Too bad science and academia can't be like financial marketes
Hahaha. Maybe that's because we academics spent the past 50 years promising our financiers to cure this major aging disease or that, blew close to a trillion of their hard-stolen dollars, and have cured very nearly nothing. Even an iBanker should be able to figure us out by now. Bioweapons didn't seem to pan out either (wasn't that a clever pitch while it lasted!). Why are they even keeping us around ?! I guess you have to fool only some of the people, all of the time... (sorry getting of topic.. but. Academia is in a lot of ways like financial markets, and that is what's birthing the problems I tried to dodge above ;-)
My point was that in monetary terms at least, the system doesn't reward researchers, inventors and the like
effectively, yet they are the ones positioned at the highest, furthest point in the complex interplay of societal mechanisms leading to the innovative improvement of the ultimate limiting factor in the advancement of civilization: technology and technique. In the case of inventors, governments introduced patent laws to counter the problem, but these can be worked around or banally violated, while litigation is costly and big companies are not afraid to be sued (more complicated tech is harder to imitate, though). Now the researcher, his pay is decided not by the importance of his work, but either luck or his ability to obtain funds -- by others' opinions. While in regular business and investments discrepancy between others' opinions and intrinsic value is a signal of opportunity (e.g., the case of undervalued stock), in
these fields it does nothing. Also, if you're looking for real-world solutions, then science is a very long-term approach, and tragically, in the age of day trading and HFT desks, long-term approaches are just not in vogue.
This brings us to a notable dilemma, which may deserve a topic of its own on the forum. Peter Thiel (PayPal, facebook), Larry Ellison (
ORACLE) and Sergey Brin (Google) notwithstanding, both biogerontological expertise and funding are very much needed. If one were looking to start or change careers, what would benefit the anti-aging cause more: if one became a biogerontologist
or if one went into a very high-paying industry, hoarded as much economic and non-economic power as possible and invested it in aging-related research, development, education, media, public events, electoral campaigns and possibly lobbying?
Edited by Bogomoletz II, 02 April 2014 - 12:00 PM.