The Logical Argument - Then What?

Op-Ed Columnist - The Public Imperative - NYTimes.com: "I can see the conservative argument that welfare undermines the work ethic and dampens moral fiber. Provide sufficient unemployment benefits and people will opt to chill rather than labor. But it’s preposterous to extend this argument to health care. Guaranteeing health coverage doesn’t incentivize anybody to get meningitis."

This logic is putting the finger on a crucial difference over the Atlantic. The question is how much else that depend on the underlying psychology. The conservatives in the US argue that they have the best medicine in the world, which is true in the absolute sense, but at the same time they don't want to make health care a human right. I have earlier argued around this but the question now is can the excellence in science seen in the US be related to the above delineated conservative logic?

The question is important because the people of EU does not want to give up universal health care if that would be the price for excelling in science. The Americans are currently trying to solve their health care dilemma but how should the EU solve the science dilemma?

I'm talking about basic science, not technology, although there is probably a lot of cross feeding these days. The first thing that I would like to comment on is that despite the fact that the grant application ways in the US are more demanding it is popular to do science in the US. From this would follow that the more secure research paths in Europe might not be so popular after all and could be replaced. More peer reviewed competition in other words. European science should perhaps be more like European business rather than European welfare.

Another important issue is whether or not research should be performed at institutes or at the universities together with education of students? Or should the basic science be performed in house at pharmaceutical companies? Or in collaboration? When I left science in 1993, it seemed like much of the data was disappearing into smaller units than on the open publication market. Hard to know in other words. Information flows in various ways these days.

How much utility is supposed to emanate from the science? Necessity does not generate basic science results. They evolve from the curiosity of the individual scientist. They need propinquity, however, and therefore mobility should be supported. Political steering of basic science is futile. It expands and contracts as there are scientists available. The politicians can help in shaping the schooling system.

Gunnar Hökmark discussed the organization of universities in Europe recently. He disliked their focus on how old they were rather on their placement in the Shanghai list. In Sweden they expanded the university system a lot while I was in the US. This is all and well for education engineers but the five universities of my student times are probably too many for Sweden when basic science is discussed. Two would probably be better. Two competing centers of excellence.

As the one American born Nobel laureate in Medicine of today points out. The Swedish Nobel prizes are great publicity for basic science and I hope the trend of awarding prizes for more applied research, like computer hard discs, is phased out. There must be other ways of popularizing science.