WHAT IS THE ROI ON BASIC RESEARCH?
Why do we need the NIH, the NSF, or the CDC and why do we fund University research centers?
Wouldn’t we be better off if they were all closed and the research was funded by industry?
Wouldn’t that save the taxpayer a lot of money and force the research to pay for itself?
Industry must answer to its Board, its investors, and its stockholders. Each of these parties has a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that money spent is done in a way that advances the company and provides a return on the money invested.
When industry invests in R&D, it does so with the specific intent to find new methods or products that can advance its mission, provide new sources of revenue and generate profits. And this is totally appropriate. Pharmaceutical firms want to develop treatments for diseases that it can manufacture and sell.
Basic Research is not aimed at finding products or developing profit-generating methods. Basic Research is aimed at increasing understanding of the fundamental properties underlying observed facts and phenomena. It does not choose topics with specific applications in mind; rather it is driven by questions posed by previous inquiries with the goal of expanding knowledge, not developing practical applications.
And yet, some of the greatest economic benefits come from Basic Research.
Here are a few examples; people that you may or may not have heard of.
J.C.R. Licklider, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Lawrence Roberts, and Tim Berners-Lee.
These are not household names.
Working in the 1950’s with a grant from the DOD and the NPL (Great Britain), Licklider, Baran, and Davies were interested in how they might be able to have University science labs exchange data without having to send it through the Postal Service. In the early 1970’s, Roberts developed what was then called ARPANET, using a technique called Packet Switching Technology, that allowed a computer at UCLA to communicate with a computer at Stanford through a telephone line.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, working at CERN, near Geneva, proposed a system that would link scientists in universities and institutes around the world and allow them to share information. He called his system the “world-wide-web.”
In 1992, a group of students and researchers at the University of Illinois developed a “browser” that they called Mosaic (it later became Netscape), which allowed users to see words and pictures on the same page, use clickable links and scrollbars.
Berners-Lee did not patent the system, no company owned it or profited from it. But it has generated trillions of dollars and created the information revolution that has transformed the world.
This Basic Research into how to allow scientists to communicate with each other would not have been imagined, considered, or funded by private industry.
Dan Kleppner
Dan Kleppner was a physics doctoral student at Harvard interested in understanding the consequences of Einstein’s theories about atoms. He wanted to study ultra-cold gases in order to investigate how certain types of atoms remained stable for long periods of time.
He determined that studying Hydrogen would allow a better model for research than previous gases but required a lot of trial-and-error attempts to achieve ultra-cooled hydrogen. This led him to the invention of the hydrogen maser. A maser is a microwave version of a laser.
The Hydrogen Maser turned out to be extremely useful in Atomic Clocks and is the underlying technology that allows for GPS.
The Basic research into Einsteinian physics resulted in a trillion-dollar industry, that no one would have imagined previously and for which there would have been no industrial development.
Fransico Mojica, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier
Franciso Mojica, a microbiologist at the University of Alicante in Spain was investigating how to measure water quality along Spain’s beaches. He was interested in a very small bacteria-like organism that lived in the salt marshes, an organism in the family Archaea. Mojica observed something strange in the genome of this organism, a series of genetic sequences repeating at regular intervals. These sequences became known as “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats”. CRISPR.
Further investigation into why these repeats occurred suggested that they were part of primitive immune system in bacteria used to cut the DNA in parasites, thereby killing them.
Emmanuelle Charpentier was studying a different bacterium, one in the Strep family, and found a new molecule within it that was similar to the repeats that Mojica had seen, and this new molecule could attach to RNA. She labeled it “tracRNA”.
Charpentier then collaborated with Jennifer Doudna to discover that if you joined the CRISPR RNA and the tracRNA into a single molecule, it could be used with another specific enzyme (Cas9) to identify a specific DNA sequence that needs to be cut. They demonstrated that they could cut out a specific gene using this CRISPR/Cas9.
Basic Research into water quality and a small, insignificant life form in the salt marshes of Spain led to a breakthrough in medical research and a complete revolution in understanding disease. It is being used to treat genetic diseases like Sickle-Cell Disease and Cancer; it is being used to study gene function and to create animal models of human disease; it is being used to develop disease-resistant crops and animals; and it is being used to detect pathogens and diseases.
No company would have found this; there would have been no reason to look for it.
Friedrich Miescher
Most people have heard of James Watson and Francis Crick who received their Nobel Prize for elucidating the double helix structure of DNA. (Rosalind Franklin was equally important, but she had passed away before the Nobel Prize was awarded, and the Nobel cannot be awarded posthumously.)
Meischer’s discovery, as so many are, was serendipitous. Miescher was trying to isolate the proteins inside white blood cells. He obtained pus-coated patient bandages from surgical clinics and extracted the white blood cells. He then looked for the proteins contained in these cells. Instead, he found chemicals that were quite different; they were not chains of amino acids and they had a very high phosphorus content. This was a new class of cell substances, and since they were primarily located in the Nucleus of the cell, he called them nucleins. His term “Nucleins” morphed into what we now call Nucleic Acids.
It was over 50 years later that scientists realized the value of Miescher’s discovery, and in the 1950’s multiple laboratories began to try to understand what DNA and RNA were.
Basic Research led to the pharmaceutical revolution, genetic research, criminal investigations and too many other advances to mention here.
No industrial concern would have ever financed any of this work.
Finally, George Kohler and Cesar Milstein.
I have written about them before. Milstein and his post-doc Kohler were interested in the basic immunology question “How does the immune system generate so many different antibodies?” In order to do an experiment, they devised a method to create large amounts of a single antibody. After immunizing mice, they took the spleen cells from the mouse and fused them with mouse cancer cells, creating a new cancer cell line that secreted one and only one antibody.
Several years later, this technique gave rise to what we now call monoclonal antibodies. These MAB’s, like Avastin, Keytruda, Humira, Remicade, Cosentyx, Dupixent and dozens more have created a spectrum of treatments for diseases that were untreatable before. Just look at the TV ads and look at the name of the drug underneath the commercial name. If that name ends in “mab”, it is a monoclonal antibody, thanks to George Kohler and Cesar Milstein.
No industrial concern would have developed monoclonal antibodies on their own because the concept had not been created before the Basic Research yielded it.
The ROI from Basic Research is HUGE, but it is unpredictable. And this is why it is so important that research be directed by scientists, not bureaucrats, who often think that science should reflect their political agenda, and not by Venture Capitalists who are focused on immediate returns on the funds committed.
I often laugh when I hear a politician say something like: “We are going to war against Cancer!”, or “We need to find new ways to treat viral infections!”
Of course, every scientist wants to achieve these goals. That is what they work towards every single day. Platitudes won’t change their efforts. The Pharmaceutical Industry tries to uncover drugs and treatments to address disease every day, using information generated from Basic Research as a guide to new approaches. The NIH, the CDC, University and Medical research programs continually explore the fundamental questions of how biological systems work. Those questions arise directly from the Basic Research done yesterday.
This is how science works. Each researcher stands atop the construction site created by previous researchers in their field. Their only goal is to build the construction a little bit higher so that the next generation of scientists can see beyond what they see.
Destroying our Basic Research agencies and programs mothballs the construction sites, and far too quickly, those construction sites deteriorate and cannot be rebuilt. This is a tragedy for our country and for our economy.