News & Views item - April 2006

 

 

Book: Thomas Barlow's Australian Miracle: an innovative nation revisited. (April 30, 2006)

Thomas Barlow

    In the first week of April 2002 the then Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, announced that he had appointed Dr Thomas Barlow as his science advisor who "will work closely with advisers in Science Minister Peter McGauran's office, provide a contact point for peak science bodies and interested agencies and ensure that the voice of Science is heard loudly and clearly in my office."

 

Dr. Barlow accepted the appointment with the understanding that it would be until the end of the government's term of office, which in the event was October 2004.

 

Dr Barlow, 35, had been a Janssen Research Fellow in Biomedical Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford and later a research fellow at MIT. Prior to his appointment to Dr. Nelson's Department he wrote a weekly column from Australia about science and society for the (UK based) Weekend Financial Times.

 

Commenting on Dr Barlow's appointment at the time TFW wrote:

In his contribution to the ABC series [Ideas with Wings] which he titled "Global Innovation Paranoia" he points out that Australia is hardly alone in complaining that it's got lots of great ideas but lacks competence in commercialising them. He lists whinges from, China, Great Britain, the USA and France to make his point and goes on to say, "Now, I don't mean to cast doubt on such a universal assertion. Some countries may indeed be better at implementing ideas than others... Yet when so many countries dwell on their own stories of lost opportunities in precisely this way (and the list of examples above is by no means complete), one cannot help entertaining a slight scepticism about the notion.
    "Could it be, for example, that this is all really just an excuse, a way of salvaging pride in an awkward situation of national inadequacy? It may be, for instance, that some societies only start worrying about their inability to commercialise their own great ideas when they are running out of ideas. After all, the fewer good ideas you have, the more of an injustice it seems to lose them."
    And a bit later on, "Unfortunately, whether there is an emotional aspect to it or not, the decrying of a peculiar Australian inability to commercialise great local ideas tends to promote a degree of complacency about our capacity for invention...
    "If Australians, being lousy at implementation, really were as great at invention as they sometimes like to think, they wouldn't care about those occasions when they were forced to sell an idea offshore. They would be happy to consider such ideas as exports rather than squandered opportunities. And then they would turn around, wouldn't they, in short shrift - and invent something else."
    Perhaps Dr. Barlow may be prepared to voice some views on just what and how the higher education sector might contribute. On the other hand perhaps he'd best serve as a ministerial conduit.

Following his stint as Dr Nelson's scientific advisor, Dr Barlow has undertaken initiatives in the private sector including writing The Australian Miracle (Picador, ISBN-13 9 78033042 2321: xvi, 262pp, $25.)

 

This eminently readable book is in a sense a revisiting of the viewpoints he put forward in "Global Innovation Paranoia" but amplified with the knowledge and concepts gained through his year-and-a-half as Dr Nelson's scientific advisor.

 

Dr Barlow opens with, "It is possible to identify at least ten ideas that bolster this national perception about Australia's incapacity to innovate and are referred to in the title of the opening chapter "Ten myths about Australian science". starting with (1) "Australians are innately inventive" and concluding with (10) As a technology user, Australian is destined always to remain below the top tier of nations".

 

He doesn't include "Australia punches above its weight", whatever that means, but he could have.

 

In discussing the "ten myths" Dr Barlow leaves the impression that he is inviting discussion and constructive argumentation at least as much as setting out viewpoints cast in stone, and certainly his earlier contribution to the ABC's Ideas with Wings would suggest this.

 

He also gives a number of historical examples of how during the nineteenth century we were excellent innovators, i.e. using overseas inventions and through innovation usefully adapting them to the Australian milieu, and thereby giving Australia one of the world's highest per capita GDPs.

 

Following World War I our per capita GDP fell away but Australia is still in the top 8% of nations just below Canada and the Cayman Islands and just above Belgium and the United Kingdom.

 

However, one of the matters that Dr Barlow doesn't analyse is the nation's balance of payments and current account deficit.

 

Sooner or later the significantly increasing negative trend of our current account deficit will have to be addressed, but it would be better done sooner than later.

 

To my mind where Dr Barlow makes the most powerful contribution to his discussion of what is now needed to not only maintain Australia's economic position within its cohort of nations, but improve it, is in his section on "Priority Setting". For openers it puts him clearly at odds with current micro-managerial government policy and the thrust of Dr Nelson's higher education reforms and the hidden agenda of its proposed Research Quality Framework.

 

Dr Barlow takes strong issue with the tenet that "the only way to increase Australia's scientific, technological and industrial competitiveness is to pick winners and to concentrate resources on fewer areas of national priority... very few [taxpayers] likes to feel that the state is being turned into a cash-cow for eccentrics. As a consequence, when people exhort governments to start talking about setting priorities for research and concentrating their resources, they are invariably thinking not just about scale and efficiency but also about control... in its strongest form it... is to place the government right behind the plough at all times, cracking the whip."

 

He counters by making the case that in fact the most efficient way for the infrastructure of scientific research (i.e. fundamental research) to realise its full potential and for it in turn to effectively underpin strategic and applied research as well as innovation is through peer review rather than governmental top down management. But peer review also entails responsible assessment and over the years that has been the case. And as an example he contrasts the American and German approach to supporting biotechnological research.  Where the US government awarded research grants on the basis of peer review assessment, the most interesting research being done by their most competent researchers was supported German governmental resourcing was determined bureaucratically on the basis of what was most "practical". In moving toward the commercialisation of biotechnology the US won hands down.

 

The three final sections of his chapter on "Priority Setting" Dr Barlow entitles: Leave decision in the hands of researchers, Legitimising the pursuit of the unknown, and the unpredictability principle. To most researchers those three "premises" would approach being self-evident while to Australia's oligarchic Cabinet they are all but anathema.

 

Along with the matter of setting priorities Dr Barlow argues vociferously, to the point in my view of weakening his case by seemingly disparaging big science requiring large scale collaborations. It is certainly the case that research papers in the experimental disciplines are rarely submitted by single authors and multiple authors are to be found on theoretical papers in mathematics, physics and cosmology though rarely submitted by large teams.

 

On the other hand a recent research paper in the journal  Cell (Cell, Vol 125, 315-326, 21 April 2006) titled "A Bivalent Chromatin Structure Marks Key Developmental Genes in Embryonic Stem Cells" which may well have a profound effect on our understanding of the controlling mechanisms during embryonic development and which required a multidisciplinary approach, is an example of worthwhile teamwork. It has 15 authors from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Montpellier-II, France, while the two seminal Australian papers published in the journal Nature on a new hominin from Flores (Brown P., et al. Nature, 431. 1055 - 1061 (2004), and Morwood M. J., et al. Nature, 431. 1087 - 1091(2004)) were authored by seven and 14 authors respectively.

 

And undertaking modern ground breaking experimental particle physics does require large teams. Ultimately research projects should be judged on their merits whether submitted by an individual or a large team, and that requires a high calibre of peer review.

 

However, that said, the attempt of the press-gang approach adopted in devising CSIRO's Flagships by its CEO, Geoffrey Garrett would appear the sort of methodology Dr Barlow is arguing strongly against -- though he refrains from citing examples.

 

In Dr Barlow's final chapter, "Understanding Ourselves" he exhorts his readers to cast off negativity, to be positive and while "Australians are not the best people in the world... the peculiarities of the Australian character and the Australian situation are strong assets... To seize the opportunity we need only understand ourselves."

 

In the end the core fifty pages on "Setting Priorities" is a significant contribution to the debate on national science policy; whether or not our political masters and their attendant bureaucrats will pay heed is highly debatable.

Further reading: Thomas Barlow, "The Power of One"; Australian Science Vol. 27, May 2006, pp 39-41.