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A Newark Star-Ledger report on this year's Nobel Prize for Physics shows how the twentieth century's greatest innovation in imaging was the indirect result of two research "failures." Wired has more details of the internal politics.

The breakthrough of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, the charge-coupled device (CCD), had a curious motivation. What catalyzed it was the peculiar agenda of AT&T in the late 1960s. Managers of Bell Labs thought that a new technology called bubble memory was about to replace semiconductors and let researchers on the latter side know they they needed a great new idea fast to prove semiconductors were worth continued funding. Bubble memory turned out to be a bubble and is now only a memory, but pressure, based on an erroneous projection of the future, helped create another future. It also made it possible to capture the images of Apollo 13. Yet the videotube that used the first CCDs became a dead end itself. AT&T's Picturephone service was based on a very rational early fear of cable and television as rivals of the telephone in building new, high-speed networks, as the historian Kenneth Lipartito has confirmed in his standard account of the program.

Veterans of Bell Labs are rightly proud of the organization's record. To quote the Star-Ledger:

Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, has now produced 13 Nobel laureates and more than 31,000 patents since 1925. During the 1960s and 1970s, the lab in Murray Hill was regarded as a crucible of some of the most innovative research in the world.

"Everything we take for granted today -- digital music, digital art, lasers -- came from Bell Labs," said A. Michael Noll, emeritus professor of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and a former Bell Labs research scientist.

But it also noted the changes and research group closings under Lucent:

Many Bell Labs scientists, past and present, say their research community has never recovered.

"The environment that was there back then, the excitement about being around creative people who were open to talking about their work, was not duplicated during its time," said Dan Stanzione, a former director of Bell Labs.

Ironically some non-profit research laboratories like Battelle and Germany's Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft have been able to support themselves at least in part through income from the innovations they helped sponsor -- like dry photocopying and the MP3 format, respectively. I have found no information on royalties received by AT&T or Lucent for the invention of Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs -- possibly because original patents had expired before the digital imaging boom. (I'd welcome information from readers in telecommunication and imaging.)

This prize for 40-year-old work raises an intriguing question. Has something been lost from American and world science by the dispersion of so many great researchers? Some of them have profited personally; at conferences I've met former technical staff members who have made fortunes in finance and entrepreneurship. Others, like the late electrical engineer and perceptual psychologist Bela Julesz, a future MacArthur Fellow whom I met while I was a science editor, flourished in academia and became mentors to a generation of students. Still others have had the best of both worlds, with high-salaried tenured teaching jobs plus lucrative industrial ties.

But is society better off with so much talent redeployed? Are great innovations more likely to arise in the newer, decentralized, and more responsive global environment? Does everything important get discovered independently anyway, regardless of what happens to one organization? I'm not so sure. In Jeremy Bernstein's Three Degrees above Zero, Bela Julesz said Bell Labs had no counterpart in Europe or elsewhere and was "an absolutely unique treasure . . . for the whole world," a "baroque organ" for the maestro who needs "to pull out every register." Maybe the old Bell Labs resembled the Hollywood studio system, where massive resources and depth of skills could be deployed to produce qualitative leaps. The Labs set a high standard for the reconfigured world of global science.

(Photo: Wiki Commons)

Some further thoughts based on readers' comments on my original post, and other recent articles:
 
From Seth:

It's true that funding agencies do tend to stress low-risk projects, but this approach makes sense. Scientific achievements most often come from slow and steady progress, punctuated by an occasional major discovery. The major discoveries can't occur in a vacuum; they rely on having that foundation of knowledge that was built up over prior years.

You're right that important work often is the result of cumulative efforts. The cult of paradigm-breaking, revolutionary science dismayed even Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions became of the best selling scholarly books of all time. On the other hand, my own friends and acquaintances in science seem to agree with the poll results that there's too much caution in grants. That may be true in journal editing, too, and not just in the US. The Spanish physicist Juan Miguel Campanario has studied the rejection of high quality papers.

I agree with Umesh Patil that scientific quality can have a long lag time. I should add that I hope the Pew Research Center will follow up with a survey focusing on what's happening at the graduate and postgraduate level now. It might also look at the controversy over opportunities for scientists and where there is really a shortage:

Among the most vocal critics: Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York, which funds basic scientific, economic and civic research. He says there are "substantially more scientists and engineers" graduating from the USA's universities than can find attractive jobs.

"Indeed, science and engineering careers in the U.S. appear to be relatively unattractive" compared with other career paths, he told Congress in 2007.

The Sloan Foundation sponsors some of the most prestigious fellowships for young scientists, so their assessment of scientific opportunity should be cause for concern, even though the Obama administration doesn't share it. Last year Dr. Bruce Rosen of Massachusetts General Hospital told the Boston Globe:

"It is a time of great difficulty, in my own experience not seen since the mid-late '80's," he said. "In our own lab I've begun to see very promising young scientists choosing careers in business consulting rather than research positions, and am facing the very real possibility for the first time in a very long while of watching good scientists potentially lose their jobs for lack of support. This is obviously devastating for the individuals involved, and very dispiriting to the community of their peers who see themselves sometimes only a small step ahead."

According to this article in Nature (full text may require subscription) there are significantly more principal NIH investigators over 70 than under 30:

"We're eating our seedcorn," says [NIH Director Elias] Zerhouni.

Anna raises this issue from her own experience as a young investigator and also questions conventional scorekeeping on scientific prowess:

I don't understand why US eminence is an issue - as if we were in competition with everyone else, which doesn't seem to be the spirit of science. Haven't all of us learned, ever since grad school, that collaboration is the key to success in science? It is true that there is a lot of competition in science, but during recent years such competition has done more harm than good to science.

And I agree that there's sometimes a note of panic or even chauvinism in criticism of America's scientific position. At least one distinguished economist, Amar Bhidé of Columbia (who earlier this year gave a presentation at the center I'm visiting), believes Americans' real vocation is as "venturesome" consumers, whose zest for innovation benefits themselves and the world far more than "techno-nationalism" would.

It's not clear that scientific (or humanistic) education improves people or societies. The Soviet Union had superb schools and some of the world's best popular high school science publications. What's important is not seeking domination at others' expense -- it's continuing to be in the first rank of a cooperative global enterprise.

Matthew Nisbet in his reply and on his blog looks on the positive side, the

almost unrivaled respect, admiration, and deference in American society, with these perceptions relatively unchanged since the days of Sputnik.

I'm in accord with Matt's interpretation of that aspect of the report and also reject alarmism about a widening gap between science and the public. But it's that very esteem that made me highlight the public's concern about long-term trends.

Alex L., a Materials Science student, is alarmed by the absence of American-born peers at his research university in the Southeast. And I think that's a reflection not so much of the quality of secondary education as of the perception that the social respect may be there, but the opportunities are not. See the Pew report's table. Fully 31 percent of the public thinks business executives contribute "not much" or "nothing" to society, but so far that hasn't turned much talent from business to science and engineering. Quite the contrary. The low opinion of business may also signify, among other things, the perception that executives are putting short-term profits ahead of investment in research, so why expect great scientific career opportunities from them? For a more corporate-oriented critique of research support and competitiveness, see the current Harvard Business Review (abstract).

A press release from the University of Cambridge has announced a forthcoming paper about the latest and possibly greatest stars of non-human animal intelligence, rooks, and their ability to make tools spontaneously without have learned their use from other birds or from humans. The rooks, birds related to ravens and crows, showed themselves the equal of better known animal tool users, the chimpanzees and their distant cousins, the New Caledonian crows.
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In a series of experiments, the rooks quickly learnt to drop a stone to collapse a platform and acquire a piece of food, and subsequently showed the ability to choose the right size and shape of stone without any training.

Not only could they use stones to solve the task, but they were flexible in their tool choice, using and modifying sticks to achieve the same goal. When the correct tool was out of reach, they used another tool to get it, demonstrating the ability to use tools sequentially. In further tests, the rooks were able to use a hook tool to get food out of a different tube and even creatively bent a straight piece of wire to make the hook to reach the food.

News of non-human ingenuity rarely surprises me. I was the editor of John T. Bonner's classic synthesis, Evolution of Culture in Animals, still in print and an excellent introduction to the topic after 25 years of further research.

Results like this open up a new question. Since animals are more capable of using technology than we had realized, why don't they do so more often? They have mental abilities not readily observed in the wild but in some cases superior to humans' -- like chimps' recall of a series of random digits presented on a computer screen. Some scientists speculate that we had to lose some mental abilities (immediate memory) to acquire the capacity for language. As the press release notes, "Necessity is the mother of invention for clever birds." In the wild, they didn't need tools; food was all around them.

This Op-Ed by the materials science and engineering professor Stephen L. Sass, shows how much the technology that helped us bring out the brains in these birds, and spread the news about them, was itself the result of new constraints; a shortage of tin (for making bronze) in the eastern Mediterranean was the incentive that led to the Iron Age.

(The actual paper on Rooks was not yet available on the National Academy of Science site when this was posted.)

What do flat-screen televisions, soft-drink vending machines, and spectacular bridges have in common? All have hidden design flaws that engineers evidently had not expected, yet that have inadvertently encouraged dangerous behavior.

Consider a new study cited by MSNBC:

Nearly 17,000 children were rushed to emergency rooms in 2007, the last year for which complete figures were available, after heavy or unstable furniture fell over on them. . . . [S]uch injuries had risen 41 percent since 1990.

Frequently to blame were

ever-bigger flat-panel televisions that Americans have brought into their homes in that time, along with the entertainment centers and narrow, less-stable stands to hold them. Injuries from televisions alone accounted for nearly half of all injuries related to falling furniture during the study period -- 47 percent.

Grownups also can go astray with fatal results, tilting vending machines to dislodge cans. In 1995, the Consumer Products Safety Commission worked with the soda can industry to develop warning labels for the machines after finding that rocking them -- whether to steal a drink or just to shake loose a stuck purchase -- was killing an average of two people a year and injuring six others. (The physics and economics of dispensing cans by gravity makes the equipment more top-heavy than it appears.)

Design masterpieces, and even local prominent structures, may have a risk of their own. They can become what lawyers call "attractive nuisances," unintentionally promoting lethal behavior. The Golden Gate Bridge, one of the world's most beautiful spans, has drawn potential suicides almost since its completion in 1937. So have other bridges without its global renown. Psychiatric studies suggest that people deterred by barriers are unlikely to seek other means of self-destruction.

Should the respective designers have known better? "Childproofing" homes was already a familiar concept when flat-screen televisions were introduced. Old-style pinball machines had tilt mechanisms for decades, revealing an impulse to manhandle equipment for an advantage.  And suicides were sadly familiar on the Eiffel Tower and, closer to home, the Empire State Building.

The cultural reception of technology helped create all three risks. Thin new televisions inspire an illusion of lightness that can lead parents to forget how heavy many of these sets were to move into place.  The casualties of the vending machines have been disproportionately young men ready to challenge machinery. (The physician who wrote the best-known report was based at Walter Reed Army Hospital.) And reports of suicides by the press might have enhanced the romantic aura of the act while neglecting its horrific consequences, even for the few, severely injured, survivors.

These examples can help us think about other hazards -- from nanoparticles through space travel. We can't foresee all interactions of values and behavior with the things we create, but with more interdisciplinary study we can improve our record, and we can and must respond more quickly when they begin.


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