Science and the slump

The news that UK research funding is getting lumped in with industrial policy has inevitably caused a flutter among basic researchers in the country’s universities.

As ever, they fear that money will be taken away from basic science to support applied research that is calculated to have a more immediate economic benefit.

The arguments over basic versus applied research funding are as old as the hills – or at least as old as the heaps of coal spoil of the industrial age. But in the knowledge economy we need to adopt a different perspective. Knowledge, not coal, is now the motive force, and research, both basic and applied – and across the sciences and humanities – is its main source.

This is not to say that the sole role of universities is to fire the economy, or to denigrate their role in education. Any university worth the name can surely handle more than one responsibility – educating people to have the vision and imagination to expand the frontiers of knowledge, whilst endowing them with the skills to collaborate with those who can put it to productive use.

Taxpayers aren’t just funding research so scientists can have a nice time in their labs – there is a tacit understanding that (at some point) research creates new products and services and drives the economy. That’s why governments of all colours have included money for R&D in financial stimulus packages they are putting together to rescue their economies.

A favourite example of those who defend basic science is the development of lasers. While they may have been little more than scientist’s toys in the 1970s, they are now doing everything from correcting short sight to playing music.

But with foresight and supportive innovation systems, couldn’t this potential have been realised sooner?

That surely is the point in putting basic and applied research in the same pot, and uniting it with industrial policy – they are not either/ors, but part of a continuum, or more correctly an ecosystem.

And so, what matters now is to acknowledge that both basic and applied research have an essential contribution to make, and work to increase the speed of translation.