单选题
The usual distinctions between "basic research," "applied research," and "development," used for many years in the formal government statistics kept by the National Science Foundation are, unfortunately, insufficient for discussions of policy for government investment in technical activities. Indeed, definitions are the source of much of the confusion over the appropriate role for government in the national scientific and technical enterprise. One cannot distinguish in any meaningful way "basic" from "applied research" by observing what a scientist is doing.
"Applied research" should not be used to mean "purposeful and demonstrably useful basic research," and one should be wary of the use of the term in government statistics. In corporate research laboratories, such as the T.J. Watson Research Laboratories of IBM, all of the work is referred to simply as "research." There is no need to attempt a distinction between "basic" and "applied" research. All of the company"s research investments are motivated by corporate interests. All of the research has a purpose. All of it is conducted under highly creative conditions. None of it is so "pure" that there are no expectations of value from the research investment.
We should reserve the words "applied research" for those narrowly defined tasks in which limited time and resources are devoted to a specific problem for an identified user who gets all the benefit and should pay all the costs. To make this view of applied research clear in this discussion, I use the words "problem-solving research" instead.
Narrow problem-solving and development are activities initiated by someone who wishes to apply research methods purposefully to exploit an identified opportunity or solve a problem. They involve the application of technical resources to achieve an identified goal for a specified beneficiary, usually the investor in the work. It is a reasonable assumption that those who engage in such activities expect to benefit from them, and to benefit by a sufficient margin over the cost to accommodate the technical risk that is ever-present in research. The investor in problem-solving may be a government agency, but is more likely to be a private firm. In most cases that firm would be expected to be able to appropriate sufficient benefits to need no government subsidy to take those risks.
Public investment in the creation of new technology (technological development, whether by research or as a product of problem-solving) is a critical link between societal goals and the scientific research that is pursued by virtue of society"s commitment to those goals. Thus the desire for technology is an important—perhaps the most important—source of demand for science.
单选题
The distinction between basic and applied researches is thought by the author to be ______