|
Join the discussion
Ideas
for Sale
Growing
Pains
Resources,
competition, and our institutional character
Technology
transfer is just a subset of knowledge transfer.
Dennis
Liotta, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry
Show
me the money . . .
1997
licensing income and patents from Emory and other institutions
What
is applied research?
How
does funding work in the sciences?
Overheard
on campus
Remarks
from Stanley Chodorow, CEO of the California Virtual University
and former provost of the University of Pennsylvania
Academic Exchange December
1999/January 2000 Contents Page
|
I thoroughly enjoyed the Dec
1999/Jan 2000 issue of the Academic Exchange, and although Luke Johnson's excellent article on 'citizenship'
was very stimulating I wish to respond here to the article
by Don Stein, the interview with Dennis
Liotta, and the remarks by Lanny Liebeskind
on "Ideas for Sale". These people put the issues surrounding
applied research and commercialization of research into sharp
focus and they should be thanked for doing that.
My thoughts on this subject
can be put very succinctly. Both basic and applied research are
"good things"; however, it is clear, by definition,
that the former must precede the latter, even though this may
not always be obvious at first sight. The university is where
most basic research is done and the government pays us a considerable
amount of money to do this.
There is every reason to believe that the breathtaking basic
research that
will spawn applied research and its commercialization in the
next fifty
years will be done mainly in universities. So the support of
basic
research should remain the higher priority (by far) of research
universities like Emory. Opportunities to spin off applied research,
such
as the new biotech incubator, should not be ignored of course.
But the best
way for Emory to be involved in this is as a catalyst. This is
a chemical
term that refers to something that facilitates an activity but
is not
changed by it. Emory should keep its focus on becoming a premier
(basic)
research university.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Joel M. Bowman
Department of Chemistry and
Cherry L. Emerson Center for Scientific Computation
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
HOME PAGE:
http://www.emory.edu/CHEMISTRY/faculty/bowman/
MULTIMODE web site:
http://www.emory.edu/CHEMISTRY/faculty/bowman/multimode/
|