Maybe it's more fruitful to not just consider the Death of Corporate Research Labs, but also ask ourselves "why did they even exist in the first place?" This day in age, the
expectation, for better or worse, is that the State sponsors research; this was very much not the case from, say 1850-1950. Luminaries did tons of basic science research under the auspices of corporate (like Irving Langmuir) and private (like Peter Mitchell) labs.
Without assigning causality (I happen to think that the primary cause is "low hanging fruit" phenomenon), the transition to state sponsored research has coincided with a general loss of scientific productivity in many fields, and even in some fields with explosive growth, like genomics, there has been major corporate involvement (half the human genome was sequenced by a not just private, but a wall-street traded, entity).
Yet the narrative of late has been "if the state doesn't sponsor it, nobody will". I don't feel like I have a solid understanding of why corporate research labs were a thing, or even, how science got done in the pre-manhattan-project/Vannevar Bush era.
Without assigning causality (I happen to think that the primary cause is "low hanging fruit" phenomenon), the transition to state sponsored research has coincided with a general loss of scientific productivity in many fields, and even in some fields with explosive growth, like genomics, there has been major corporate involvement (half the human genome was sequenced by a not just private, but a wall-street traded, entity).
Yet the narrative of late has been "if the state doesn't sponsor it, nobody will". I don't feel like I have a solid understanding of why corporate research labs were a thing, or even, how science got done in the pre-manhattan-project/Vannevar Bush era.