“Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value” (John McDougall, NRC president, yesterday).

“Discovery comes from what scientists think is important, not what industry thinks is important.  Fundamental scientific advancement drives innovation, and that is driven by basic research.” (David Robinson, CAUT Associate Executive Director, yesterday).

Some days, the level of discourse in Canadian higher education policy seems to be improving.  Other days, like yesterday, it is full of childish, one-dimensional arguments about the nature of science and research, arguments that the rest of the world outgrew of fifteen or twenty years ago, and I just want to weep.

The basic concept of research was invented by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 work, Science: The Endless Frontier.  In order to press for greater funding of university research, Bush made a sharp distinction between “basic” (or “fundamental”) research, “performed without thought of practical ends” at universities, and “applied” research” (something to be left to business and the military) that developed from the former.  To have more of the latter, he conveniently argued, you needed more of the former.

But this neat division was a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful scientific taxonomy.  As Donald Stokes pointed out in his book, Pasteur’s Quadrant, outside of theoretical physics, there really aren’t many fields of science where scientists knock about “without thought of practical ends”.   Fundamental research often solves very practical problems that industry faces (which is true for a great deal of research in Engineering, Computer Science, and Chemistry), or which quite clearly has commercial applications (true for much medical research, for instance).  Discovery, as David Robinson says, does come from “what scientists think is important”, but that begs the question: “how do they decide what’s important”?  The answer, often, is discovered by interacting with industry and finding out what companies think is important.  If that weren’t true, frankly, the contribution of university science to economic growth would be a hell of a lot smaller than it is.

As for the notion that scientific discovery is not valuable without a commercial application: man, that’s some strong ganja they’re smoking on Montreal Road.   Are mathematics worthless because you can’t patent an equation?  Was Galileo just some flâneur because he never made a penny off heliocentrism?  How the hell can you tell, a priori, whether something has a commercial application?  I mean, Rutherford wasn’t thinking about multi-billion dollar industries in telecommunications, nuclear power, and quantum computing when he did his gold foil experiments.  Yet all those industries would be non-existent if we still thought that atoms were solid shells.

As a country, our scientific and academic leaders should do better than this.