My own private American science

President Barack Obama is all for research and development in science and technology in the United States. 

The President dutifully spoke of the significance of investing in this area of human knowledge--the usual "creation of jobs" and "strengthening of the economy."

I'm disappointed, as I expect a guy like the President, who joked about not doing well enough in physics to become the "Science-in-Chief" of the nation, to transcend the economic rationale.

Science is best pursued when its "disinterested", i.e. pursued not to fulfill some direct or tangential, central or peripheral, economic motive, but for the development of humanity at large. Any economic fruit should be borne incidentally.

However, economics is unfortunately the primum mobile of the President's American innovation initiative and of all innovation initiatives globally. According to the NYT, the particular speech, which I believe is a speech representative of a worldwide trend, cleverly conceals from the narrative, a "vital backstory, one that underscores a profound change taking place in the way science is paid for and practiced in America."

The backstory is that "American science, long a source of national power and pride, is increasingly becoming a private enterprise."

Hollywood, a pioneer in disseminating through the guiles of art and entertainment, the "absent" facts of this reality, has been telling us for a long time about the consequences of a privatization of American science. 

Consider, scifi films like The Europa Report and Prometheus, and the most recent, Snow Piercers, among many others.