Polanyi on science funding
Distinguished UofT chemist and Nobel Laureate John Polanyi has an opinion piece published today in the Globe and Mail in which he scolds the Canadian government’s “timid approach” to science funding. As others have done, he contrasts the laudatory nature of US President Obama’s speech to the National Academy of Sciences and the promise to double basic research budgets with our government’s dismissive cuts to research funding agencies. In this, Dr. Polanyi observes the difference between thinking for the future, “investing in the long term”, and our government’s tendency to think short term, to “treat basic science as a current account to be drawn on”. The current Canadian approach of focusing on applied science, he argues, will lead to diminishing returns, as funding focuses on leveraging the basic science which is no longer being produced.
Dr. Polanyi also argues against the idea that government will do a good job of identifying and funding marketable applications of basic research: “if apparent to the bureaucracy, they are also apparent to others”. Furthermore, “it is an abiding mystery why, having failed so definitively to pick winners in the marketplace for goods, governments have been empowered to pick winners in the far more subtle marketplace for ideas”. Indeed, there already exists a hungry marketplace ready to take the hard-won discoveries of basic science and turn them into useful and profitable widgets. Any free-market economist (Mr. Harper?) will tell you that the competitive nature of the market will do a better job than the government in identifying and supporting winning applications of research. Investment by the government into basic science accomplishes goals outside the market’s purview – education and training and investment in research with no obvious short-term return on investment.
Most helpfully, Dr. Polanyi provides a clear and telling example of how difficult it is to predict and choose the sort of research which will lead to advances down the road:
Mr. Obama’s advisers might recall that, in 1937, the same National Academy of Sciences was charged with making a study of emerging technologies. It reported that the major growth areas in applied science would be found in novel means of farming, in manufacturing synthetic gasoline and in the introduction of synthetic replacements for natural rubber.
They had rightly grasped that there was a coming crisis in resource availability. What they overlooked — understandably, since the clues were hidden among so many others – was the imminent emergence of nuclear energy, antibiotics, jet aircraft, space travel and computers.
These powerful technologies emerged because the new opportunities thrown up by basic science were seized, not because the basic science itself was targeted. Quite the contrary – it was freedom of inquiry in basic research that permitted far-reaching new concepts to flower. These then led, from the bottom up, to ground-breaking technologies.
This powerful example serves to illustrate exactly why basic research needs to be supported – it is impossible to predict what vistas will open to us with new discoveries. So why does science in general, and research funding in particular, get such short shrift? Dr. Polanyi argues, “The explanation may lie in our inattention. Science, especially basic science, is regarded as an activity of small national importance. Science policy is the domain of junior politicians”. If science policy is going to be in the domain of junior politicians, scientists themselves must strive to have a major impact on shaping it before it gets there and a better job of explaining to the public why it deserves greater focus.
