The idiot RFK, Jr

The very idea that a person like RFK, Jr, would land in Trump’s cabinet as the Secretary of Health and Human Services seemed so farfetched as to be bad pulp fiction. Yet there he is.

I have no special insights or knowledge on HHS other than what I read. Everything that could be said about the pathetic case of RFK, Jr, and his place in pseudoscientific madness has already been stated by better writers than I.

If you wanted to purposely obliterate certain patches of modern medical developments from the last 120 years, there are few better hatchet-men than RFK, Jr. RFK, Jr., is not without a certain charisma. His strength of conviction is taken as a measure of truth. He is a talented speaker despite his speech impediment and, like most popular speakers, is a performer playing to the entire USA. His compelling position on the stage lends a credibility to his assertions. His slashing of HHS funding and staff is jaw dropping in its extent and coverage.

The University-Government-Industry R&D Complex

Until Trump, the USA had accumulated considerable technological ‘soft power‘ internationally since WWII. An element of that soft power is the American University-Government-Industry research complex. The government funds basic university research across the spectrum of science and the universities provide basic research and training of scientists and engineers. Industry taps into this valuable technology resource for skilled technologists and develops applied science for their projects.

The USA has been a very productive engine of ingenuity, especially since the beginning of WWII. However, our dear leader’s administration has been deconstructing agencies in the name of rooting out the deep state. In reality he is busy putting in place his own deep state.

Project 2025, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, amounts to a libertarian coup backed by libertarian hardliners and supported by conservative protestant evangelical Christians. I’m trying to be fair to the evangelicals, but they have woven Trump into their Christian eschatology. They may still support #47, but many are holding their noses in doing so.

Why not remove the university research funding and leave it to industry? To our neoliberal friends that might sound appealing. Universities could continue to produce scientists and engineers but leave the R&D to industry. After all, letting the open market take care of R&D is one of the goals, right? Let industry produce and pay for their own R&D talent.

The problem will be that new R&D chemists hired into a company at the PhD level would have to be trained on how to execute chemical R&D. Normally this happens in graduate school and in a post doc appointment. But wouldn’t business prefer to hire walking, talking, trained, young and energetic chemistry researchers? I think so.

In #47’s administration, research efforts are being discontinued willy nilly by inexperienced and scientifically untrained actors whose only goal is to rack up dollar savings. Their amateur appraisal of what constitutes valuable scientific activity is cartoonish.

Having been in both academic and industrial R&D, my observation is that basic and commercial science can be quite different activities. Universities have a continuous stream of fresh students and post docs to do the actual work of research at a time period in their lives when they are the most productive and at a far lower labor cost than could industry. Benefits, if any, are quite modest.

The current approach simultaneously trains scientists and engineers while at the same time developing basic science and engineering for the price of a one or more grants. In the process, the advanced instrumentation and the many subject matter experts walking around in the building aid academic research greatly. If a transformation (i.e., a reaction) goes poorly, an academic lab may try to find a mechanism. A commercial R&D lab exists solely for the purpose of supporting profitable production. This means developing the best routes for the fastest conversion and highest yields of chemicals into money. Along the way, commercial chemists may discover new chemistries or have unexpected outcomes. If they are lucky, any given R&D ‘discovery’ may lead to a new product or better control of a reaction. The result of commercial R&D may be more profitable processing but also it may be of scientific interest.

The role of the university is quite different from the role of industry in our society. Universities are funded to provide leading edge research. Here, knowledge is acquired by exploring the boundaries of particular chemical transformations or in the realm of calculation. The driving force in academic R&D is funding and publication. Every scientist wants to be the first person to discover new processes and compositions. It is not uncommon in academics for a research program to finish with a sample of 2 milligrams of product for spectroscopic analysis. For a proof-of-concept result, a sample small enough to analyze and still get a mass for the yield closes the work.

The preferred role of industry is to take up where academia leaves off. If a known composition and/or process is commercially viable, the captains of industry would prefer not to fund enough basic R&D to get a product to market. Thirty minutes on SciFinder should provide an indication of the viability of a process to produce a given chemical substance. They would prefer their chemists work on scaleup to maximize the profit margin of a market pull product rather than wading into the murky waters of technology push.

You learn to do laboratory research by doing laboratory research. Reading about it is necessary but not enough. The success of much research requires broad and deep knowledge and specialized lab and instrument skills.

The industrial end is a bit different from academia. In applied science there are two bookends in business-to-business product development-

• Market Pull is development to produce products that are already articles or processes of commerce or are analogs of existing solutions. At the commodity level, a producer must compete with existing suppliers. Market pull is the domain of producers who compete on price and service, offering products that may be substantially similar.
• Technology Push is the development of new technologies (components and processes) awaiting first adopters. A customer must be convinced that a new technology is worth the risk of committing to it. Customers are generally aware that a new technology may develop teething pains leading to unanticipated expenses and disruption of the timeline.

In order for a company to allocate resources for an R&D project, sales projections, cost and margin studies must be performed to convince management to proceed. A great starting point is with a known substance and a good public domain procedure for it. This is where academia really shines. Industrial R&D will collect academic research papers on all aspects of the production of a new product.

One serious caveat for industrial R&D is the intellectual property (IP) status of all of the compositions of matter and the processes used therewith. In chemistry, IP is divided between the composition of matter and the method or process. Chemistry patents are often written with Markush claims that use variables to enrobe vast swaths of compositions of matter within patent coverage.

Some academics file for patents as inventors, leaving the ownership costs to the university assignees. The thinking has been that the university may someday collect license fees from the invention. The wild-eyed inventors may honestly believe that industry will beat a path to their door wanting licenses. More chemical patents of all kinds are allowed to quietly expire unlicensed than most realize.

Research Issue	University	Industry
Discovery of new chemistry	Built to excel in it	Can do but would much rather avoid the expense and time
Publication of results	Critical to career growth and scientific progress	Research developments are confidential
Patenting IP	Mixed views. Some patents may provide revenue to the university. Patents that are contested are very expensive to protect.	Patents enforce exclusivity for 20 years and cement competitiveness of the assignees.
R&D	Much time and care can be spent on the research. Research is distributed through publications and seminars.	Prefers that existing R&D be applied to scale-up and process improvements
Career growth	Students, post docs and professors can choose academics or industry	Scientists can take the business path or stay on the R&D path
Safe and smart technology	Academics have the ability to pursue environmental and safety matters with the chemistry.	Industry is a slave to quarterly growth. Changes that will increase the quarterly EBITDA are most favored by the C-suite and the board of directors.

Some loose talk about patents

Many in academia view a patent as a publication that they can stuff into their vitae. While being awarded a patent is a validation of an idea, it also means that the examiner was unable to find a reason to deny the patent. Citizens are entitled to patents and the USPTO must find a reason to deny the application. The language in a patent application must be internally consistent, be written in the ‘patent dialect’ and provide a description for others to understand the claimed art enough to avoid infringement. The USPTO does not require that the reality of the claims be proven. (I’ve been involved in 2 technology startups based on patents that were not proven by prototyping because it was not required by the USPTO. Both were business disasters because the claimed art didn’t work well enough).

Patents can induce a high credibility impression that may or may not be valid. Patents are commonly used to impress investors and are found stapled to a business plan. The startup may have an attorney on the board of directors who is supposed to serve as council. The attorney may or may not be a patent attorney. But if they do not possess patent and technical knowledge, they can only help with word smithing documents like NDAs, contracts, and sitting in on meetings to catch the odd procedural misstep. They can bring confidence and comfort to the startup founders with business structure, agreements, and negotiations etc., sorta like a big ole’ teddy bear for the CEO.

Summary

One of the purposes of government is to protect ourselves from each other. Another purpose that has worked well until now is that gov’t has been able to blunt many of the harsh and brutal forces of nature like disease, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms.

The USA has excelled in medical research for decades. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was begun to assure that food and drugs were safe for the public to consume. Every new drug developed in the USA has a paper storm trailing behind it. To be compliant with FDA generally, a sizeable amount of operational rigor must be demonstrated and practiced. Food safety in restaurants and in the food supply chain as well as drug development and testing are all subject to complacency or outright evasion without gov’t oversight. People and organizations will always drift away from safe practices if nobody is watching and auditing.

Organizations, like individuals, behave like a gas. They will expand to the space available. Retiring government regulations means that there will be a good deal of new space to expand into. Regulations were originally conceived to solve or prevent problems.