Last week’s announcement that the NRC was “open for business” has, if nothing else, revealed how shockingly weak most of the arguments are in favour of “basic” research.
Opponents of the NRC move have basically taken one of two rhetorical tacks. The first is to present the switch in NRC mandate as the equivalent of the government abandoning basic science. This is a bit off, frankly, considering that the government spends billions of dollars on SSHRC, NSERC, CIHR, etc. Even if you’re passionate about basic research, there are still valid questions to be answered about why we should be paying billions of dollars a year to government departments doing basic research when the granting councils fund universities to ostensibly do the same thing.
The second argument is to say that government shouldn’t support applied science, because: a) it’s corporate welfare, and b) all breakthroughs ultimately rely on basic science, and so we should fund that exclusively. It seems as though those who take this line have never heard of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, a publicly funded agency in Germany which does nothing but conduct applied research of direct utility to private enterprises. It’s generally seen as a successful and useful complement to the government’s investments in basic science through the Max Planck Institute, and to my knowledge, Germany has never been accused of being anti-science for creating and funding Fraunhofer.
Another point here: the benefits of “basic” research leak across national borders. Very little of the upstream basic research that drives our economy is Canadian in origin. So while it’s vitally important that someone, somewhere, puts a lot of money down on risky, non-applied research, individual countries can – and probably should – make some different decisions on basic vs. applied research based on local conditions.
The relative benefit of a marginal dollar investment in applied research vs. basic research depends on the kind of economy a country has, the pattern of firm size, and receptor capacity for research. It’s not an easy thing to measure accurately – and I’m not suggesting that the current government has based its decision on anything so empirical – but it’s simply not intellectually honest to claim that one is always a better investment than the other.
Opposition to the NRC change is clearly – and probably justifiably – coloured by a more general irritation at a host of this government’s other policies on science and knowledge (Experimental Lakes, long-form census, etc). But that’s still no excuse for this farrago of flimsy argumentation. Rational policy-making requires us to engage in something more than juvenile, binary discussions about what kind of research is “best”.
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Hi Alex,
It’s nice to read a nuanced piece about the NRC for once.
You are right in pointing out that Germany’s Frauhofer Institute receives public funding. However, the biggest part of their budget (70%) is still coming from research contracts. I doubt that NRC will get a similar portion of its budget from contract research in the short term.
More info: http://www.fraunhofer.de/en/about-fraunhofer/business-model.html
Cheers!
Dan
Hi Daniel. Thanks for reading.
I agree that would be an exceedingly ambitious target even in the medium-term…it’s not obvious to me that NRC has the tools or expertise in the right fields to attract much industry funding. But it doesn’t strike me as necessarily wrong to at least start heading in that direction.
I suppose one of the fears is that the attitude voiced by the government and the NRC reflects how they view all science in Canada, and that it’s only a matter of time before the same approach is applied to NSERC. When this is compounded with how the federal government deals with science in general – in its policy decisions and in how it communicates (or fails to communicate) results of publicly funded research – I think it’s a legitimate concern. That said, as you point out we do have to acknowledge that NSERC, NRC and SSHRC are all different beasts.
Alex, I agree that the rhetoric around NRC and basic science has become rather partisan, as though its an either/or proposition. However, the accompanying quotes/comments from the President of NRC and the Rt Hon Minister for Science and Technology set the unfortunate tone (surely they weren’t goading this knee-jerk response…). To say that the only valuable research is that which leads to commercial value is not only ridiculous, its a red flag to a bull.
Our problem, though, is at least in part our own making. We (the basic science community) have long argued that investments in blue sky research correlate in the long term with economic prosperity and societal benefit. The problem is that the rest of society, including politicians, take the logical step of assuming that if this is the case, then surely the time scale can be compressed by oiling the cogs and applying pull. This reveals not only ignorance of the disparate, disjointed and largely serendipitous steps along the way but also reveals the difficulty in tolerating the inherent apparent waste in research that does not lead to economic gain. Seen in these terms, science is a slovenly, vastly inefficient and hopelessly overfunded expedition into the unknown. The endeavour cannot be justified in economic terms, just as a mission to the moon cannot (even though its been offered as a test case). Science is long term, a stretch into the fog of the unknown, with no certain promise of a return. However, it is justified by uncomfortable facts – that human knowledge is a barely tapped and virtually unlimited resource and that no one in their right minds would suggest that ignorance is to be rewarded. The track record of science is also remarkably consistent and is a compelling argument that doing more will be worthwhile.