Funding

So now I ponder the question of which is the better model:  NSF or SU2C?

My instinctive answer is that neither is better.  They both accomplish different things.  When people talk about doing research, they must envision it as a bunch of scientists working in laboratories like Francis, Crick, and Franklin.  A bunch of celebrities thinking about these big questions and doing specific experiments to find the answers that others haven't already determined.

Although this is a necessary part of research, and to me the most appealing, it's absurd to think that this is all there is to it.  Science is a field that relies on data.  Without evidence and proof, the theories and individual experiments mean nothing.  I may have been surprised when I initially started looking around for labs to work in, because none of them were really able to do the broad, overarching research of which I had romantically dreamed.

What people see in the news is things like SU2C, which is certainly an incredible kind of thing:  have a bunch of rich people, affected by an important issue and with connections in high society, to bring together the brightest minds to come up with research that addresses such broad concerns as "cancer".  And this is good!  It means people get a more positive image of science, and encourages the dreamers in 3rd grade to pursue science as other engaged young people pursue music and sports fame.  Celebrities in science augment the public image of science and gradually supplants the religious fervor against science, spurred by loonies stuck in the 15th century.

But let's not get too hasty.  Although it's FANTASTIC when people with an insanely unfair proportion of society's resources decide to [somewhat] altruistically give back to that society, it's unreasonable for anybody to expect that to happen.  Relying on chance for things to happen is not scientific.  Relying on spontaneous flux and circumstance for events to occur is inefficient.  Especially in the case of science, where the work that these bigwig medical researchers are doing is utterly pointless without being based in a century of research on carcinogens and unrestricted cell growth.  And on the flip side, that methodical structure is agitatingly slow without individuals with passion, intuition, and the capacity to write great grant proposals.

That, I think, covers the foundation of my answer to the initial question.  What needs to happen is that society should rationally conclude what the most worthy scientific pursuits are, and pour our shared resources--taxpayer money and other governmental revenue--into funding for all of the little labs that do data acquisition and test mini-hypotheses.  Those all come together to form a more thorough image of the contemporary questions and the respective answers.  That utterly important research can then be guided by the sometimes eccentric ambitions of the mad scientists and Nobel laureates, and sped up at certain loci by celebrity donors.

The two business models are both valuable.  So how, we should ask ourselves, should our government allocate money?  Assuming we want to have success in science, what do we do?  The only logical answer is the following:

By virtue of the government being our collective power and an entity that complements culture as the stabilizing backbone of society, we should ask our government to do what we can, with supporting sound evidence, expect will work.  Within that set of possible actions, we should do what has the greatest potential for the greatest success.  So what can we expect?  We can expect that data acquisition on a large scale (the kind where we get our funding from the highly structured organizations headed by the government, like NSF) gives theoretical scientists something to analyze.  That organized groundwork allows theoretical scientists to draw hypotheses and support conclusions.  We can expect that wealthy individuals will only donate to scientific research when there's promise that it can achieve something they really want, such as the cure to a disease that is slowly killing them or their loved ones.  In other words, we can expect that the wealthy will not donate to things that are more menial and that are important in an unexciting way.

So, if you believe in the power of science, vote for people who support increased government spending on research, because entities like the NSF have the most power to get the ultra-valuable boring stuff done.  And if you know rich people, convince them that it's a really good idea to donate to mad scientists; for instance, persuade them that it's totally awesome in a million ways to make out a huge check to a small, elite research team researching the neurogenetic development of language in the hopes of finding the ideal method for genetically engineering a talking animal.