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Published online 27 January 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.62
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Science minister wants focus on fewer disciplines
Plan would concentrate UK funds on research of benefit to the economy.
Funds for research should be redirected to fields such as the life and earth sciences where the United Kingdom could lead the world, says the UK science minister.
Paul Drayson made the proposal to a House of Commons committee on 26 January.
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One of the main points of government-funded research is that it funds research which the commercial sector wouldn't be interested in. The idea that the government only focuses on areas which can make money goes completely against this. I'm in agreement with Mr Peach: narrowing down will force us to miss many opportunities in research and development. The Internet was invented at CERN: if nobody had put funding into particle physics at CERN we wouldn't have the Internet, at least not in its current form. Not to mention, what would happen to all the mathematicians and physicists with no expertise in these areas and rely on government funding for their research?
It is understandable that in a moment of serious economic crisis one could think of focusing the funding on branches of science that can produce immediate or short term return, start a new growth etc. Basically it means that eating comes first and fundamental science does not help too much with starvation. But in reality genuine revolutions tend to come more from fundamental rather than from applied research. In this glorious IYA 2009 we celebrate the fact that Galileo Galilei, who was paid by the Republic of Venice to help with improving the efficiency of its fleet, decided to direct a telescope towards the sky instead of the sea. Galileo had developed a new technology for the practical application of sighting a far ship, but he paved the road to a new view of the cosmos by doing something much less oriented on a practical or economic return. Galielo was not alone in using a new instrument for pure research, a few months before him, Thomas Harriot had produced the first drawings of the moon surface based on telescopic observations. The Republic of Venice with all its naval power has eventually disappeared, the vision initiated by Harriot and Galileo is still with us, and its applications have incidentally produced economic benefits hard to estimate. There are many other examples of the inestimable consequences of pure research. Paraphrasing a statement which I find very profound, convincing Michael Faraday to discover smokeless candles would have never produced electric illumination. The novelty and its benefits comes often from pure research, something which is hard to evaluate immediately on economic terms. A colleague of mine, who had developed neural networks for analysing the decay of short lived beauty particles, applied the same methods with some success in completely different fields, such as predicting financial trends. The contrary rarely happens.