This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail.
Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.
> This kind of incremental development has been criticized a lot, precisely because it discourages scientists from trying anything audacious. Developing a slightly more efficient telegraph line every year still does not beat inventing e-mail.
I’d be surprised to learn that it would have been possible to run packet data on the original telephone system.
I’d be less surprised to learn that decades of incremental improvements ultimately enabled packet data to run on top of telephone lines.
I said most, but if you're looking at the projects funded by the EU, there's plenty of heavy projects such as the EPI (that can be criticized of course) and contributions to many fundamental research projects.
Incremental research is needed, and as a collaborator or downstream from many of these projects, the developed tech is often disruptive in many ways, be it cost reduction (keeping the industry competitive) or creating new features, improving safety of security of the products. Yes, developing a slightly better telegraph has its use and it doesn't beat inventing email but email itself was a incremental progress from telegraph, telex, fax, BBS, internet... Haven't seen a 747 assemble itself from a DARPA project yet.
A lot of the cutting edge stuff on all kinds of wireless or fiber communication is funded through the EU and I'd say looking at funded projects year after year you can see lots of research lab work percolate quite quickly to a large network of SMEs that then provide new services to lots of European companies.
Most of the groundlaying work on mRNA has been done by Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian scientist who moved to the US to continue her research in better conditions.
The history of mRNA research is pretty tangled, but its majority took place at the American side of the pond. Unless you want to cherry-pick one particular moment and disregard all others, then no, mRNA technology is not a European, or even majority-European invention.
Katalin Karikó moved to the US in 1985, from a Warsaw Pact country.
She did her research at UPenn and accepted a demotion and pay cut in 1995 because grant agencies decided this weird mRNA stuff wasn't worth funding.
In 2006 she founded startup company RNARx, funded with 100k USD of government grants, but didn't come to an agreement to license patents of her own work which UPenn held.
So in 2013 she joined German company Biontech, funded with 150m EUR of venture capital, which was finally able to productize the research.
Absolutely not. The most common Covid vaccines originated in Europe (AZ, BionTech) with the exception of Moderna (US).
To take an example were all the ground work was done in Europe and later propelled US companies to riches: MP3.
But hey, if you want to play Super Trump with countries, and the US to win, fine for me. The US win by virtue of being the most exceptional country on earth.
Whenever you introduce large bureaucracy into any process, risk mitigation becomes the main goal of the most important actors, at the cost of all the previous goals.