Over The Horizon

A Familiar Feeling...

Aspects of a recent lecture at the University of Canterbury on US science and technology policy by Jack Sommer, Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, must have sounded familiar to his audience.

Since the 1950s, individual US universities have become dependent on the government and its agencies for research funding. Not surprisingly, the government now wants more say in the nature of research being done and where it will be carried out, moving towards applied R&D rather than relying on serendipity to produce new technology.

Research proposals on the boundaries of scientific understanding are less likely to find funding in a competitive environment than those where the referees already have a good understanding, says Sommer. He noted that history shows that almost all of the great scientific breakthroughs have arisen by serendipity as a by-product of people working on some other problem. The breakthrough arises from the nature of the inquiry being broad enough to move in a different direction when this becomes promising, and an undue emphasis by the funding agency on determining in advance the nature of the research to be carried out will work against such breakthroughs.

Sommer also commented on the disappointing degree of commercial uptake of research results and the superfluity of lawyers and paucity of scientists in the US Congress.

It vexes politicians when a scientist is brought before a committee to report on any problem where the answers are not straightforward, he noted, because politicians want answers to the problem and not questions -- preferably durable answers so that they can explain to their electorate why they voted for a certain course of action. Thus, there is often a basic problem that scientists can't deliver what politicians want, exacerbated by the fact that most politicians don't have anything like a working understanding of the nature of scientific discovery.

John Blakeley, Canterprise