A year ago (“A Nobel for Google,” October 9, 2024), commenting on The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announcing Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind as two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, I wrote:
there is a market for faculty talent, too, and there the choices include not only the academy but also industry. Just as physician-researchers sometimes leave academic medicine for pharmaceutical companies, the engineers, chemists, physicists, and computer scientists have choices, too. They can make careers in universities or in industry, or try to do both simultaneously. The worse the conditions become in academia—poisonous faculty politics, cancel culture, performative “wokeness,” the decline of meritocracy in favor of other values such as “equity” or bureaucracy—the greater the relative attraction of choosing to make a career instead at Google or some company that will be the next Google….Perhaps the risk of a talent exodus, “brain drain,” from academia to industry, will put some market pressure on higher education to create conditions that are conducive to scholarship. …The Nobel for Google is a reminder that universities aren’t the only places where significant discoveries happen….what Google and similar innovative companies are doing are providing healthy competition to academia’s monopoly on scientific research and discovery. That’s prizeworthy.
The Nobel prizes for 2025 are still being announced, but already one of this year’s awards—one of the Nobel Prizes in Physiology or Medicine—has gone to a researcher working at a for-profit company rather than at an academic medical center.
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