Last Friday, Exxon Mobil Corp., riding the wave of $100/barrel oil prices, posted record profits of $40.6 billion for 2007—the highest ever for an American company—on revenues of $405.5 billion for the year. So just what would $40.6 billion do for those working in R&D: It could support about 40,000 researchers at $100,000/yr, more than offsetting the 17,000 jobs lost in the U.S. economy in January.

It could be used to offset the DOE’s high-energy physics research shortfall for FY2008—about 400 times over.

It could be used to just about double the NIH’s and NASA’s FY2008 R&D budgets—combined.

It could be used to more than quadruple the Dept. of Energy’s R&D budget for FY2008.

It would pay to build 80 duplicates of R&D’s 2007 Lab of the Year, the Janelia Farm Research Campus (Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Ashburn, Va.

It could be used to multiply by more than 50 times, the size of Exxon’s R&D budget for 2008 (slightly less than $800 million)

It could be used to more than double the endowment for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation in the world which funds research in AIDS and other diseases.

It could be used to build about 10 Large Hadron Colliders (including the cost overruns and experiments).

It could be used to operate about 10 research centers the size of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

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