No where in any of this is there actually a single reference to a single IP, person, or company that is interfering with research.

I agree, it is entirely unclear from the article whether any IP claims have been put forth, or if this is some kind of pre-emptive action. I think gene patents are truly evil, and pharma companies can be truly sleazy at times, but I'd like to see some actual evidence before pointing fingers in this case.

At least we have "classic liberal" now returning to mean "pro- individual liberty".

Yeah, but I've also seen plenty of people claim this mantle for themselves while espousing completely contradictory positions, e.g. supporting the criminalization of sodomy. As is too often the case, they support individual liberty only so far as it aligns with their own lifestyle and economic choices. (This too is not just a conservative failing, but they tend to be the ones talking the loudest about the broad concepts of "freedom" and "individual liberty". Progressives at least tend to avoid such generalities in favor of "social justice".)

Away from politics, most people would associate "slow to do anything crazy" with "conservative".

Well, sure, but that's why I qualified my statement - within the bounds of US politics, self-proclaimed "conservatives" tend to leap at the chance to do something radical and crazy. (And of course self-proclaimed "liberals" are often anything but, although the resurrection of the term "progressive" has helped distinguish the more dogmatic lefty types from the rest of us.)

If you have a big enough ego, everything you don't understand must be unimportant junk.

I think people read too much into the use of the word "junk", and attribute a pejorative meaning that wasn't necessarily intended. The best explanation I've seen (can't remember the source, sorry) was something along the lines of "junk is the stuff I keep in my attic; stuff I throw out is garbage." Biologists are in fact aware that non-coding parts of the genome can be essential, and there was never any presumption that anything we didn't understand was unimportant - however, how much of the non-coding DNA is genuinely necessary is an open question, and it's hard to find an obvious use for most of it. Clearly some complex organisms get along fine without it, so it's not unreasonable to view junk DNA primarily as a side effect of millions of years of evolution.

I about coughed in my coffee when he praised a Bush for making the world safer. Is this guy a conservative?

The elder Bush gets quite a bit of praise from present-day liberals for his foreign policy. (Even my brother, who is ideologically closer to the Green Party than the Democrats, agreed with me that Bush was one of the best presidents of his lifetime.) Part of this is just nostalgia influenced by the experience of his son's foreign policy, but even from an unbiased standpoint Bush I did very well. The part that gets the most credit isn't the Persian Gulf War, but the fact that the Cold War sputtered to a halt without anything blowing up. I've always thought that Bush's chief accomplishment here was having the good sense not to do anything crazy (rather than any overt acts), but in my opinion that's one of the most underrated qualities a president can have. It has nothing to do with being "liberal" or "conservative" in the sense these words are used in American political discourse.

I believe it's Peter Vollhardt, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley (which has one of the best chemistry departments anywhere). He actually drove the thing to work - apparently he paid the campus a pile of money for a rare on-campus parking spot next to the chemistry complex.

You're projecting an awful lot of opinions that I never stated, implicitly or explicitly. I do not disapprove of anything that Corning did, nor do I object to its intentions. I am merely trying to make a distinction between basic research, applied research, and product development. All are essential, but only the latter two make money. I don't want to get sucked into a religious argument about where the money should or should not come from, but that question is also irrelevant to the distinction. Basic research, no matter who pays the bills, is done with the understanding that it may not lead to anything commercializable. Therefore companies focus on applied research, and product development (which academic basic researchers tend to be lousy at). I don't expect them to do anything else, but someone still has to do the basic research.

First of all: scientific research for no relevant purpose at all should be done with DONATIONS not with violent attack on individual freedoms to deprive people of their property.

If you want your argument to be taken seriously, drop the hyperbole. Unless you live in North Korea or Turkmenistan or Cuba, no one is preventing you from leaving if you don't like the way your country is run.

Secondly I immediately thought of a counter example to your argument [wikipedia.org].

That isn't really a counter-example, because Corning pursued the project with the goal of near-term commercialization. The fact that it failed at the time is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it's "basic research".

To be fair, the journal Science is run by a non-profit, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). I think it's still behind a paywall, but I have less problem funding a non-profit that way.

There are a lot of other journals like this. I publish frequently in journals published by a specialist academic organization - they are read by everyone in our field, the organization does good work in general (it's truly community-run), and their policies are generally reasonable. But they do still have some overhead that has to be paid somehow. We usually cough up the $1000 or $1500 or whatever for the open-access fee (that makes the articles free upon publication, instead of having to wait the 12 months that the NIH specifies), which I don't mind. It would be a real shame if these publishers went out of "business".

Part of the problem with Elsevier and NPG however is that their open-access fees are insane - I read something like $7000 for an article in Nature, which is usually shorter than most of what I publish.

Private companies do science [slashdot.org] all the time [nytimes.com] because they need [bit-tech.net] to push their knowledge forward to stay competitive [cisco.com].

You're missing the rather large distinction between basic and applied research. Most companies do science with the explicit goal of advancing products to the market, and are very reluctant to spend time and money on anything that doesn't have a clear route to commercialization. (I'm not saying this as a put-down: their job is to make money, not publish journal articles.) But most basic research, at least in the field of biomedicine, can take decades before commercialization is feasible, if that ever happens - and there's no way to know in advance whether it will or not.

My favorite example is X-ray crystallography, which pharmaceutical companies use to study the molecular interactions between proteins and drug candidates. The first experiments were performed in 1937, the first atomic-resolution structures were published in 1961, and I believe the first application to drug design was sometime in the 1980s. It's not like those lazy academics were just sitting on their hands all this time; it took them decades just to work out the math involved, and there were multiple Nobel prizes awarded in the process. Now academics and companies solve thousands of crystal structures every year, but it still took the rest of the 1980s and 1990s for the technology to develop enough to support that pace.

There are actually a handful of companies that are so profitable (or so large) that they can subsidize undirected basic research: IBM is one, also Genentech, Novartis, and arguably Google and Microsoft. And smaller companies will publish bits and pieces of their directed research as well, if the lawyers let them. But for most, they can't spend decades developing a theory; their shareholders would never stand for it.

Only a few of the most common freshman introductory texts --- that will sell zillions of copies --- might be profitable

The author of one of the most popular college organic chemistry textbooks drives a red Ferrari - definitely the exception to the rule, however. Most of the time the payoff is largely just to the ego (which most tenured professors have no shortage of).

Much of their infrastructure is related to payment processing and restricted document delivery.

There is also a relatively huge overhead from the production costs of a dead tree journal, which few of the audience will even see at this point. (I can't remember the time I actually picked up a copy of Journal of Molecular Biology - I just download PDFs onto my iPad.) They have an entire staff whose job it is to reformat your Word document, arrange figures, etc. Some journals even charge a "color fee" if you have color images (essential for many biology articles), as if it were more expensive to generate colored PDFs.

The sick irony in this is that more and more of the content ends up in the supplemental material anyway, and that's usually just an unformatted PDF.

Congress just recently passed legislation saying that any papers produced and at least partially funded by the NIH must be made public within one year of publication. This, of course, is dependent upon the NIH making an actual database for this

This has been policy for several years now, and the NIH does indeed have an actual database for this. Apparently they are known to call up investigators who are tardy uploading their papers (some journals do this automatically, but usually not the big commercial publishers).

I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient. Nothing we can synthesize is as efficient on the nano-scale as Photosystems I and II - but of course since the plant is not made entirely of photosystems, the relative efficiency rate appears to be less.

I think it's a despicable thought process that's in desperate need of modification.

I think it's ridiculous that every time the subject of extraterrestrial life comes up, a dozen clueless people post the same objection as if it's some stunningly original insight that biologists have simply missed due to lack of imagination.