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Comment by photochemsyn

2 years ago

This article - a retrospective puff piece - entirely neglects the circumstances leading to the loss of relevance of Bell Labs. It's explained in the autoposy of one of the greatest scientific frauds (fabricated nanoelectronic devices made of organic carbon materials e.g. pentacene) of the past few decades [1]:

> "For over half a century, Bell Labs had been owned by the telephone monopoly AT&T and had plenty of money to spend on science. But in 1984, the monopoly broke up, and after 1989, managers encouraged Bell Lab researchers to focus on research with commercial applications. Disenchanted, top scientists began to leave for universities and were mostly not replaced by new recruits. In 1995, ownership of Bell Labs was transferred to the newly formed company Lucent Technologies."

Then Lucent got hit by the dot-com bubble blowout, resulting in a 30% loss of share value in Jan 2000. This led to a new focus on PR:

> "By keeping up its practice of releasing exciting scientific findings, the lab could continue to demonstrate to investors, customers and anyone else that Lucent had a sound, long-term technological future. Again, this was a question of survival: with revenues falling, managers had to make the argument that their jobs and the jobs of their staff were worth keeping."

This led to a culture in which critical scrutiny of the claims of one fraudulent researcher was discouraged in favor of institutional cheerleading, and the end result was that 15 papers published in Science and Nature had to be retracted.

[1] "Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World" (2009) Eugenie Samuel Reich.

If you want a parable for what's happened to Bell Labs and many other scientific institutions in the US, it's that of the greedy farmer killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

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photochemsyn

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GlibMonkeyDeath  2 years ago

The farmer lost his monopoly on wheat, so he couldn't feed that wildly expensive goose any more. It isn't greed when the farmer would go out of business feeding his goose, especially when those golden eggs wouldn't necessarily help his farming business directly.

  • photochemsyn  2 years ago

    I think that what happened is Bayh-Dole legislation passed c.1980 which allowed corporations to exclusively license patents generated with taxpayer funds at public and private universities, so they lost their incentive to maintain large privately-funded research centers, which used to be valuable because they'd have exclusive control of any patents. A side-effect of Bayh-Dole was the gradual conversion of academic institutions into for-profit commercial operations, especially in the STEM fields like chemistry, engineering, medical research, etc. - with accompanying declines in academic integrity, open data sharing, etc.

    Eliminating Bayh-Dole would mean university-based patents generated with taxpayer funds would be available to any interested party under a non-exclusive licensing program, and then corporations would again be incentivized to maintain private research centers - which IIRC also served a tax-writeoff function for AT&T in Bell Lab's heyday.

    • ghaff  2 years ago

      It's also the case that corporate labs that genuinely did research tended to be a byproduct of companies that were essentially monopolies to some degree in some way. Even if a bit idealized, Bell Labs was certainly like this. (From an old movie. Ma Bell: We don't care we don't have to we're the phone company.)

      At least some of the 80s vintage corporate labs like DEC were being increasingly folded into the broader engineering organizations as their parents became less dominant. Essentially corporate research labs are a creature of organizations that have some long-term play money. Or at least that's the idea. I'd note that some of the current work going on in quantum computing has a lineage that dates back to some pretty fundamental research done in corporate labs in the 1960s.

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