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Published online 20 August 2008 | Nature 454, 927 (2008) | doi:10.1038/454927a
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Bell Labs bottoms out
Institute pulls plug on basic research.
It generated six Nobel prizes in as many decades, but after a string of staff departures, physicists claim that the once iconic Bell Laboratories has finally pulled out of basic science.
Just four scientists are left working in Bell's fundamental physics department in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Nature has learned.
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The closing of Bell Labs - and the tendency of bureaucrats in federal research agencies to channel funds to researchers who will provide the answer that they want to see - are a very bad a omen for fundamental research. Oliver K. Manuel http://myprofile.cos.com/manuelo09
Its a shame. Bell Labs had come to represent more than merely a research arm of a profit maximizing corporate machine. It was seen by many as a haven where talented scientists and engineers could symbiotically thrive to broaden scientific frontiers with novel research that were afforded with tremendous degrees of flexibility in focus. i.e. allowing important scientific research to proceed that may -- on hindsight -- lack any immediate or obvious exhuberance in practicality to the telecommunications sector. It had become renouned as a non-academic instituion that fostered brilliant scientific research, along the likes of IBM Zurich, etc. Moreover, for AT&T, then Lucent and now Alcatel-Lucent, Bell Labs also turned out to be an effective marketing tool particularly amongst scientific circles and even the general public. I guess the scaling back and corporate restructuring of Bell Labs is the nature of things. Afterall, industry financed research has to -- and very well should -- feedback to the corporate bottom line somehow. Even the mighty Bell Labs is no perpetual motion machine.
It is unbelievable, no fundamental physics in Bell Labs... what''ll be further...
Basic research is extremely important.
is there any new in telecom which can be categorised the area for invention not innovation, possibly teleco as technology is getting saturated,or with subjective to conditions its importance as core revenue generating field is debatable now ? ..is that needed for telco oriented research facility to re-invent their own thought processes and find new areas of research? , which can have substantial commercial and public importance , what is the hot for today , surely telecom is not the answer I guess, may be Bell labs and ALU both needs some basic re-engineering in their thought process and basic modeling for commcercial products and research...
Sir - It was sad to witness the prolonged decline of Bell Labs as described in Geoff Brumfiel's obituary "Bell Labs Bottoms Out" (Nature 454 p 927, 21 August 2008). There is no need, however, to exaggerate the already great achievements of Bell Labs by purporting the popular but misleading myth that the transistor was invented there in 1947. The first transistor was in fact a field-effect transistor or FET invented much earlier (in the 1920s) by Austrian-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld working in Berlin. He patented his FETs in 1925 and 1928 (US patents 1900018 and 1745175); the next FET patent was due to Oskar Heil in 1935. Today FETs are by far the most important transistor variant - the vast majority of all transistors are FETs. Bell Labs were fully aware of the prior art, and only got bragging rights on the first point contact transistor invented by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, and William Bradford Shockley in 1947. Note also the independent development of the "transistron" by Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker in 1948. - Jürgen Schmidhuber, Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, Lugano, & Dept. of Computer Science, TU München, Germany