2 The Diffusion of Scientifi c Knowledge across Time and Space Evidence from Professional Transitions for the Superstars of Medicine

If Whitehead’s characterization of modern philosophy as “a series of foot-notes to Plato ” is perhaps a slight exaggeration, then the claim that contem-porary scholarship on the economics of innovation is largely an extension of themes laid out in the 1962 Rate and Direction volume is no more of one. The contributors ’ prescience about the potential economic importance of academic science is particularly impressive, since at the time the conference was held (in 1960), the post- Sputnik transformation of the academic enter-prise into the behemoth we know today had only just begun. The volume laid out a belief that basic research was important for innovation, marshalling theory, case studies, and data to support the assertions about the economic payoffs from basic research made in Vannevar Bush’s “Science: the Endless Frontier ” just fi fteen years before. However, the conference volume was very much a call for more research, emphasizing the need for more data, and deeper understanding. In this chapter we attempt to rise to this challenge by examining the diffusion of knowledge across time and space within the life sciences. This endeavor remains as important at the beginning of this century as it was in the middle of the last one, given perennial calls fo