I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.
Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture.
Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes...
You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.
Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement.
Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander)
The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).
Yes, although in the case of Japan (MITI and the like), there are counterexamples like the Fifth Generation project. In addition, there were economists like Lester Thurow in the US arguing strongly at the time that the US had to follow Japan's lead in industrial planning to create cosortia like SEMATECH, which largely didn't pan out.
Does anyone know what eventually happened to it? I had read about it a bit in the media at the time, it seemed like an ambitious project. I remember they were going to use Prolog instead of Lisp (for whatever reason). Did any concrete benefits come out of the research, for example, that are widely applied in (any) industry? Interesting to know.
Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry.
> are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term?
If we're talking about EMBL in Heidelberg, we can say with confidence that (along with DKFZ) it's a huge drawcard for the University. But the GP asked if it had attracted talent in some industry and kept it for the long term. Can we really say that the Rhein-Neckar region has really attracted big private sector biotech investment, on par with a place like Basel? I don't think so. By a pure coincidence of geography, companies like Roche have a presence in the general area (Mannheim I believe), but I don't think you can argue that any deliberate actions by EMBL or DKFZ have led to deep private sector talent pools.
I actually think you could turn this argument around pretty easily and show that even enormous investments in institutions like EMBL and DKFZ don't actually create the private sector spinoffs that central planners would imagine.
Like the GP, I suspect that there is a combination of environmental factors at work, that we can't fully identify at present.
Regarding your point: Heidelberg and Cambridge have both profited to some extent, but I'm convinced that a place like EMBL has profited Europe as a whole much more, keeping excellent talent on the continent and attracting excellent talent to the continent. Bork, Ellenberg and co. would have otherwise been long gone to the US and with them a lot of excellent scientists.
Regarding cluster formation: I agree, EMBL and DKFZ alone are not sufficient for creating the critical mass that you see in Boston and SF. You need a couple of big companies as well as the academic infrastructure to get these clusters up and running. I guess only Munich has the critical mass in certain sectors in Germany.
As of 2016 (last year for which there are figures; new ones should be out in a couple of weeks) CERN had 82 research physicists on staff, out of a total headcount of 2531 [1].
The vast majority of researchers working at CERN are associates (982), users and visitors from other institutions, mainly universities in member countries. CERN's primary role is to provide shared facilities (accelerators and detectors) which are too expensive for individual members, not to employ researchers.
The equivalent in machine learning would be shared computing, data collection & labeling resources capable of competing with what Google, Facebook etc have to offer. A state-led initiative on shared computing resources might be more cost-effective than buying time on Google Cloud, but the main thing could well turn out to be pooling data from national databases. Yay?
[1] https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20S...
HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
You can only demand more if you're certain that more is achievable. I don't see what evidence you have that allows you to conclude that.
Yeah, as a scientist there's nothing like underfunding when it comes to doing great things! Having to reduce the team letting people go, work with obsolete/scarce equipment, and spend the majority of the time writing grant proposals to beg for some money to move forward, are great boosts indeed. And surely the great advances of science have not been associated to large labs with huge resources, often related to the deep pockets of the military...
(Also, if everyone in the EU paid $80 for the Higgs, that’s about three LHCs depending on where in its history you take the exchange rate).
Counterexamples: one of the early prime number researchers was proud that his work had no use at all, and now it’s the foundation of a major class of encryption. That was a century or two.
Or, Maxwell published “A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism” in 1873, and it took another 30 years to become voice radio.
Of course, as the LHC only discovered the Higgs in 2012, even your 10 year lowball would be four years in the future.
Like it on not, science and research is what powers humanity flourishing, if you want to get your pitchfork out about misused resources, go complain about corporate tax cuts or money invested in pointless ad-tech, not science.
Not all science and research though. That's the whole point of my argument - we should direct funds towards projects that actually have tangible benefit to humanity in the future. I will eat my shoe if any application of neutrinos comes about in the next 50 years. Transistors? Great - those weren't invented by accident, and John Bardeen certainly deserves his two Nobel Prizes.
Communication through any obstacles, including (in principle) the entire diameter of the planet: https://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
A 5 ton detector isn’t particularly implausible in a whole range of scenarios.
Eat up. :)
I'm not even going to dive into the huge discussion that is "why profit driven science is an objectively terrible idea".
In my opinion, these projects are one of the last great human efforts to inspire generations with things that are not just about making more profit. But it's not about this project or that. It's about far more.
You say this money should go to hungry people instead. Let's say it's not just starving children in Africa, but maybe even a project to feed the homeless or help under-privileged children get an education...even in that case, do you actually think that if all that money was freed up, this would actually happen?
Of course it wouldn't. It would go to line even more pockets of some faceless international organisation / corporation / hedge fund / military investment buddies of some regime.
There is no way in hell that any poor or under-privileged person would benefit from the abandonment of these projects. No chance whatsoever. What little money there is, is all concentrated in the hands of a few people who have absolutely no other mission in life other than accumulating more money and power.
They have made most science happen for private sector profit-reaping already. This is some of the last stuff done for all mankind. We'd be making a huge mistake abandoning it.
Again, the people in charge will not help the poor or homeless. If you wanted to do that, you should tax multinational corporations and get rid of tax havens.
There is a kind of money hidden away in tax loopholes all over the globe that would make the LHC, HBP, heck, the ISS look like chump change.
Look there first.
Many, I'm not sure, but how about Silicon Valley? Which was borne mostly out of government backing of military projects and the university system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_a...