Jason Crawford

Although I think it has some purchase in the popular, maybe in popular consciousness and possibly in science policy.

You often hear it attributed to Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, although it's been around since before that.

And since there's no one sort of formal model of it, people divide it into multiple different, sometimes you'll see it in three, four, five phases, whatever.

They're called different things, pure research versus applied or basic research.

It doesn't really matter.

I like to think of it in a very simplified view, science, invention, and distribution.

And the kind of naive take on this is that there's a flow.

There's like a sequence.

First, we figure out some science.

Then we apply that to invention.

And then once we've invented something, we can distribute it through a business or some other effort.

Now, there is an important element of truth in this, and we'll spend a good amount of time looking at what that is.

But a naive interpretation is, you know, a little detached from reality.

So the naive interpretation, I'm going to just caricature this.

I call it the clean handoff model.

And it's this idea that science is purely upstream of technology, that the relationship is sort of one way.

To elaborate, it's the idea that – so science is motivated by pure curiosity.

We're not thinking about applications.

We just kind of – it's just a free play of the intellect.

We just pursue our – we just want to understand the world.