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Published online 22 October 2007 |
Nature
| doi:10.1038/449957a
Updated online: 28 November 2007
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Field trials aim to tackle poverty
Pioneering lab applies medical sense to development projects.
Faced with the multitude of problems that result from and contribute to poverty, how can you decide which strategy to use to tackle an issue? One innovative lab is borrowing ideas from the medical world in a bid to find out.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is pioneering the concept of randomized trials, more commonly associated with drug safety tests, to assess what works and what doesn't in development and poverty interventions.
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On a larger note of suggestion regarding how to confront global poverty, the editorial “The War on Want� (Nature 449, 947; 2007) raises the most fundamental issue in the following excerpt “ ...... fighting poverty more effectively demands a change of culture not only in aid agencies but also in academia, in particular to bridge the gap between basic research and the development of drugs and vaccines for neglected diseases. The scientific community's reward structures, excessively focused on papers and patents, need to encourage efforts to use science to generate tangible benefits ...... Only a few universities have, for example, created centres for biomedical translational research, evaluated not by the usual metrics but by their results, much as a company assesses project performance. Far more could be done along these lines in agriculture, energy and health ......� How to bring a change of culture is the real question, that is. Creating centres for biomedical translational research would help. However, this alone will not be enough because it takes care of only one side of the coin, i.e., the majority belief that application is a bye-product of fundamental research. While there is no doubt that basic research can bring unexpected benefits, we should not forget the other paradigm that believes in seeking fundamental discoveries while pursuing application research. In the linear model of innovation, the sequence of events flows from basic research to applied research to invention to economic growth. Though useful, this concept is only half the story because backward links may also equally be important (see http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/e124/e124F04lec8.pdf for some examples of linear and non-linear models). Given this, I wish to highlight here that encouraging investigators to undertake projects with these backward links would help accelerate bridging the gap between basic research and societal development. This encouragement may be brought about by increasing research funding of such projects. Besides, like creating centres for biomedical translational research, appropriate institutional measures such as awareness programs should be in place to remind researchers of the expectations of the society from science, and the urgent need for problem-solving. I am saying this because I am afraid that many scientists need to be made aware of the “meaning� of science. Regarding scientific community’s reward structures, developing criteria for quantitatively evaluating translational research (see Science 318, 391-3; 2007 for some suggestions) is the need of the hour.