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Aeppli, now 48, attended M.I.T., where he got a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and went on to work at Bell Labs, the legendary research arm of AT&T. Then he moved on to the NEC research laboratory, outside Princeton, N.J., as a senior research scientist. But while industrial labs used to be well-funded havens for freewheeling scientific inquiry, says Aeppli, "my career was limited because opportunities to lead were very few." So he left for an academic job in Britain. He now holds a chair in physics at University College London and also directs the London Center for Nanotechnology...
...Xerox, which hired not just engineers but also mathematicians, physicists, biologists and even astronomers and gave them free rein. The strategy led to utterly impractical but revolutionary discoveries. The Big Bang theory of the cosmos, to name just one example, got its first experimental proof at AT&T's Bell Labs...
...prowess. So, what changed? American business, for one thing. Competitive pressure and the need to prop up stock prices forced many companies to abandon research and focus mostly on short-term product development. Freewheeling corporate research labs that didn't contribute visibly to the bottom line--AT&T's Bell Labs, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center--have been restructured...
...Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Alexandra C. Bell can be reached at acbell@fas.harvard.edu...