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cium antagonists and angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE, inhibitors). The use 

 of calcium channel blockers came from clinical tests of various compounds that 

 were first made by pharmaceutical firms. Knowledge of how these compounds 

 worked and how they could best be used came years later, mainly through federally 

 funded research. In contrast, the ACE inhibitors were developed by drug companies 

 through a logical progression of discoveries that built on decades of publicly funded 

 research. Private investment was essential, but federal investment was equally 

 important at many stages, both leading and following privately funded research. 

 Almost all the important technical decisions, in both public and private sectors, 

 were made by those educated in research universities and trained at least in part 

 through federally fimded research. 



The story in information technologies involves different agencies and domains 

 of science, but the lessons are similar ^ Lynn Conway of Xerox and Carver Mead of 

 the California Institute ofTechnology in the 1970s conceived of "silicon foundries," 

 where graduate students, their professors, and others could have computer chip 

 designs fabricated into integrated circuits. Their idea won federal support and 

 became the heart of the very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit program supported 

 by the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Defense of Defense. NSF joined 

 the program, broadening access to VLSI fabrication services — the foundries. On a 

 parallel track, the network that later became the Internet (first as ARPANet) was 

 used to send designs to the foundries, which then created and shipped the chips, 

 reducing cost and increasing speed. What once took months now took days. The 

 impediments to chip design diminished; graduate students felt free to experiment 

 and innovate; even radical designs for chips became practical. 



The foundries and other components of ARPA's VLSI program had spectacular 

 results: a renaissance in computer design, universities creating VLSI programs, the 

 beginnings of three-dimensional graphics, and initial efforts in reduced instruction 

 set computing (RISC), now in use in millions of computers. RISC computing origi- 

 nated at IBM but was adopted only after a period of federally funded research that 

 made its applications readily apparent, at which point several firms in addition to 

 IBM invested in it. Several major corporations grew directly out of the VLSI pro- 

 gram. 



Decades of federal and industrial investments in information technology led to 

 the creation of the elements — from three-dimensional graphics to windows to local 

 networks — now embedded in the way we work, obtain and share information, and 

 teach our children. The dynamic interactions between federally funded academic 

 R&D and industrial R&D made the United States dominant in information technol- 

 ogy', which strengthened the nation's competitiveness and also provided advantages 

 in other sectors throughout the economy that depend on information technologies, 

 such as finance, entertainment, communications, education, and transportation (see 

 Figure 11.13). 



As has been detailed in the case of information technology and is evident also 

 in medicine and in many other fields highly dependent on science, the history of 

 innovative development with significant social and economic benefits points to 

 several major conclusions:^ (1) research has consistently generated large payoffs; (2) 

 these payoffs often take years or decades to be realized; (3) while the time from 

 discovery to market may be long, the transition from science to technology is more 



