Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?

We examine how the premature death of eminent life scientists alters the vitality of their fields. While the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases after the death of a star scientist, the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases markedly. This surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited. While outsiders appear reluctant to challenge leadership within a field when the star is alive, the loss of a luminary provides an opportunity for fields to evolve in new directions that advance the frontier of knowledge within them.

The mobility of elite life scientists: Professional and personal determinants

As scientists' careers unfold, mobility can allow researchers to find environments where they are more productive and more effectively contribute to the generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we examine the determinants of mobility of elite academics within the life sciences, including individual productivity measures and for the first time, measures of the peer environment and family factors. Using a unique data set compiled from the career histories of 10,051 elite life scientists in the U.S., we paint a nuanced picture of mobility. Prolific scientists are more likely to move, but this impulse is constrained by recent NIH funding. The quality of peer environments both near and far is an additional factor that influences mobility decisions. We also identify a significant role for family structure. Scientists appear to be unwilling to move when their children are between the ages of 14­17, and this appears to be more pronounced for mothers than fathers. These results suggest that elite scientists find it costly to disrupt the social networks of their children during adolescence and take these costs into account when making career decisions.

The anatomy of medical school patenting.

BACKGROUND: Although issues related to patenting by faculty at academic medical centers have been the source of much controversy, there is little systematic evidence of the growth of these activities, their distribution among academic departments, and their relationship to faculty research efforts. METHODS: We pooled data on medical school faculty, National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant activity, and patenting to examine changes in the propensity to apply for a patent during the period from 1981 through 2000 that was subsequently granted, the distribution of these activities among departments, and the relationships between patenting and variables associated with individual faculty members. These variables included sex, academic degree, years since the last academic degree was earned, patenting by departmental peers, and NIH funding history. In addition to basic descriptive statistics, we estimated Poisson regression models based on the number of patents a faculty member applied for as a function of these variables. RESULTS: Applications for patents that were subsequently granted per medical school faculty increased dramatically during the period from 1981 through 2000. Although most patenting activity was carried out by faculty members in clinical departments, their rate of patents was low relative to that of faculty members in basic science departments. Regression results showed that persons were more likely to patent if they had recent NIH funding, were male, had Ph.D. degrees, were more experienced faculty members, and worked in departments with higher patenting rates. CONCLUSIONS: Although the number of patents granted to medical school faculty increased dramatically during this period, patent activity was concentrated among a small number of departments and faculty members. Moreover, persons who had recently received NIH funding were more likely to apply for a patent than those who had not received such funding.

Public R&D Investments and Private-sector Patenting: Evidence from NIH Funding Rules.

We quantify the impact of scientific grant funding at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on patenting by pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms. Our paper makes two contributions. First, we use newly constructed bibliometric data to develop a method for flexibly linking specific grant expenditures to private-sector innovations. Second, we take advantage of idiosyncratic rigidities in the rules governing NIH peer review to generate exogenous variation in funding across research areas. Our results show that NIH funding spurs the development of private-sector patents: a $10 million boost in NIH funding leads to a net increase of 2.3 patents. Though valuing patents is difficult, we report a range of estimates for the private value of these patents using different approaches.

The applied value of public investments in biomedical research.

Scientists and policy-makers have long argued that public investments in science have practical applications. Using data on patents linked to U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants over a 27-year period, we provide a large-scale accounting of linkages between public research investments and subsequent patenting. We find that about 10% of NIH grants generate a patent directly but 30% generate articles that are subsequently cited by patents. Although policy-makers often focus on direct patenting by academic scientists, the bulk of the effect of NIH research on patenting appears to be indirect. We also find no systematic relationship between the "basic" versus "applied" research focus of a grant and its propensity to be cited by a patent.