For baby rats, there’s nothing like a massage.
No...not that kind.
When licked with their mom’s soft tongue - or massaged by a researcher’s soft brush
- their enzyme levels spike, their growth hormones rise...they thrive.
To discover this heartwarming bit of information, researchers drew from a quarter million dollar
grant from the National Institutes of Health - in other words, public tax dollars.
No matter how much you like rodents, you might question whether this was a good use of public
money.
But it was actually a great economic investment.
Fast forward a few decades...the US was spending billions each year caring for premature babies.
Researchers recalled how massage had helped baby rats thrive, and they decided to try
similar techniques on the babies.
They grew faster, their immune systems improved, and they were discharged an average of six
days earlier.
‘Preterm infant massage’ is now common in intensive care units nationwide.
An investment of less than $250,000 now saves the US five billion dollars in healthcare
costs each year...not to mention lots of tiny lives.
This outcome wasn’t a given; the rat massage study, like all so-called “basic research”,
sought to understand how the world works, with no clear applications - or payoffs - in
mind.
And while there are MANY good reasons to do science other than the hope of a return on
investment, time and time again, basic research does end up paying off.
The Human Genome Project cost the US government more than $5 billion, but thanks to its applications
in all sorts of industries, it has had an estimated trillion plus dollars of economic
impact - that’s more than 178 dollars for every initial dollar spent.
Then there’s Fermat and his Little Theorem, a beautiful piece of pure mathematics describing
certain conditions of prime numbers.
This probably-very-inexpensive work enabled the entire field of data encryption, now a
3-billion-dollar-a-year industry.
But we cherry-picked these examples; some basic research must have minimal returns on
investment, or none at all...right?
Well, we can’t be sure, mostly because what happens between ‘eureka!’ and payoff can
be...complicated.
Take the scientist who used electromagnets to levitate frogs...which seemed like a non-profitable
dead end.
But this kind of creative thinking eventually resulted in him developing graphene, a Nobel
Prize-winning material with tons of applications and a 42 million dollar market in 2017.
And sometimes, like in the case of Fermat’s Little Theorem, it’s a matter of time...it
took 300 years to see the theorem’s payoff.
Intrepid economists have estimated the return on investment for basic research, and calculated
that overall, we get back what we invest, plus an additional 20 to 60 percent a year.
That is a big range, because the calculations depend on which social benefits economists
factor in - like the employment gained by students and researchers, or simply the advantage
of knowing more stuff - and how we assign values to those benefits.
Yet even the most conservative estimates suggest that overall, basic research more than pays
for itself - and can even outperform more traditional investments.
But the thing about basic research is that these dividends rarely go back to the lab
that did the work, or whoever funded it, so private, profit-seeking firms are not likely
to invest heavily in the basic-est basic research.
And that means if we want to continue reaping the economic benefits of basic research - as
well as all the other amazing stuff it makes possible - taxpayers will have to have a hand
in the process.
Doing basic research would be impossible without taxpayer support, and making MinuteEarth would
be impossible without the support of our partners - like NordVPN, which sponsored this video.
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