[Ip-health] REMINDER: KEI Brown Bag this Friday

[Benjamin Krohmal]

Knowledge Ecology International is hosting a brown bag lunch seminar
by Robin Hanson:
"Grants vs. Prizes for Scientific Innovation."

Who: George Mason University Associate Economics Professor Robin Hanson

What: Brown Bag Lunch on "Grants vs. Prizes for Scientific Innovation"

When: 12:30-2:00pm on Friday, March 16th

Where: KEI/CPTech - 1621 Connecticut Ave. NW, suite 500, Washington
DC 20009.

Details:

Robin Hanson holds a PhD in economics from the California Institute
of Technology, as well as an MS in physics and an MA in philosophy of
science from the University of Chicago.  Before pursuing his PhD,
Robin worked as a physicist at Lockheed and NASA, and afterwards he
was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy
Research at UC Berkeley.  He is now an Associate Professor of
Economics at George Mason University and a Research Associate at the
Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.  Robin is best
known for his work on idea futures markets.  He has published on an
eclectic array of topics, and his ideas have been extensively
profiled in the popular press, including in Forbes, Wired, and The
New York Times.  He blogs at Overcomingbias.com.

Robin's brown bag presentation will be based on his paper "Patterns
of Patronage: Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science" (http://
hanson.gmu.edu/whygrant.pdf).  Several previous brown bags have
concentrated on prizes as an alternative to traditional patents for
promoting more focused and accessible medical innovations.  However,
many support a different alternative to the drug patent status quo:
greatly expanding public research grants and maintaining government
rights to the resulting innovations.  After all, grants are already
extensively and successfully used to fund a great deal of scientific
research, while the use of prizes has been much more limited.  In his
presentation "Grants vs. Prizes for Scientific Innovation," Robin
Hanson will review the historical use of both grants and prizes by
patrons of scientific research, and argue that the relative
pervasiveness of grants as opposed to prizes today is the result of
funders' preferences and not a reflection of any advantage in
stimulating innovation.  According to Hanson as quoted in a recent
New York Times article, =93Bureaucracies like a steady flow of money,
not uncertainty, but prizes are often more effective if what you want
is scientific progress.=94

If you would like to join us for Robin Hanson's brown bag seminar,
please RSVP your name, title, organization and contact details to:
ben.krohmal@keionline.org or call 202.332.2670.