Research Organizations for Discovery

Abstract

Modern science is rarely a solitary occupation. Investigators require buildings, massive amounts of equipment, institutions to act as their agents for securing, managing, supporting funds and, perhaps most importantly, fellow scientists with whom to collaborate and to share and test their ideas. Research institutions have different missions although the distinctions are usually not absolute; industrial and for-profit organizations conduct applied research; government laboratories often have specific missions to solve problems related to their area of responsibility, university and research institutes are usually tasked to conduct curiosity driven and discovery research. Several of the papers in this volume contain anecdotal accounts of different institutions that provide a body of data from which broad inferences may eventually be made. In this article I will describe two research groups with which I have been associated. They are significantly different from each other but both are dedicated to basic discovery research. I hope that these descriptions will contribute to the richness of the data provided in other papers in this volume.