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2004's Science Talent Search Winners Are In
Slate is running an article about this year's Science Talent Search (concentrating on things like whether the participants are "weirdos"); there are better descriptions of the top entrants' projects at this results page. Congratulations to the winners!
1) Most of the finalists had obviously a lot of help from outside and sometimes access to people and equipment mere mortals do not. For example a FIB machines as used by one of the finalists is only owned by a few chosen universities.
2) Many of them to be first or second generation immigrants (judging from name, style etc.) Again, this shows how lost the US would actually be without immigration.
As a matter of fact, I have presented many ideas anonymously over the course of my lifetime. This was for several reasons:
(1) I felt that they were sufficiently beneficial to humankind that they should be pursued independent of anyone's claim over them on the basis of desired prestige or expectation of financial benefit.
(2) I wanted people to evaluate them on their own merit, without falling into the fallacial trap of "appeal to authority". In many cases, who the idea came from might outweigh the intrinsic merit of the idea.
(3) I have often been too afraid to voice some of my ideas publicly, since people like you would invariably attack me, and that would create controversy that would reflect negatively upon my position. This is sad and I admit that I suck, but I am human and I experience fear.
Scientific papers are another matter; the peer review system is constructed in such a way that one cannot normally submit papers anonymously. If, however, you are accusing me of using my own name for self-aggrandizement, I can assure you that was not my motive.
I am not aware of making generalizations about groups. I am referring specifically to a subset of Americans who pursue wealth above all else, consume out of proportion to the rest of the world, and continue to employ people from outside the USA for menial tasks at substandard wages. And to the Intel corporation that, last time I checked, was in the sole business of making a profit. Furthermore, I am referring to a very small group of children who have been influenced by that corporation and its principles. Children who cannot be expected to see the danger in starting out their scientific careers filing patents and focusing on applied research while calling it science. If you can get a patent upon it, it is not science: it is applied science, commonly called technology.
If these children, as you say wish to "protect their work from companies that would otherwise use it unethically", then instead of filing a patent, perhaps they should go to an anti-globalization rally, instead of propagating a system that is broken. But I doubt that is the case. I suspect that, since the prize is sponsored by Intel, they have the notion that patenting something is good, or else they haven't really thought about it. Children adopt the attitudes of their respected elders very easily. That is why corporations should not be allowed access to children.
Please try to understand that this is not an anti-patent rant, merely a rant against the concept of protecting "intellectual property" in the field of science. There may be excellent reasons to patent a manufacturing process or a specific implementation of a scientific discovery, commensurate with the level of effort invested in developing it, but scientific pursuits should be free from such concerns. It is duplicitous of Intel to foster any other attitude. At least, if it is called science.
I may be bitter; I am confronted constantly by people like you whose first response to any idea is, "hush, you should patent that; don't tell anybody". I am bitter about the decline of intellectual freedom and the corporatization of science. I am bitter that only applied science gets proper funding in most parts of the world, and I am bitter that the quality of corporate-funded science is so poor.
I am definitely unsuccessful. I have convinced almost nobody that science should be pursued for its own sake, and that our survival as a species may depend upon it.
I am certainly self-righteous. One needs to be amid the din of the dumbed-down soap-box nonsense roaring out of the lower forty-eight that gets passed off as science.
But silent I shall no longer be!