http://etherwave.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/los-alamos-vs-100000-garages/ A blog dedicated to improving how we write, teach, and think about the history of science Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:06:39 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://etherwave.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/los-alamos-vs-100000-garages/#comment-318 Philip Mirowski Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:23:01 +0000 http://etherwave.wordpress.com/?p=850#comment-318 The contrast between the Manhattan Project and '10,000 garages' does replay the outmoded dichotomy between Cold War science and the new era of global privatized science. The problem is that the terms of the debate have largely been dictated by neoliberal economists, and therefore no appreciable headway is made in diagnosing the real problems besetting contemporary science and the universities. Americans have a weakness for seeing science as prosecuted by geniuses and entrepreneurs; but the real issue is how to deal with a fatally flawed system of the funding and organization of science in the US, which includes phenomena like: outrageously stengthened IP, the junk science movement undermining academic science, the failure of the biotech model of research, the offshoring of all manner of corporate R&D to low-cost platforms like China, the spreading practice of ghost authorship in scientific journals, badly biased results in journals due to hidden funding effects, and the falling number of American scientific publications in fixed journal sets. The ridiculous dichotomy posed by Brokaw simply reveals the result of the degradation of current understandings of how science works (or not). Historians have not helped with their penchant for retrospective praise of newly uncovered instances of 'commercial science' in the longer perspective. I discuss these issues in detail in my forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, ScienceMart. The contrast between the Manhattan Project and ‘10,000 garages’ does replay the outmoded dichotomy between Cold War science and the new era of global privatized science. The problem is that the terms of the debate have largely been dictated by neoliberal economists, and therefore no appreciable headway is made in diagnosing the real problems besetting contemporary science and the universities. Americans have a weakness for seeing science as prosecuted by geniuses and entrepreneurs; but the real issue is how to deal with a fatally flawed system of the funding and organization of science in the US, which includes phenomena like: outrageously stengthened IP, the junk science movement undermining academic science, the failure of the biotech model of research, the offshoring of all manner of corporate R&D to low-cost platforms like China, the spreading practice of ghost authorship in scientific journals, badly biased results in journals due to hidden funding effects, and the falling number of American scientific publications in fixed journal sets. The ridiculous dichotomy posed by Brokaw simply reveals the result of the degradation of current understandings of how science works (or not). Historians have not helped with their penchant for retrospective praise of newly uncovered instances of ‘commercial science’ in the longer perspective.
I discuss these issues in detail in my forthcoming book from Harvard University Press, ScienceMart.

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