Basic science research is going down, DOWN

This morning I happened to read the wikipedia page about Bell Labs, where I was surprised by the amount of research and inventions done by the scientists in it, I only need to say that they invented the first transistor !!!!, they invented electronics :D ! also the C programming language and UNIX was a work done in there.

But at the end of the page a bad news struck me, as of the last year (Aug 2008) they stopped any research in “Basic Science”, you know physics chemistry and things like these, and moved to more marketable areas, I felt disappointed :s. The basic science research is supposed to be the solver of every problem facing the advance in technologies, as when certain bottleneck faces a tech these sciences would be the first to solve the problem, like when Bell labs invented transistors they solved the problem of the huge sizes of computers due to using tubes. Nowadays we have a similar problem we need something better than these transistors, we devices much smaller than electronic devices.

What surprised me more that lately tonight I found Slashdot posting a topic talking about similar fears, and mentioned : “While IBM, Microsoft, and HP collectively spend $17B a year on R&D, only 3%-5% of that is for basic science.”

I see the markets over saturated and most of the technologies reached their high end with no substantial change in them (we still have mechanical HDDs, please make bigger SSDs :D).

Yeah most of them look at Nanotechnology as the salvation of most of industry problems, I think we will have to wait a lot to see this change they allege.