Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

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There are quite a few places like this:

* GTRI * Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab * MIT Lincoln Labs * ~All the national labs (NIST, Argonne, etc...)

They are still mostly full as I understand.

If I was to write an article on what might be improved: We need more translational research (product focused, using existing knowledge) and less academic research.

One problem I see is that there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization in physics like there is in comp sci or biotech.

Granted I'm biased. I founded my company (zeroK NanoTech) to capitalize on laser cooling research. Two Nobel prizes and countless professors pushing the boundaries on this stuff since the 90's. And my little company is going to be the first to deliver a product that's a black box to the user wrt to the science but delivers some new capabilities. The ion trap quantum computing may yet pay (much larger) dividends to society and those guys are also now making big pushes as well. Might be fair to count the resurgence of rocketry and fusion in this category as well.

So maybe things *are* looking up after all!

" there just isn't the springboard from academic research to commercialization"

I worked in tech transfer for a bit.

There isn't such a thing as 'translation of science' because knowledge itself is pretty useless, even applied research is.

Products - which hopefully embody some of those things - are what people buy and the things that go into making good products are a bit orthogonal to classical R&D approach. Thinking about things from a 'user centric' instead of things having 'intrinsic' value is a big leap that I think takes a few years for some to get.

In Academia we think of knowledge as having inherent meaning and value unto it's own - which is totally fine I'm not hear to argue otherwise.

But in the real world, it's almost as if you have to view Science as just 'fancy pants tooling' and give it about as much love as your ruler or hammer, i.e. think of it as just a tool to meet some 'ends' wherein the 'ends' is not 'publishing a paper'.

In biotech, the 'ends' maybe more mappable, i.e. 'this drug regrows hair in men and women' but as you indicate, it mostly doesn't work this way.

Even then, even if we got our surplus PhD's into industry, we still may have this over-capacity.

So all of that aside, maybe we are entering the phase where the standard/normative level of education is just really, really high. Like in one of those corny Star Trek places where everyone has a PhD.

Just like many of the wealthy, effete folks in the past who got degrees because they were rich and not even interested in pursuing something applied or interesting, 'we're all getting rich now' and perhaps should turn our focus to the 5B people on planet earth who still have material needs.

Translational research is its own subfield in biotech too. And it's plausibly one key place where a lot of low-hanging fruit might still be hidden, both in biotech and in the harder sciences. In general, it would be nice if academia did its part as an alternate, fully formalized source of what's usually left to tacit "folk" know-how in all sorts of industry-relevant pursuits.

True that, with the caveat that biotech has much longer development cycles, and often socialized markets, which make them an odd fit for scrappy entrepreneurs and VC.

Personally I think we are turning discoveries into products pretty fast, at the least faster than any time in history. My thought was that we need more fundamental discoveries (e.g. like understanding gravity or theories that predict and unlock high temperature superconductors), but the people who discover those things needn't be teaching staff.

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