Hopkins: A Hole to Throw Our Money into

I guess this should be a good thing for all of us, but let me rant a bit. Hopkins is consuming $1.3 BILLION DOLLARS of our tax money annually, grants we could be getting and converting into goods and services, and producing a meager $12.5 MILLION from 799 licenses for technology. Anyone who goes into business looking for that kind of return on their investment needs to have the head examined. Granted, a good amount of their research does go into medical research for which we can not quantify their efforts to relieve human disease and suffering. But still, I think we deserve more with our tax money.
Here’s the article from this weeks Gazette:

Johns Hopkins tops in R&D spending

Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore conducted $1.49 billion in science, medical and engineering research in fiscal 2006, making it the top U.S. academic institution in total research and development spending for the 28th year in a row, according to a new National Science Foundation ranking.

The university also again ranked first on the foundation’s separate list of federally funded research and development, spending $1.3 billion in fiscal 2006 on research supported by such agencies as the National Institutes of Health, NASA and the Department of Defense.

“Johns Hopkins is putting renewed emphasis on getting the results of our faculty’s research out into the marketplace where it can do the most good for patients and consumers,“ said Aris Melissaratos, who oversees technology transfer as senior adviser to the president for enterprise development at Johns Hopkins.

“In fiscal 2006, the university earned $12.5 million from 799 licenses and patents,“ Melissaratos said in a statement. “That’s a good performance, and we’re working hard to do an even better job of creating connections between our researchers and business.“

I have had the pleasure of meeting Aris Melissaratos and working with some of the programs he created while at DBED under Gov. Ehrlich. I hope his appointment at Hopkins is and indication that they see the error of their ways and are working to correct the problem.