Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
wages of researchers, and thus the overall costs of research;
(2) that firms will simply substitute government funding for their own
funding and continue to conduct exactly the same amount of output;
and (3) that the allocation mechanisms used by governments may be
imbalanced and are not as effective as market forces (Guellec and van
Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, 2003). Generally speaking, there are three
main types of government support for R&D: research funding for
basic research conducted in universities, direct support to firms for
firm-based research and tax breaks like those discussed previously
(Guellec and van Pottelsburghe de la Potterie, 2003).
Research conducted with stakeholders in the stem cell sciences in
Australia shows that they consider the availability of government
funding to be the single biggest factor affecting the future of the
industry (Harvey, 2011). Importantly, direct support for basic
research also has a political advantage for governments, allowing
governments to be seen to be capitalising on the social value of
investing in new research (Gottweis et al., 2009). The US stem cell
industries have long had the most direct funding worldwide, despite
the well documented problems associated with the federal funding of
embryonic stem cell research (Harvey, 2009).
3.2.2 Regulation
At the height of the global debate over human embryonic stem cell
research in the early part of the 2000s, it was widely argued that the
implementation of regulations that were too restrictive would
operate as a disincentive for scientists and that valuable research
opportunities would be lost. There is now a range of legislative
parameters in place worldwide, with characterization of these
regulatory environments tending to adopt a sliding-scale approach,
ranked from permissive to restrictive (e.g. Salter, 2007; Isasi and
Knoppers, 2006). Notable about this approach too is that, as
regulations change over time, each country tends to move to the
more, rather than less, permissive end of the scale (Isasi and
Knoppers, 2006).
