Why not to expand federal research funding

George Will recently wrote a very interesting column where the examples of Abraham Lincoln (who was a patent holder) and Michael Faraday were used to justify increased federal spending on scientific and technological research.  While both Lincoln and Faraday did, at times, work for their respective governments, methinks he could have used some better examples.

Why?  Well, for starters, Lincoln's patent was fully funded by the private sector--just like those of notables these days like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Michael Dell, and a host of others today.  So Lincoln's example proves....perhaps that he used the Patent Office well, but not by any stretch of the imagination that we need federal funding for flatboat research!

Faraday's case is even less relevant to modern research funding.  Faraday, for the uninitiated, rose from being a bookbinder's apprentice to the secretary for Sir Humphry Davy to a full professorship at the Royal Institution.  Let's imagine how he'd be treated today.

First of all, when Davy got him the professorship, he would have gotten a quick visit from the Dean explaining how Faraday's professorship without even a bachelor's degree would imperil the Institute's accreditation.   In the same way, government "gatekeepers" are loath to fund research without at least one Ph.D. listed on the grant application, so Faraday would have been working--even had he kept his professorship--without a lab or funding as soon as he wasn't working directly for Davy.  Then, when he turned his interests from chemistry to electromagnetics, the gatekeepers would again have shut him off for trying to do research "outside of his area of expertise."  It's worth noting as well that the Royal Institution, despite its name, was and is private--and its funding was mostly private at the time.

In other words, had Faraday needed help from today's U.S. government to achieve his groundbreaking research, the world would have had an excellent bookbinder instead of the man who helped Maxwell formulate his famous equations.  Perhaps it's time to reconsider what we're actually achieving with federal research funding.