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Comment by a_conservative | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing this! It brings to my mind the tension and conflict between Robin Williams and the Fields' medal mathematician in Good Will Hunting.

It sounds like you still do get to do science. I suspect that you may be having a bigger impact on the world now than you would have had as another science professor. Can you offer any comment on this? Am I off base?

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I'm not sure, perhaps. I work in Oncology and I enjoy it indeed, it feels meaningful. Still, of all the research projects I worked on (from circulating tumor cells to Next Generation Sequencing data processing pipelines), only 1 project is actually used on the market (let's say 3 years of work of the past 11). A lot is killed. Some research becomes IP, some research becomes a paper. In a way I find corporate research to be pretty honest work, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work and it's killed. There is no pressure to publish it anyway. There is pressure though to get the FDA to approve something in the end. And for that, it really has to work and be real. We spend a lot of time on reproducing things, also research papers we base our work on. But then you need to patent your work, and that still doesn't always feel right, at least sometimes it doesn't, especially when you won't actually make a product in the end. I try to avoid that.

Some professors do pretty amazing stuff. We work with academic groups a lot, they focus on new science, we focus on IP and making products or software we can use.

Thank you so much for this reply. For me personally, as I get older and gain experience, I become less ideological about the world and more pragmatic. It makes sense that both good and bad research can take place in either industry or academia.

Thanks again for your comments in this thread. They were very enjoyable to read and lessened some cynicism I've been mired in lately.

As one gets older one also learns that being ideological may not be the best way to advance your ideology, it's often done by being pragmatic. I.e., in small steps from within the industry you want to change. You may even go into industry, find that it's not for you, and return to academics to make sure collaborations with industry advance your ideology. But you have to realize all these things take place over years and decades and you have to give yourself time and peace of mind as you try and learn things.

One project in my research group is now locked into an EU funded project with a professor that absolutely seems to hate industry and seems to be opposed to anything that gives us more insights then the project plan was supposed to give us. And it is really unworkable. We are good people and we want to solve issues together with others as well. Over the last years I did have some really good experiences with other academic groups by the way, so often it works well.

Blocking a market with shitty IP you are never going to put in practice yourself is pretty bad imo. But publishing something that is wrong wasting a lot of other researchers' time and sometimes even stopping progress (if a group/prof is influential) is also bad. Both are part of the game and arguably we shouldn't blame the players. But avoiding such things, sometimes at great cost, is what being ideological is all about ;) (a quick example: I once came up with a nice new type of assay, and knew my company would never ever make a product out of this. So I won't push on the IP angle, instead I express the benefits of publishing the assay [open access] as a way to show our company's expertise.)

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