Lots of innovation came from Bell Labs or other national laboratories that are foundations of many modern technologies. I always thought that private sector alone cannot make technological progress fast without the help of the government sponsored science facilities. It is incredible to see what came out of those facilities because the scientists worked really hard because of their genuine interest in working on such projects because they either like the process of figuring things out or their curiosity cannot be quenched until they get it.
Also, it seems like promising (a real promise that can be backed up) researchers a comfortable upper middle class income, job security, good benefits, and light-touch supervision is a good match for the type of person who excels at basic research.
Too little security and nothing ever comes to fruition. Too much money sloshing around and you attract the wrong sort of crowd.
Public entities are best suited to providing this type of compensation and employment arrangement.
That sounds exactly like my employer, the JHU Applied Physics Lab. We’re a university affiliated research center, so we aren’t tied to the government pay scale and can provide a better career advancement outlook.
Don't grants still tie you to government pay structures? I know in biology most academic research labs may as well be government entities because that's the main way to get funding, and that funding has various rules attached including e.g. the max pay for a postdoc.
No, we don’t get funding through grants. Our work is either direct sponsored work or internal research funded through overhead. We aren’t a federally funded R&D center like Laurence Livermore or MIT Lincoln Labs, we are a university affiliated research center.
We exist in this nice middle ground between academia and pure profit companies where we do a bunch of research and exploratory work without the pressures of trying to get tenure, while also getting to push real products out to our sponsors but without ever worrying about getting laid off because we didn’t meet some growth number for the quarter.
