"Research in this country is going down"
About this Quote
"Research in this country is going down" lands less like a lament and more like a diagnostic from someone who spent a lifetime turning curiosity into hardware. Coming from Amar Bose, it carries the authority of an inventor who knew that breakthroughs are rarely lightning bolts; they are the compound interest of patient funding, institutional trust, and permission to fail quietly for a long time.
The sentence is blunt, almost willfully unpoetic. That plainness is the point. Inventors tend to talk in signal, not style, and Bose’s choice of a downward trendline metaphor ("going down") frames research as an ecosystem you can measure, starve, and eventually crash. The implied target isn’t just government budgets; it’s a broader cultural shift toward short-term metrics. When research is treated like a quarterly performance instead of a multi-decade bet, you don’t merely get fewer patents. You get safer questions, thinner ambition, and a brain drain that doesn’t announce itself until the pipeline is already empty.
Bose also knew the uneasy relationship between academia and industry from the inside: he built a major company while remaining deeply tied to MIT. So the subtext reads as a warning about broken feedback loops. If universities become credential factories and corporations become optimization machines, the messy middle zone where new ideas are allowed to be inefficient disappears.
It’s a small sentence carrying a large fear: that a nation can keep consuming innovation long after it has stopped meaningfully producing it.
The sentence is blunt, almost willfully unpoetic. That plainness is the point. Inventors tend to talk in signal, not style, and Bose’s choice of a downward trendline metaphor ("going down") frames research as an ecosystem you can measure, starve, and eventually crash. The implied target isn’t just government budgets; it’s a broader cultural shift toward short-term metrics. When research is treated like a quarterly performance instead of a multi-decade bet, you don’t merely get fewer patents. You get safer questions, thinner ambition, and a brain drain that doesn’t announce itself until the pipeline is already empty.
Bose also knew the uneasy relationship between academia and industry from the inside: he built a major company while remaining deeply tied to MIT. So the subtext reads as a warning about broken feedback loops. If universities become credential factories and corporations become optimization machines, the messy middle zone where new ideas are allowed to be inefficient disappears.
It’s a small sentence carrying a large fear: that a nation can keep consuming innovation long after it has stopped meaningfully producing it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Amar
Add to List
