Valuing Research
Last night I attended a forum in Melbourne organised by the Greens around their campaign to #RespectResearch. The forum attracted a large crowd, predominantly medical-focused researchers and heard from 4 speakers:
Prof Peter Doherty (Nobel Laureate and immunologist, @ProfPCDoherty)
Dr Krystal Evans (CEO of BioMelbourne and medical research scientist, @dr_krystal)
Adam Bandt (Greens MP, @AdamBandt)
Jeannie Rea (President of the National Tertiary Education Union, @NTEUNational)
Jacquie Tran (@jacquietran) has put together a great summary of the issues raised on her blog.
To add to this, I wanted to note a few points:
There are some very good stories in Australia about scientific research collaborations. The medical research sector, with its large number of philanthropically-supported institutes, is very well funded in Australia. These institutes have good connections with universities and industry.
Krystal Evans highlighted some great examples of industry successes in the medical sector. These include Melbourne-based drug manufacturer Hospira, Biotech sensor manufacturer Global Kinetics and blood product giant CSL.
Peter Doherty did note that there are not many companies doing fundamental science research in Australia. I’d go further and say that, outside of the medical sector, research positions in Australia are few and teams are very small.
Jeannie Rea did highlight significant problems with regards to the casualisation of academic and teaching staff. However, I feel that this is a symptom of the problem (lack of funding for research and education) and that given the casualisation of many other types of jobs it is not a strong argument on its own.
The Greens appear to have done an excellent job of summarising the issues on their re-vamped website, "Respect Research". The only issue I have is with the title. As I tweeted, I think that asking/telling people to “respect” research implies a sense of entitlement. I’d suggest that the issue is more about getting people to value the outcomes of research. Our society and especially our politics, are increasingly driven by self-interest. People want to know what is in it for them. People like research but if the scientific community wants people to respect research then I think the community needs to be helped to value it first.
The bulk of the meeting was devoted to the issues and the problems, there weren't a lot of new solutions presented. As such, I’ll try and list the ideas that I took away from the discussion, both at the forum and online.
The level of industry-supported research in Australia continues to be an area ripe for improvement. Tax incentives are not the key here, many companies in this sector, particularly startups, don’t pay tax. Leveraged government and institutional investments that allow companies access to people and equipment at a subsidised rate is a much better bet in my opinion. The researcher in business scheme was, in my opinion, a great example.
Government policy reflects ideology and popular opinion. At the moment in Australia the focus is very much pointing towards demanding commercial returns on research investment. The current government has announced a new prize to reward this and signalled new, national research priorities. I firmly believe that fundamental research is still required. However, pragmatically, I think that the research community needs to make some effort to respond to these challenges. I believe that rapid prototyping, the Internet of Things, apps and crowdfunding are all opportunities for scientific research to be more rapidly translated into commercial products. There are a number of examples of Australian startups in the health space that have developed hardware and apps that have already been commercialised. One product, to be used for monitoring of respiration, has been developed outside of research institutes and is about to be launched into retail stores. Looking back, it would have been great if respiratory-focused researchers could have developed this as a short-term consumer product that would help fund more basic research.
For areas where commercialisation is not a focus the message needs to be very clear. Social research informs policy - if you measure educational outcomes, for example, you help governments plan better education policies. If you do astronomy then the data you generate inspires many other applications (wifi!).
For me, the clearest action that came from the meeting is that the first step in improving research funding is to make the public really want it. Adam Bandt pointed out that in all their surveys people do support research. So, the community is starting from a good place. The public doesn’t need to be converted but research needs to be made a priority so that the public and in turn politicians, see it as a vote-changer. The way to do this is by communication. Every researcher needs to get better at explaining what and why they do their work. Even last night some of the speakers were not particularly succinct. We can all do better and that only comes through practice.
A specific idea that came to my mind was a challenge to all researchers to run a crowdfunding campaign. The proceeds of this could be used to employ a vacation student to help with research (two benefits) but the point of this wouldn’t be the money. It would be to practice communicating. Set a reasonable target, a couple of thousand dollars and challenge yourself to raise the money. If you can’t convince your networks, your friends, family and colleagues, to throw a few dollars your way then you’re either failing to communicate or you’re doing something that is not relevant. Doing a crowdfunding campaign would also train researchers to make better use of video, written content and social media. If done well enough interviews with the mainstream media could well follow. My experience with doing media releases around printed solar cells shows that if the story is succinct, well-written and that if you have photos and video, content-starved blogs and news agencies will run the story. I’m sure we didn’t do it perfectly but we did get our story out there.
Better and different types of communication will also go some way to addressing another problem that we face in Australia - falling interest in science education by both teachers and students. Falling numbers of people studying science risks perpetuating a vicious cycle of falling interest in research leading to less funding for research leading to less interest in studying it. School students need to see the sorts of jobs that science leads to, particularly for women. It’s not just about wearing a lab coat. As I said recently, science is about taking information, analysing it and making decisions. Science and research in general, is vital. However, the research community can’t expect the general public to just accept this. We need to show them why. We need to value research and then respect will come.