In his Sunday letter to the editor, headlined “Without profit motive, all endeavors fail,” Bob Jack wrote: “Profit is the expected result of risk that investors take when they buy into development of technology and systems for a given activity, health care included. One cannot separate the delivery of health care from new medical technologies, including breakthrough drugs, that are part of the innovation cycle needed to advance the quality and effectiveness of health care.”
The reality, however, is that few private corporations in this country perform the necessary research and development to create the technologies that have largely been responsible for our high (but dramatically slipping) standard of living. It is the U.S. government — via the Energy and Defense departments, the National Institutes of Health, and the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs — that provides money to support research and development in government-funded national labs, at universities and in industry that are largely the driving forces for our nation’s innovation.
At one time, large-scale research was supported by great corporations such as AT&T that resulted, for example, in the development of the transistor and high-speed optical computers. But most U.S. companies no longer perform significant research or do so in an extremely limited capacity because of their short-term and myopic profit-making outlook, and the ball is dropped on the need for long-term investment to develop and improve technologies that may require decades to succeed.
Our government is shouldering much of the risk to continue our unprecedented success in science and engineering that mostly drives our economy, well-being and national security. Let the U.S. taxpayers shoulder the risks and costs of developing new technologies (just as they have done to rescue irresponsible and greedy banks) and then let corporations profit from them! What a deal!
The writer is an associate professor of physics at UNLV.
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