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The Clamor To Save Science

Jim Correll, director Fab Lab ICC at Independence Community College, Independence Kansas 

Each year, when a president or a congress releases a proposed budget, if there’s any reduction to government spending for “science,” there’s a clamor about not supporting science with the implication that scientific research will come to a halt without said government funding. For the first 160 years or so of America’s existence the bulk of scientific discovery came about by tinkerers and small companies. Starting roughly with World War II, the government became more and more involved with scientific discovery, most notably the development of atomic weapons and energy. After the war, as Russia went from ally to adversary, the involvement of government in scientific discovery continued, much of it weapon related. 

In January, 1961, in his farewell address to the nation on the advent of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Dwight Eisenhower warned that the institution of science had become intertwined with our military institutions in an unhealthy way. Eisenhower used a term “Military Industrial Complex” (MIC) to describe this phenomenon of science and military combined. In the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, he said that while the nation must be secure there was a danger that MIC might have undue influence over the allocation of the nation’s resources, spending too much on science and defense. He also said that science was becoming so complex as to take it out of the garages of tinkerers and inventors and into large and expensive research and development departments both public and private. 

Today, we enter another era as the Internet and other means of sharing information begins to put much of scientific discovery back in the hands of “digital tinkerers” in their garages and small shops indeed, some in Fab Labs and maker spaces. 

There is disruption coming in the field of scientific discovery. In 2011, fourteen year old Easton LaChappelle of Mancos Colorado (population a bit above 1300) began working, in his bedroom, on a motorized prosthetic hand. He was not a scientist and he didn’t have a lot of money or any kind of government funding. Yet, in five years, at nineteen, he released the plans for his thought-powered robotic hand to “open source,” meaning anyone could use or springboard from his technology. His hand cost $350 to build as compared to tens of thousands for a conventional prosthetic hand. 

For many scientific discoveries, gone are the days when we can afford to take six to eight years in development. Today’s entrepreneurs and tinkerers measure their time to discovery in a matter of weeks or months instead of years. There will always be a need for government participation and sponsorship to foster scientific discovery, but many research institutions, both in government and in large industrial firms, have become bureaucratic and complacent. The rest of us have to learn to work with constrained resources. In fact, constrained resources have led to some of the greatest discoveries of our time. There’s no reason science can’t survive a cut of ten to thirty percent in government spending. The entrepreneurs and tech start-ups can make the discoveries in less time and for less money. 

Jim Correll is the director of Fab Lab ICC at the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on the campus of Independence Community College. He can be reached at (620) 252-5349 or by email at jcorrell@indycc.edu. Archive columns and podcasts at www.fablabicc.org. 


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