How much American universities spend on science, why everyone invests in American biomedicine, and how one small delay in publishing a scientific paper can change the list of winners.
In sports, the flag matters. In the national teams of strong sports powers, competition is high, but whoever makes it through gets everything. In this sense, science is like high performance sports – countries with developed science attract the best brains from around the world. Large universities have not only a lot of funding: they can provide organizational and legal support for patenting and business start-ups, and nominate for prestigious international awards. Some historical data about the nominations is given by the Nobel Prize website (all data are kept secret for 50 years, and then published). For example, in the first 10 years of the 20th century there were 135 “nominees” (those who nominate for the prize) from the United States. By the middle of the twentieth century, the situation had changed dramatically: in the 1960s, there were already 728 “nominees” in the United States. Moreover, in the entire available statistical period, only the United States, France and Germany managed to cross the threshold of 2,000 nominees. The difference in science budgets is no less impressive. The University of California at Berkeley complains on its website that it could lose $349 million because of covid, and its fundraising programs are in the billions.
Who makes money from great discoveries
U.S. Nobel opportunities differ from many countries by orders of magnitude. This applies to science in general and even more so to biomedicine. The imperfection of the American health care system for the end user, the patient, is simultaneously its gigantic advantage in terms of innovation development. Medicine in America is very expensive: costs in this area amount to almost 20% of the country’s GDP, and the average American has to spend $1200 a year on medicine. Patients suffer from this, but it stimulates the market: an innovative drug or treatment approach provides a new opportunity for big profits for companies and rightsholders. Therefore, patent disputes in the U.S. are common, and both universities and research institutes actively participate in them, becoming co-owners of their employees’ innovative startups. For example, long-time Nobel Prize candidate biochemist Robert Langer has been a successful entrepreneur and a major media figure for many years. Langer has more than a thousand patents, and his pharma startups have even received Russian investments. Many émigré scientists follow the same path.
But basic science is broader than its specific applications, so a huge number of people benefit from high-level science, not just the authors of the discovery. Scientific research, especially at the Nobel level, is often so universal that the scale of its application and impact on science exceeds the scale of even a dozen patents, much less the work of a single company or laboratory.
But in some cases, scientists do become direct beneficiaries of their work as intellectual property. And then the atmosphere of cooperation and friendly competition can be replaced by news from the courts. For example, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, who won this year’s Nobel Prize for developing a method of genetic editing using CRIPSR/Cas9 systems, cannot defend their primacy in American courts.
The fact is that several scientists fought at different levels for the right to be called CRISPR/Cas9 discoverers: the tandem of Dudna and Scherpantier, their colleague from the Brod Institute Zhang Feng and another CRISPR/Cas9 pioneer, Lithuanian biochemist and MSU graduate student Virginius Šikšnis, who now maintains his post-Nobel silence. He won the prestigious American Kavli Prize in 2018 along with Doudna and Charpentier, but he was not listed as a Nobelist and is no longer in the news about the patent wars.
Why everyone is going crazy about CRISPR/Cas9
The particular appeal of the CRISPR/Cas9 story is that it reminds one of the science of the last century, or even the century before that, when a result of great importance was obtained as a result of a neat mind game by a lone hero. The prevalence that the method has gained in laboratory practice is due to the simplicity of execution – it is not the scale of a large hadron collider or a giant telescope. Scientists have been looking at the strange by the standards of developed organisms immune system of bacteria and even more ancient and primitive organisms – archaea – for several decades. After “getting over” a virus, they incorporated a piece of its genome into their own, transmitting this code by inheritance. The next time they encounter the same infection, their microscopic immunity recognizes the already familiar sequence and cuts the DNA or RNA of the virus, preventing it from penetrating into the cell.