Discovery is finding out something that already exists, but that was unknown.
Invention is taking what is known and creating something that has not existed before.
For example, while looking for a new route to China, Columbus discovered America; or Newton discovering gravity, or Franklin electricity, or Pythagoras discovering that the Earth was spherical.
Invention is taking things that are known and creating something that has not existed before. For example, Guttenberg’s printing press, or Edison’s light bulb, or Bell’s telephone, or the Internet.
In current science, basic research is discovery.
Applied research is invention.
In medicine, a great example is Smallpox. In the 19th century it is estimated that between 300 million and 500 million people worldwide died from Smallpox. Over a hundred years prior to the discovery of viruses, Edward Jenner, a British physician observed that milkmaids who had contracted the non-lethal disease, cowpox from their dairy cows, were immune to smallpox. He found that if you took some Cowpox pus and inoculated healthy people with it, that those people would also be protected from Smallpox. His discovery was that people who had Cowpox would not get Smallpox, his invention was a way of inoculating people with Cowpox so that they, too would be protected from Smallpox.
In my opinion it is critical for all of us to understand these differences. Companies and industry will never do basic research that leads to discovery. There is no ROI on that research because no results can be predicted in advance. Discovery is defined as understanding something that already exists, but which is currently unknown, and the fact that it is unknown circumscribes any attempt to define a need for it in advance. Industry will always take new discoveries and try to create marketable products or services from the learnings of those discoveries. That is invention. Capitalism thrives on invention.
Only the society as a whole, through governmental efforts, can finance discovery. That is the purpose of the NIH, CDC, NSF, NASA and other research agencies.
Understanding the difference between Discovery and Invention, it becomes easier to understand that you cannot pose goals like “Discover a cure for cancer”. There is no way to solve this statement. You can study cancer cells to try to understand what makes them act the way they do; or try to find underlying issues that make people more or less susceptible to cancer. But the discoveries made along the way can never be predicted. However, as we learn more, and make more discoveries in basic research, we create more opportunities for those learnings to yield new treatments from the inventors in industry.
The goal of this essay is to try to establish a base level understanding of why we support basic research, and why cutting funding to it is short-sighted. Further, attempting to recast the goals of our societal research institutions into problem-oriented programs runs counter to the extreme advantages that basic research provides to our society, our country, and the world.
Here are some stories:
In 1948 the Swiss agronomist George De Mestral went hunting. When he came back home, he observed that his dog was covered in burrs. When examining those burrs, he discovered that they stuck to the hairs of the dog through a system of loops. This observation was a new discovery, something that existed, but had not been previously known. He then spent 10 years trying to develop a manufacturable system based on this discovery. He succeeded and called his invention “Velcro” a term derived from the French words “velour” (velvet), and “crochet” (hook), which describe De Mestral’s observation of hooks and loops.
In 1928, a British bacteriologist, Alexander Fleming, returned home from a vacation. In his laboratory he had been growing bacteria in petri dishes; but when he went to inspect them, he found that one had been contaminated with a mold. He noticed that in that dish, the one with the mold contamination, that the areas around the mold were free of bacteria. When he purified the juice that came from the mold, he found that it could kill bacteria. He called that mold juice “penicillin” because it was able to kill the bacteria that he was cultivating: Penicillium notatum. We call this a discovery because it was something that existed in nature but had not been previously known. He published a paper about this in 1929. Ten years later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, at Oxford read Fleming’s paper and turned his observation into a viable medicine, the first antibiotic. That was an invention, because they created something that had not existed before, based on the earlier discovery.
In the 1930’s, the Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger was trying to invent a sensor that could detect poison gas. While testing one of these sensors, Jaeger was smoking a cigarette, and when the smoke from that cigarette came close to the sensor, it went off. This unexpected discovery led to the invention of the smoke detector.
In the 1920’s, a Canadian veterinarian, Frank Schofield was dealing with a disease in cattle and sheep that had been grazing on moldy sweet clover hay. They began to suffer internal bleeding. Many died after simple veterinary procedures that resulted in uncontrollable bleeding. Schofield discovered that there was a chemical that the mold had secreted into the hay that prevented blood from clotting. 20 years later, that discovery allowed Karl Link, at the University of Wisconsin to isolate the anticoagulant from the hay, and invent a new compound named after the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) that had funded the research. The compound, Warfarin was initially used as a rat poison but eventually became an important tool in treating heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.
In the early part of the 19th century, the British pharmacist John Walker was experimenting with chemicals. He would place those chemicals on sticks. One day, working with a combination of potassium chlorate and antimony sulfide, he accidentally scraped one of those sticks on the hearth near his fireplace. The stick burst into flames. That discovery resulted in the invention of matches.
In 1866, an American pharmacist in Georgia, John Pemberton, who had been gravely injured in the Civil War was trying to discover a pain killer that could replace the morphine with which he had become dependent. He mixed alcohol with coca leaves and kola nuts. He called his product “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca”. However, the temperance movement in Georgia forced him to remove the alcohol from his “wine”. He replaced it with sugar syrup, and one day he accidentally mixed some carbonated water into the mixture. Thus, was invented “Coca-Cola”, a name derived from the Coca leaves and Kola nuts.
Discoveries lead to large scale advances in our understanding, and the understanding allows creative people to invent products based on that understanding. When we downsize our roster of people making discoveries today, we limit the number of products that we may invent tomorrow. Inventions drive economic growth, so the best economies fund basic research to fuel inventions.