One thing to say about the recently announced Nobel Prize in Physics is that it illustrates, as Congress mulls the nation’s R&D budgets, the economic rationale for bigger research investments. After all, the three scientists who shared the award won for work that helped harness light in ways that hastened the development of, yes, the Internet but also the entire digital camera revolution. That’s a pretty big pay-off.
But there’s another more specific and timely takeaway: All three of the laureates this year carried out their groundbreaking work while working at corporate research labs. And that’s actually a problem, because labs like the ones this year’s laureatesworked in don’t really exist now. Congress needs to consider that too as it continues to weigh FY 2010 and 2011 research budgets, climate legislation, and indeed the nation’s economic future.
The problem the country faces is that the conditions in which Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith made their breakthroughs are harder to come by today. Kao, for example, made his breakthroughs in fiber optics (the thin glass threads that now carry a vast chunk of the world’s phone and data traffic) while at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the U.K. Similarly, Boyle and Smith designed the first digital imaging technology while working at Bell Labs, the legendary research organization that was once part of AT&T.
What was so special in these corporate labs of the 1960s?
