponsor no longer exists, Bell Labs' patron wouldn't survive modern antitrust, etc. But Dworkin's numbers suggest that in the US federal case, the customer showed up for FY26: bipartisan appropriations broadly rejected the administration's proposed cuts. NIH got a raise. NSF received more than double what the White House requested. The problem isn't demand; it's that NSF is 70% behind on new awards and NIH is 50% behind on new awards. The shop is refusing the sale.
Which I think makes the "independent research ecosystem" case far stronger than your essay even claims. If the well-funded dependent system can't obligate the money it's already been given, the comparative argument for an alternative metabolism that simply… works… doesn't need organic-produce marketing. It needs witnesses.
I'd add one thing from my vantage at a public Belgian/Wallonian university — this pathology is not confined to US federal plumbing. The same pattern shows up in any "underfunded" public research institution: support admin that is fragmented, defensive, and structurally needy, and researchers who are overwhelmed, hiding, and quietly routing around their own organisation. It’s the same metabolic acidosis you're describing, just at a smaller scale and with EU money instead of NIH money. The good news, which I think underwrites your ecosystem bet, is that there are solutions at the institutional level that don't require waiting on the federal plumbing to unclog. I've been building some of them. Curious whether you'd treat executive/administrative capacity as endogenous to the "customer" question or as a separate failure mode. I suspect it matters for how the new ecosystem positions itself.
This is exactly the kind of question the research ecosystem needs right now.
And I'm not sure it has to mean betraying independent science as radically as it might seem.
There's a new opportunity here. Whoever learns to build the infrastructure - the systems that allow knowledge to move, reach the people who need it, and influence real decisions - will find new ways to sustain themselves financially.
Yes, it requires more than awareness. New skills, real effort, a different way of thinking about what research organizations actually do. But I think it's worth it.
Some thoughts you provoked:
1) Idealistic views about pure research in fact motivated lots of research production before WWII. In the U.S., many top native-born workers were the children of post-Great-Awakening clergymen, and they made a sort of religion out of truth-seeking and discovery. If you haven't read Sinclair Lewis's novel Arrowsmith, which embodies this ethic (his science adviser was the romantic scientist Paul de Kruif, author of the equally romantic book The Microbe Hunters), you should. Much of the book is about the conflicts and difficulties of doing good science in a world where publicity and funding are major concerns.
The main moral/ethical message of that book is that true, honest scientific research is written for the small coterie of fellow specialists chasing discovery in the same narrow area, and no one else, not journalists, donors, downstream users of potential technology, etc., who are incapable of understanding or appreciating the technical difficulties or the quantitative meaning of research. Pure researchers are like monks, undistracted by anyone or anything outside their moral community. And I think that Lewis described a partial truth, though obviously not the whole truth.
2) Your discussion of knowledge flows in the scientific metabolism leans heavily into the "sticky information" regime where the big problem is communicating and transferring understanding from one locus of problem-solving to another. That is also the regime that most management scholars are concerned with.
But the other half of the story is the problem of "mobile information"--the appropriability problems that lead to secrecy, the institution of IP laws, etc.--that are more often considered by economists studying R&D. No discussion of independent research institutions and finding customers can be made coherent without confronting these appropriability issues head-on.
3) Private foundations like Rockefeller essentially created a number of fields in the U.S., such as geochemistry, by their funding choices. They did so based on their own notions of pure-research value and potential. As my college history of science prof noted, those decisions were contingent rather than determined; the world might look different today had they instead chosen to fund, say, colloidal chemistry. But the private foundations were not research monopsonists as the government has constantly striven to become since WWII (V. Bush being a particular offender here).
I believe the problem that has to be acknowledged as well in this discussion that you can also monetise research by bamboozling investors, promising a perpetuum mobile, selling snake oil, create atmosphere of fear which forces others to buy yours or else and et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera. The ways outlined in this article are all ethical and genuine ways to monetise research that both promote science, enrich global human body of knowledge and generate value for the people doing the research. Yet in my opinion, one of the worries about what can happen to the research ecosystem is due to that -- there might be created a situation in which doing actual research is not the correct play, thus the total amount of knowledge generated is severely diminished while the raw amount of people doing "research" increases
Nice reframing... It strikes me though that there's many more vectors for selling beyond existential risk. Threat avoidance is a classic sales pitch... Others include enhancing status, enabling a first mover, illuminating a frontier etc etc