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Business is business, and scientists who work in the commercial sector are expected to contribute to profits. Yet a strong contrast between the search for profits and the search for knowledge doesn’t describe industrial science very well in the early twentieth century and describes it less well today. For one thing, the distinction between knowledge and commercial goods makes less sense in the “knowledge economy” than it once may have done. We now understand that both knowledge and durable goods may each have monetary value. For another, to say that people working in industry are driven by money may miss as much as it gets right. Scientists who want “interesting work” and good conditions for doing it may find these in industry, while money may be as much a sign that one’s work has succeeded as it is a motive for doing it. Nor should one neglect aspects of altruism, even utopianism, that one can readily find among scientists and engineers working in industry, and, of course, expecting to be rewarded: some pioneers of the internet thought they might make societies more democratic and less authoritarian; many scientists working in biotech reckon their labors might cure dread diseases. (en) |
