Erstellt am: 14. 10. 2009 - 13:40 Uhr
Can Science Be "Pointless"?
There are few easier targets for ridicule that obscure research.
When Charles Darwin started looking at the humble earth worms, it's said he was widely mocked. At the height of his fame he became obsessed with his daily experiments with the little pink wrigglers. The general public and even some of his colleagues thought that he had gone barmy. But Darwin showed how, by chewing up the soil and shitting it out again, the humble worm played an absolutely pivotal role in making the land fertile. His “pointless” experiments had shown how agriculture, and therefore, civilization was possible.
Science at its best should surely be led by curiosity and it is often impossible to predict where that curiosity will lead us.
The best inventions - and many of the the best medical aids are among them - have often come as an accidental bi-product of scientific experiments. Penicillin and the X-ray (Thank you Professor Röntgen) are two prime examples.
This blessed serendipity of science is something that it would be tragic to see lost.
Yet scientists are now complaining that there seems to be a trend for governments to exert extra pressure on universities to focus on work that has demonstrable economic benefits.
Nowhere has this policy been as nakedly presented than in the UK, where. Downing Street has announced that it is to stop funding "pointless" university research. They want academics to prove that their academic inquiry has some 'relevance' to the 'real' world.
Taxpayers might be relieved with the thought that they will be contributed less of their wages to insights into the (fascinating) sexual antics of bedbugs, for example, but a recent conversation with a Nobel Prize winning scientist has convinced me that that relief might be short-sighted.
At the recent 4th Vienna Nobel Laureate Seminar, I mentioned this to Roger Tsien, a chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on fluorescent proteins last year. His colleague and co-Laureate Osamu Shimomura started the research by looking at an obscure secret of the sea: “It was trying to understand how certain jellyfish glow. That’s just the sort of thing that tax payers lover to ridicule.”
Sierra Blakely
But that research led to an understanding of the green fluorescent protein, a Nobel Prize and and a better understanding of how biological systems work. Tsien says that looking at the jellyfish has become invaluable in the domain of genetic engineering and helped research into “Alzeimer’s, cancer and AIDS”.
Maybe the problem is partly a failure of communication. It's true that academics might sometimes come across as aloof and overworldy. And there is a certain amount of arrogance in the scientific world. It would be great if they could descend from their ivory towers and communicate more clearly to the general public that is often helping to fund their research.
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has spoken of the "responsibility" of scientists to communicate their work and to make the case for science, but there are famous cases of scientists who were engaged readily with the media being shunned by their colleagues. In 1992 Carl Sagan who has been presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences. It's widely thought that his exclusion stemmed from a snobbery regarding his televison work - which has since attained cult status.
I put this question to Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewai, who was also at the Vienna seminar. He has been trotting the globe in recent years promoting science in both the developed and developing world. He said that he had often found it a more taxing challenge to communicate science to a non-specialised public than to write a scientific paper.
But communication problems aside, you'd hope that governments were more open minded about science and scientists and more tolerant of research that they might see as "pointless". Is understanding the world we live in not 'point' enough?
Politicians should be aware of a probably apocryphal quote from the English electricity pioneer Michael Faraday. In the first half of the 19th century Faraday is said to have been asked by a skeptical prime minister about the usefulness of his bizarre experiments with magnets and wires and electric current. His famous reply: “Someday you can tax it.”