Exploring the path from discovery to business

The Australian winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, have been honoured with Australia Day awards.  The pair belong to an exclusive group of DIY laureates.  Much of their prize-winning work was done in their spare time.

The ultimate DIY achievement was 100 years earlier.  In 1905 Einstein published three remarkable papers, one of which earned a Nobel Prize in 1924.  The papers were written in his spare time while he was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office in Berne.

There are also 20 laureates from the private industrial sector out of more than 500 awards for chemistry, medicine and physics, another select group.

Is there anything to be learned about the path from discovery to business from the laureates of the private sector?

One would expect the industrial Nobel winners to be drawn from the great high-technology companies of their time.  That is indeed the case.  In the early years up to 1940, the few laureates came from IG Farben, Marconi, Bell Laboratories and General Electric.  In the second half of the 20th century Bell, IBM, General Electric and DuPont were all contributors.

Some of the awards are for quite staggering developments.  The invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain (1956) was the first part of a transforming invention for the 20th century.  This in turn begat the second part:  the integrated circuit from Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby (2000).  Noyce did not live to share the award (he died in 1990) but he was one of the "Traitorous Eight" who walked away from Shockley's management and, with others, eventually founded Intel.  Kilby was at Texas Instruments.

There are other echoes of the past in the prizes.  James Black (1988) created the beta-blocker drug for ICI and then a drug to suppress acid causing stomach ulcers for SmithKline.  Marshall and Warren (2005) then challenged the wisdom of the origin of ulcers, modifying a successful treatment with a simpler one that threatened drug company revenue as well as medical teaching.  The "most remote from business" prize must be Penzias and Wilson from Bell Laboratories (1978) for their discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the echo from 300,000 years after the creation of the universe.

In the past 15 years no more big prizes went to the big industrial research laboratories.  The culture has changed.

The big corporations used to reflect the US East Coast philosophy of corporations controlling everything relevant to their business with central research laboratories.  On the US West Coast the approach was more co-operative with technology spread over a number of independent companies, many acting as suppliers of equipment or components.  Intel, Microsoft, Cisco and others moved technical innovation to the West Coast.

Laureates have emerged from this distributed system with the integrated circuit (2000) and the polymerase chain reaction, invented by Kary Mullis (1993) from Cetus.  Few discoveries directly benefited their originating corporations.

What of the Australian government?  Should these events point to a new approach to national needs, distributed research funding and to reappraising the role of the CSIRO?

Corporations have corporate needs but scientific research frequently delivers to a wider community without direct or immediate benefit to the company.  Discoveries achieve technical utility through diverse pathways.

Finally, from the US West Coast there are signs that plurality is important in creating a more vibrant technical and business environment.  Little of this fits policymakers' linear model of discovery, giving rise to technology that in turn gives rise to business.

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