Bill Gates takes rich to task

Les Schaffer schaffer at optonline.net
Tue Feb 5 10:04:06 PST 2002


Michael Perelman wrote:


> I have a book coming out in April that devotes considerable
> attention to this. I did not choose the title -- Steal this idea:
> the corporate confiscation of creativity.

there was an interesting exchange in Science magazine a couple week ago, around an earlier correspondence entitled "Enclosing the Research Commons", by Donald Kennedy. here's an extract from the latter:

It is approaching 60 years since Vannevar Bush and others persuaded

the U.S. government to do a remarkable thing: take resources that had

been at the disposal of the war effort and allocate them to the

support of basic research, most of it in academic institutions. It

came to be called the "Endless Frontier," a metaphor adroitly chosen

to link the promising unknowns of 20th-century science with the

promising unclaimed spaces of the 19th-century American West. The

Endless Frontier changed fundamental science from a venture dependent

on small privileged elites into a vast publicly owned enterprise.

That was the first revolution. The second, under way now, is a surge

of basic biomedical science toward the private sector, driven by the

mobilization of philanthropy and corporate risk capital. Continuing

the frontier motif, it could be called the Great Enclosure. Just as

the 19th-century frontier was transformed from public land into a

checkerboard of individually owned holdings, the largely public

domain of basic research is now moving into private

hands. Interestingly, these enclosure revolutions came about in the

same way: Both were implemented by purposeful government

intervention, accomplished through statute.

[snip]

les schaffer



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