Scientific inquiry and results are not always straightforward, and often manifest themselves in the Law of Unintended Consequence. The Golden Goose award rewards that crooked path to success. The award was designed by Congressman Jim Cooper (D-TN) as a clever way to illustrate the value of federal funding for basic scientific research.
“Researchers who have used federal funding to make their research breakthroughs constitute the ‘goose,’ and the innovations stemming from their work are the ‘golden eggs.” The Golden Goose Award explicitly links the two.” http://www.goldengooseaward.org/about-us/
TechVision21 congratulates this year’s Awardees:
- Tiffany Field, Gary Evoniuk, Cynthia Kuhn and Saul Schanberg For rat research that helps premature babies survive.
- Preston McAfee, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson For basic theoretical research on game theory and auctions that helped the Federal Communications Commission figure out how to allocate the nation’s telecommunications spectrum.
- Larry Smarr For discovering how the study of black holes crashing into each other in deep space ultimately led to the creation of the first Internet browsers.