NOTE: Look here <www.invent.org/hall_of_fame/150.html> for Brotha
West's bio.
Also: <http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blwest.htm>

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November 13, 2005
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?
By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN

Baltimore

WHEN James E. West was 8 years old, he propped himself on his bed's
brass footboard
one afternoon and stretched to plug the cord of a radio he had repaired
into a ceiling
outlet. It was one of his first experiments. Mr. West's hand sealed to
the light
socket as 120 volts of electricity shimmied through his body, freezing
him in place
until his brother knocked him from the footboard and onto the floor.

Like more storied inventors who preceded him, he was quickly hooked on
the juice
- even as he lay shivering from that first encounter. "I became
fascinated 
by electricity after that, just completely fascinated," recalled Mr.
West, 
now 74 and an award-winning research professor at Johns Hopkins
University. "I
needed to learn everything I could about it."

Over the past several decades, he has secured 50 domestic and more than
200 foreign
patents on inventions relating to his pioneering explorations of
electrically charged
materials and recording devices. According to the National Inventors
Hall of Fame,
an organization in Akron, Ohio, that counts Mr. West among its
inductees, about 
90 percent of all microphones used today in devices like cellphones,
acoustic equipment
and toys derive from electronic transducers that he helped to develop
in the early
1960's.

Inventors have always held a special place in American history and
business lore,
embodying innovation and economic progress in a country that has long
prized individual
creativity and the power of great ideas. In recent decades, tinkerers
and researchers
have given society microchips, personal computers, the Internet,
balloon catheters,
bar codes, fiber optics, e-mail systems, hearing aids, air bags and
automated teller
machines, among a bevy of other devices.

Mr. West stands firmly in this tradition - a tradition that he said may
soon be 
upended. He fears that corporate and public nurturing of inventors and
scientific
research is faltering and that America will pay a serious economic and
intellectual
penalty for this lapse.

A larger pool of Mr. West's colleagues echoes his concerns. "The
scientific
and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at
a time when
many other nations are gathering strength," the National Academy of
Sciences
observed in a report released last month. "Although many people assume
that
the United States will always be a world leader in science and
technology, this 
may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist
throughout
the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and
technology can
be lost - and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed
it can be
regained at all."

A COMMITTEE of leading scientists, corporate executives and educators
oversaw the
drafting of the report, entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm:
Energizing
and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future." To spur American
innovation,
it recommends enhanced math and science education in grade school and
high school,
a more hospitable environment for scientific research and training at
the college
and graduate levels, an increase in federal funds for basic scientific
research 
and a mix of tax incentives and other measures to foster high-paying
jobs in groundbreaking
industries. The report cites China and India among a number of
economically promising
countries that may be poised to usurp America's leadership in
innovation and job
growth.

"For the first time in generations, the nation's children could face
poorer
prospects than their parents and grandparents did," the report said.
"We
owe our current prosperity, security and good health to the investments
of past 
generations, and we are obliged to renew those commitments."

The Industrial Research Institute, an organization in Arlington, Va.,
that represents
some of the nation's largest corporations, is also concerned that the
academic and
financial support for scientific innovation is lagging in the United
States. The
group's most recent data indicate that from 1986 to 2001, China,
Taiwan, South Korea
and Japan all awarded more doctoral degrees in science and engineering
than did 
the United States. Between 1991 and 2003, research and development
spending in America
trailed that of China, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan - in China's
case by billions
of dollars.

Mr. West's personal journey has involved overcoming school segregation
and racism,
a reading disability and the downsizing of Bell Labs, the legendary New
Jersey research
center where he once worked, and he fantasizes about a day when
children hold inventors
and scientists in higher esteem than hip-hop stars and professional
athletes.

"We need to bring the view back in this country that we're willing to
make 
investments for the future because everything that's in the cellphone
and the iPod
today was known 20 years ago," he said. "I think scientists and
inventors
are a very peculiar breed in that we're not in it for the money - we're
in it for
the knowledge."

IT all begins with a tingle of curiosity. "If I had a screwdriver and a
pair
of pliers, anything that could be opened was in danger," Mr. West
recalled 
of his childhood. "I had this need to know what was inside."

That need links Mr. West to a rich tradition in American life and
civilization. 
Benjamin Franklin, his kite lofted into the sky to coax electricity
from the clouds,
is the totemic American inventor whose financial acumen gave him time
to ponder 
and then spout a series of inventions that included a stove, catheter,
glass harmonica,
bifocals and, of course, the lightning rod - which he declined to
patent so it would
be freely available to the public.

No less a figure than Abraham Lincoln regarded the patent system, and
the protections
it offered for what he called the "fire of genius," as one of
history's
signature achievements. Shortly after President Lincoln's death, Thomas
Alva Edison
filed a patent for his first invention, an electric vote recorder.
Edison became
widely heralded not only as the creator of a longer-lasting light bulb
and the phonograph
but also as the inventor of the invention factory.

When the conglomerate that eventually became General Electric began
buying out Mr.
Edison's operations in the 1890's, it represented the beginning of the
corporate
absorption of the inventive act. "Edison marks the end of the
individual inventor
and the precorporate phase of invention," said Randall E. Stross, a
contributor
to The New York Times who is also working on an Edison biography titled
"The
Wizard," which Crown Publishing plans to release in 2007.

In 1932, a year after Edison died, corporations secured more patents
than individuals
for the first time, and a year later the Census Bureau eliminated
"inventor"
as a job class, according to Technology Review, a trade publication.
During the 
golden era of corporate research and development that followed Edison's
death, G.E.,
DuPont, AT&T and eventually Lockheed, Eli Lilly, Intel and other
corporate giants
came to dominate innovation. And as that happened, some tensions arose
between corporations
and independent inventors and researchers.

While tipping their hats to the scores of breakthroughs that have
emerged from corporate
labs, inventors also say they are concerned that bottom-line pressures
at many companies
may cause pure research to be eclipsed by innovation tied to rapid
commercialization
- leading to routine refinements of existing products rather than to
breathtaking
advances.

A tug of war has emerged between individual inventors and corporations
over proposed
legislative changes in patent laws, with the inventors arguing that
possible revisions
would benefit the business giants. Corporations have argued that the
system is equitable
but flawed. Dean Kamen, an inventor whose creations include the
wearable insulin
pump and the Segway transporter, recently testified before Congress,
calling for
changes in the patent system that also preserve protections for
individual inventors.

Despite those tussles, Mr. Stross says he believes that recent
technological advancements
have helped to move innovation out of the corporate sphere and to "give
the
lone inventor access to inexpensive tools and resources to once again
be master 
of one's own lab."

Robert S. Langer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
and a biotechnology pioneer, says that he shares the concerns raised in
the National
Academy of Sciences report but that he remains confident about the
country's prospects.
"While I think we can always do better, I am optimistic about the
spirit of
innovation in this country," he said. "I think we hold a lead, but no 
lead is unassailable."

For Mr. West, whose career has spanned stretches in creative havens
like Bell Labs,
inventing has meant brainstorming sessions with fellow tinkerers and
long hours 
walking the corridors of his own mind. "I spend a great deal of the
hours that
I'm awake within myself," he said. "You never want to stop doing it,
especially
when it's a pleasure. It's vital to my existence and I couldn't live if
I wasn't
an inventor."

Ilene Busch-Vishniac, a Johns Hopkins professor and inventor who has
collaborated
with Mr. West for more than two decades, most recently on acoustical
research, called
him the quintessential explorer. "For an inventor to be successful they
have
to think outside of the box and propose things that are wildly
different," 
she said. "Secondly, you need to be able to figure out how to do the
tests 
that evaluate whether something is plausible. Jim is great at both of
those things,
but especially at figuring out the tests."

Mr. West began testing his limits at an early age, defying his family's
wishes that
he become a dentist and setting his sights on a doctorate in physics.
To dissuade
him, his father introduced him to other African-American friends with
doctorates
- all of whom had failed to land university posts and held blue-collar
jobs instead.
Still, Mr. West pressed on, coached by a series of mentors, memorizing
text and 
numbers to mask his reading problems, building on his mathematical
gifts and eventually
enrolling as an undergraduate in physics at Temple University.

AFTER a summer internship at Bell Labs, he invented a pair of
headphones; enthralled
by his lab work, he decided to forgo his physics studies and to stay on
at Bell 
Labs, where he developed microphone technologies and explored a range
of interests
in acoustics. When Bell Labs became part of Lucent after AT&T
reorganized, the
scope of its research operations shifted, and Mr. West eventually moved
on as well.
At Ms. Busch-Vishniac's invitation, he joined Johns Hopkins in 2000.

Although he walks with a slight limp caused by a series of lower back
surgeries,
Mr. West looks much younger than his age. Like all inspired inventors
whose fertile
imaginations make them both researchers and artists, Mr. West also
still manages
to bring a Zen-like focus to his endeavors. "If I'm concerned about
what an
electron does in an amorphous mass then I become an electron," he
allowed. 
"I try to have that picture in my mind and to behave like an electron,
looking
at the problem in all its dimensions and scales."

He and Ms. Busch-Vishniac are currently analyzing solutions to noise
problems in
hospitals, and they are mentoring two local high school students and a
Johns Hopkins
graduate student who have joined their team as young inventors. The
graduate student,
Emily Nalven, 22, said she decided to join Mr. West after taking
classes with him.

"Even on the days he didn't lecture, he came to class, sat in the front
row,
took notes and spent his time after class answering student questions,"
she
said in an e-mail message. "One day, I asked him something about sound
waves
and he answered my question, then came back the next day with an even
more detailed
explanation to ensure that I truly understood."

The seeds of future inventions are sown in these kinds of interactions,
but the 
possible erosion of fertile academic and financial soil in America
concerns Mr. 
West and many others in science.

"The inventiveness of individuals depends on the context, including
sociopolitical,
economic, cultural and institutional factors," said Merton C. Flemings,
a professor
emeritus at M.I.T. who holds 28 patents and oversees the
Lemelson-M.I.T. Program
for inventors. "We remain one of the most inventive countries in the
world.
But all the signs suggest that we won't retain that pre-eminence much
longer. The
future is very bleak, I'm afraid."

Mr. Flemings said that private and public capital was not being
adequately funneled
to the kinds of projects and people that foster invention. The study of
science 
is not valued in enough homes, he observed, and science education in
grade school
and high school is sorely lacking.

But quantitative goals, he said, are not enough. Singapore posts high
national scores
in mathematics, he said, but does not have a reputation for churning
out new inventions.
In fact, he added, researchers from Singapore have studied school
systems in America
to try to glean the source of something ineffable and not really
quantifiable: creativity.

"In addition to openness, tolerance is essential in an inventive modern
society,"
a report sponsored by the Lemelson-M.I.T. Program said last year.
"Creative
people, whether artists or inventive engineers, are often
nonconformists and rebels.
Indeed, invention itself can be perceived as an act of rebellion
against the status
quo."

THOSE who keep an eye on corporate behavior say they think that
sober-minded risk
taking - and the support of daring research for research's sake - also
needs to 
be on the strategic menus of more companies. "When inventors work
independently,
the invention itself is seen as an opportunity, whereas in the
corporate world accidents
are seen as failures," said Peter Arnell, a marketing consultant who
coaches
companies about innovation. "When people exist outside of the corporate
model
and have vision and passion, then accidents and getting lost are
beautiful things."

Nathan Myhrvold, part of Microsoft's early brain trust and the former
head of its
heavily endowed research arm, founded Intellectual Ventures, a fund
that he says
spends "millions of dollars" annually to support individual inventors 
in long-term projects. Mr. Myhrvold started his fund about five years
ago after 
he retired from Microsoft; he now backs about 20 inventors in such
fields as nanotechnology,
optics, computing, biotechnology and medical devices.

"As far as we know, we're the only people who are doing this - which
means 
we're either incredibly smart or incredibly dumb," Mr. Myhrvold said.
"There's
a network of venture capitalists for start-ups that have created
thousands and thousands
of businesses, but very little for inventors."

Mr. Myhrvold says that most public and academic grants are for
investigating well-defined
research problems - and not for backing, as he does, "an invention
before it
exists." His staff of about 50 people files about 25 patent
applications a 
month on behalf of inventors and his fund. He and his staff also help
inventors 
refine ideas, pay for their time and labor and share ownership stakes
in projects
with them.

"We all love the goose that lays the golden eggs but somehow we've
forgotten
about the goose," Mr. Myhrvold said. "This decade I'm hoping will be
the
decade of the invention."

Whether or not a new inventive age is coming in America, Mr. West says
he plans 
to continue doing what he's always done. He and Ms. Busch-Vishniac
debate, regularly
and vociferously, the merits of their respective ideas. But both say
their debates
are authentic exchanges of viewpoints, not games of one-upmanship.

"You can't have a big ego and be a great inventor," Mr. West said.
"You
constantly have to be listening and evaluating."

Even though he is halfway through his eighth decade, he is pursuing
other new projects
- collaborating with a colleague at Georgia Tech, for example, to
explore improved
methods of teleconferencing. Inventing, he says, is the intellectual
bicycle that
he rides each day.

Looking back over the years, Mr. West says he has often gone down the
wrong intellectual
path. But, he says, that's just how inventors do their thing.

"I think I've had more failures than successes, but I don't see the
failures
as mistakes because I always learned something from those experiences,"
Mr.
West said. "I see them as having not achieved the initial goal, nothing
more
than that."

    * Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company