The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003
Timothy Lenoir
Revolution from above: The Role of the State in
Creating the German Research System, 1810-1910
The American Economic Review
Volume 88, Issue 2
May 1998, 22-27.
Index
I. Economic Engineering: 1806-1848
II. Research Imperative, Decentralized Competition,
and Institute-Building: 1848-1871
III. Academic Science and Industry’s Needs: 1877-1910
Discussions of modern
scientific research’s organization point to the 19th-century emergence of German
research universities as evidence that state investment in nondirected
academic research, when coupled with beneficial relations between academic
research and industry, and when stimulated by appropriate incentives such as
protection of intellectual property in an open, competitive system, can lead to
explosive growth in scientific knowledge and rapid improvement of industry. This paper examines three episodes in the
evolution of Germany’s research system pointing to the roles of state interests
and innovative ministerial leadership in fashioning the research system to meet
state needs.
I. Economic
Engineering: 1806-1848
The first period considered
is that bracketed by the Prussian defeat by Napoleon’s armies and the 1848
Revolution. Discussions of the research
university quite naturally focus on the Humboldt reforms and the University of
Berlin’s founding in 1810. But the
Humboldt reforms should be considered together with the Stein-Hardenberg economic reforms aimed at fostering private
initiative through removing guild restrictions on trade as well as a sweeping
set of anti-feudal land and labor reforms. In a nearly unbroken line of policy until
1845, Karl H. F. Stein, Karl A. F. Hardenberg, and
their successors, Gottlieb J. C. Kunth, Ludwig F. V. Bülow, and especially Christian Beuth
and Christian Rother, attempted to stimulate
industrial development. They employed a
variety of means, from dissemination of technical information to handing over
government-purchased foreign technology to private parties as capital
investment, and from the creation of organizations to generate development
funds for new industrial start-ups to actively building state-financed
industries employing the newest technologies and organizational techniques, all
in order to pressure Prussian industry to modernize its production methods (see
William D. Henderson, 1958; Ulrich Peter Ritter, 1961; Ilja
Mieck, 1965;
Wolfgang Radtke, 1981; Hubert Kiesewetter, 1989; Hermann Fernholz,
1991; Werner Vogel, 1993).
Another key feature of the
Prussian plan to modernize German industry was new types of educational
institutions to free industry from its tradition-bound practices. Stein and Kunth
identified “Bildung” as the most useful form of state
aid, and Beuth argued that where science is not
introduced into industry, there can be no securely based industry or progress. Beuth opened the Gewerbeschule (School of Trade and Industry) in Berlin in
1821, to provide rudimentary instruction to handworkers and manufacturers in
mechanics and chemical-technical subjects. The school was expanded within a few years to
include a third class, the “Suprema,” which treated
the scientific basis of technology as a unified field of study.
The Humboldt university
reforms were also conceived as regenerating the nation’s spiritual foundation,
particularly through institution of the seminar, nourishing intellectual
independence and initiative. Elite young
minds trained in close interaction with faculty working on independent research
problems would become the new generation’s bulwark. But the university Humboldt envisioned did not
include laboratory training as a regular part of the science curriculum. In fact, Humboldt’s planned science curriculum
was primarily devoted to “pure” theoretical science, particularly mathematics
and physics. While chemistry and
physiology were included in this picture, laboratories were only deemed
* Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA 94305.
22
important for supporting lecture demonstrations and for the
professor’s private research needs. The
model of Wissenschaft um sich selber willen
that emerged in this environment was heavily opposed to any association
with handwork. Between 1830 and 1848,
laboratory exercises were tolerated as entrepreneurial activities professors
might initiate for fees which they would plow back into lab equipment (R.
Steven Turner, 1971, 1974; Charles McClelland, 1980).
The response of the
Prussian ministry and university faculty to a scathing critique of the system
launched in 1840 by Giessen chemist Justus Liebig sums up the pre-1848 situation of natural sciences
in universities. To Liebig’s
claim that chemistry was an independent discipline worthy of its own institute,
rather than simply an adjunct field for medical students, leading faculty
members responded that Liebig’ s recommendations to
combine the pursuit of new chemical knowledge with laboratory work based on
standardized and easily taught methods of analysis undermined the university’s
purpose. Liebig’s
program combined pursuit of pure knowledge, typical of science academies, with
work appropriate to technical institutes, which trained students in material
production. According to an old-guard
professor, Liebig personified the time’s central
academic evil: lust after discovery in order to attract more students. The true purpose of university science,
according to this professor, was to transmit solid, proven knowledge to men
training in useful professions to serve the state (Turner, 1982).
II. Research Imperative, Decentralized Competition,
and Institute-Building: 1848-1871
A fundamental shift
occurred in the organization of academic science in Germany from the mid-1840’s
through the mid-1870’s, connected with the emergence of a prestige market
driven by a new research ethos (Joseph Ben-David, 1971). This shift in many ways realized Liebig’s vision of science. As Ben-David argued persuasively, in large
part the shift during this period was due to competition among different German
states for intellectual talent as they vied for cultural leadership of a
hoped-for unified Germany. Intense
competition existed among the leading state ministries of culture and education
to stock their universities with the best professors, now defined as
discoverers of new knowledge. A state
ministry’s appointments were based on international reputation for research and
publication as evaluated by a review process established within the ministry
and drawing on faculty peer review. In
an environment where several universities could compete for a single professor’s
talents, highly visible scientists were able to make laboratory space, assistants,
and equipment a condition of their acceptance. These academic market forces meant that nearly
every German university got at least a small institute of chemistry, and
similar developments occurred in physics and physiology. Having grown out of traditional teaching
functions in which laboratory work was seen as at best formalizing traditional
student training, once the new labs were in place entrepreneurial directors
were recruited who would use the facilities to advance their own research and
to encourage research among advanced students, in turn reinforcing the
scientific achievement of the professor/lab director.
While the open system
blossomed during this brief period of German academic history, the earlier mercantilistic concerns of state ministries were
nonetheless still present. In my view,
interaction between these two tendencies gave the system its distinctive
features. Recruiting star faculty was
only one of the items on state ministers’ agendas during this period, characterized
at best by modest economic growth and more often by stagnation and decline. Enhancing their universities’ prestige was an
important goal, but increasingly for the smaller German states, stimulating
their economies was another. While
universities competed for faculty, they also competed with one another for
students; a reason for recruiting star faculty was to increase student
enrollments. Since the largest growth
sector of student matriculation in this middle period was in medicine,
ministers tried to increase their competitive advantage for medical students by
hiring the faculty and constructing the ancillary support facilities for
medical education. A second, larger,
area of concern of state ministers during the late 1840’s-1850’s
was the need to stimulate the economy. While
23
states like Prussia could appoint a few professors in highly
visible universities without consideration of the support facilities’ integration
with other programs, smaller states felt increasing pressure to utilize their
resources efficiently, dovetailing appointments with other initiatives. Peter Borscheid’s
(1976) study of Baden illustrates how this competition for students, combined
with the effort to harness chemistry to stimulate agricultural production, led
to impressive expansion of chemistry facilities at the University of
Heidelberg.
Elsewhere (Lenoir, 1997), I
have shown that a similar pattern can be seen in the building of first-class
science and medical institutes at the University of Leipzig by Johannes Falkenstein, the director of the Saxon Kultusministerium.
Falkenstein
was to Saxony what Beuth and Rother
were to Prussia (see David Cahan, 1985; Alan J. Rocke, 1993; Lenoir, 1997). As Kultusminister of
the most industrialized German state, Falkenstein was
not as pressed as his Baden colleagues to generate immediate economic benefit
to industry and agriculture from investment in the natural sciences, but he had
consistently promoted economic modernization and industrialization as a means
to long-term prosperity and social stability. But one of his concerns as Kultusminister
was to boost enrollment at Leipzig, particularly by attracting students from
other German and foreign states. Leipzig
had not done particularly well in student enrollment during the 1840’s and
early 1850’s. In an era when the medical
faculty was a university’s “bread and butter,” Falkenstein
concentrated his resources in the area of his existing strength: clinical
medicine. He made plans to improve the
Leipzig natural-science faculties and build a new science and medical campus.
The retirement of the
professor of physiology allowed Falkenstein to
implement his plan. He recruited Carl
Ludwig, Germany’s leading physiologist, for Leipzig’s clinical medicine
program. Although Ludwig was famous for
introducing physics-based instrumentation into physiology, his work had never
had much direct contact with clinical medicine. Falkenstein
perceived a perfect fit between Ludwig’s advancing research programs and the
work of the star he already had in the Leipzig medical stable, the clinician
Karl Wunderlich. Since the late 1850’s, Wunderlich
had been deeply involved in his studies on thermometry, strengthening his
conviction that the closest cooperation ought to develop among experimental
physiology, chemistry, pathological anatomy, and diagnostic techniques for the
clinic. Falkenstein
built new institutes for physiology and pathology, each with positions for
assistants in physiological chemistry and microscopic anatomy, the goal being
to integrate these various enterprises into a collaboration
between Ludwig and Wunderlich. In order to promote this cooperation, these
institutes were all situated adjacent to one another with connecting corridors
and walkways. The integration of
experimental clinical medicine, long considered a defining moment of the 19th
century’s medical revolution and the first step toward rational science-based medicine, can be considered the outcome of strategic
planning on the part of enlightened state bureaucrats (see Kiesewetter,
1988).
The efforts of ministers
like Falkenstein to optimize interactions among their
different research faculty and to coordinate facility use led to systemic
interactions among disciplines, improving the content of science in ways that
no one could have predicted by simply betting on each discipline’s stars
pursuing their own personal research programs. While this system building was considerably
short of targeted research and development, it prepared the way.
III. Academic
Science and Industry’s Needs: 1877-1910
The final phase of
development I want to consider is between 1871 and 1910, culminating in the formation
of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes. As the
two periods I have already discussed demonstrate, the view that state-supported
research at the universities should stimulate industry in certain ways was at
best a rhetorical position in the German nation’s political and cultural
transformation. For the most part, few
scientists other than Liebig thought their work had
direct relevance to industry, and the highest rewards were to be obtained by
emerging as “bearers of culture,” rather than as scions of industry. In the period
24
between 1871 and 1910, however, this situation shifted
radically, when the tensions that had earlier characterized the relations
between academic and industrial cultures dissolved. This cultural shift was as important as the increased
relevance of scientific research to the economic performance of German
industry. In bringing about this
transformation, the work of enlightened state ministers, particularly Friedrich
Althoff, was once again crucial (see Karl-Heinz Manegold, 1970; Frank R. Pfetsch,
1974; Bernhard vom Brocke,
1980).
In the previous sections I
have described the conditions for a powerful set of institutions for generating
scientific research and the production of new knowledge. But by 1890 the recognition dawned that the
fusion of teaching and research providing the rationale for developing these institutions
in fact hindered science’ s advance, since the bulk of resources had to go into
supporting time-consuming low-level training. The progress of science at the turn of the
century depended on more than simply providing good scientists with time for
research by reducing their teaching. In
addition, I have suggested in the previous section that developments such as
those connected with Ludwig’s call to Leipzig pointed toward another refinement
of the system through stimulating interconnections between otherwise autonomous
disciplines. Although favorably disposed
to such cross-fertilization, Althoff did not hold out
much prospect for its realization, given the rigid hierarchies and social
divisions in German universities. The
solution to these structural problems depended on establishing an Archimedean
point outside the universities. The
impetus for change and the specific solutions to the problems of establishing
the necessary institutional conditions for advanced research came about as a
result of acute awareness of the increasing importance of academic science for
industry, and the centrality of industry to the German Imperial State.
The relationship between Farbwerke Hoechst, a dyestuffs manufacturer, and the research
workers in Robert Koch’s laboratory at the Imperial Institutes of Health (Reichsgesundheitsamt), following the discovery in Koch’s
lab of the first biological antitoxins (diphtheria, tetanus) illustrates how
closer links between industry’s demands and academic science’s interests were
forged. A constellation of factors
stimulated research and development in the field of pharmaceuticals at Hoechst.
Foremost among these was the economic
crisis faced by the industry, most severe between 1881 and 1885. The increased costs of finding new dyes in an
evermore competitive market and dyestuffs’ actual decline in price forced major
chemical firms producing dyes, such as Hoechst, to seek to diversify their
products (John Joseph Beer, 1959; Borscheid, 1976).
Hoechst moved into
pharmaceuticals by establishing consulting arrangements with the directors of
university laboratories, supplying them with both funding and materials to work
on subjects of potential interest to the firm. Within a few years, owing to the increasing
complexity of research requiring facilities unavailable routinely in
universities and problems of reliably managing such consulting arrangements,
firms like Hoechst moved to internalize these research capabilities. Early experiences with the privatization of
Emil Behring’s work on sera at Hoechst led Aithoff to be concerned about insuring the expansion of
basic research, but also making it available for commercial development. A first experiment was the establishment of
the Frankfurt Institut fur Serum-Prüfung-und-Forschung
with Paul Ehrlich as director. Though
not yet a for-profit research institute, the Institut
was firmly based on mutual cooperation among state, industry, and academic
science. This institute prefigured a
more ambitious endeavor to pursue rational drug therapeutics and production of
artificially synthesized drugs based on Ehrlich’s discoveries of certain dyes’
ability to block trypanosomes’ toxic capabilities (see Ernst Bauemler, 1984; Lenoir, 1997 pp. 179-202).
The Georg-Speyer-Haus
that Ehrlich proposed and eventually constructed was an interdisciplinary
institution whose director would define problems to be attacked through
exchange of ideas among physiologists, biochemists, microbiologists,
bacteriologists, pharmacologists, and clinicians working inhouse.
An unspecified percentage of the profits
from patents was reinvested in the institute to cover
its operating costs, including the costs
25 Index
of undertaking new research. The firms of Hoechst and Casella
contributed substantially to the initial endowment and also supplied the raw
materials used in the department of chemistry’s research. In exchange, the two firms received first
refusal on any marketable patents. But
the choice of research problems was left to be determined solely by Ehrlich and
his staff.
Concrete results, such as
the production of Salvarsan, the first cure for
syphilis, were undoubtedly instrumental in supporting the conviction that the
pattern of a multidisciplinary institute combining the advancement of basic
science with the needs of industry embodied in the Georg-Speyer-Haus
was capable of more general application. It was because of its success that Ehrlich sat
on the board of advisers who laid the plans for the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaftinstitutes (see Manfred Rasch,
1987; Jeffrey Allan Johnson, 1990; Rudolf Vierhaus
and vom Brocke, 1990).
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27
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003