Opinion- 03 April 2008

Uwe Proske* asks: How Important are Practical Outcomes in Research?

Some years ago, on behalf of the Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society, I interviewed my friend and teacher, Archie McIntyre (1913-2002) and asked him about his life and work. One question that came up was his views about pure versus applied research. Here is what he said:

 

In the early days, whether something had a useful, practical outcome was a consideration, but not a major one. If research is not driven by the pressures of a useful outcome, the work often seems to be more objective. And who is to say what knowledge is going to be useful, and what isn’t? Research should also be part of someone’s intellectual training, to try to find out something new, if they can. Here the intellectual achievement should be rewarded, not the practical outcome.¹

 

Remarkably, these views are a long way from present-day realities. Another anecdote I can contribute from my own experience during my days as a young budding physiologist is that it seemed to me departments engaged in applied and clinical research generated outputs that were not as strong as departments concerned with basic science. At the time I concluded that applicability of research findings and clinical outcomes were influences that distracted enquiring minds driven by the motivation most closely linked to creativity, that of curiosity. Such a conclusion prompts the question, are the basic driving forces for creativity any different today? To me that seems unlikely. Yet the intellectual climate is quite different. How has that come about?

 

An important factor is likely to be the rapid rise to prominence of the reductionist biologies, molecular biology, genomics and proteomics. These disciplines have frequently been able to come up with specific answers to questions that point directly to practical outcomes or clinical relevance. Then we have seen the rise of the whole stem cell industry. All of the new developments, important as they are, have tended to focus the researcher’s eye firmly on the opportunities provided by commercial exploitation. Such a trend appears to have brought with it a rise in the incidence of scientific fraud

 

There is another influence that, in my view, has altered the research climate in Australian universities. In the past, federal funding has allowed universities to provide significant support for research at the level of individual departments. These funds were intended to be spent to encourage broadly-based research in many areas, in both the basic and applied sciences. That situation changed with introduction of the Dawkins era in the late 1980’s. Overnight the number of Australian universities increased several-fold, but not the federal funds to support them. Application of the vegemite principle led to significant funding shortfalls in the established universities. They responded to the crisis in several ways, including through a greater encouragement of applied outcomes and commercial exploitation of research. We saw the rise of university-owned commercial companies which acted as an interface between university research and industry. Needless to say, this was accompanied by the introduction of a new university bureaucracy to administer the changes as well as to impose a corporate structure on university administration. There was a new term on everyone’s lips, “intellectual property”. At the same time the federal government began to exert its own pressure through government-based funding agencies encouraging applied outcomes and practical relevance

 

Some of the casualties in this process of change were the decline of research activities in areas not thought to have commercial potential. An example in my own field is the gradual disappearance of comparative physiology. True, there has been a recent upsurge of interest in insect vision although, in some respects, this may be a special case. Research aimed at obtaining an understanding of mechanism, rather than practical outcomes has been discouraged. We don’t want to understand it, just exploit it. Some of these attitudes can be seen reflected in the previous Research Quality Framework rating process of research. Ultimately everything is directed at money and profit.

 

Coming back to the starting point of this piece, if the prime motivation that drives us in our quest to understand the world around us is curiosity, then we should encourage it. It may mean that pay-offs from research for the community at large may take longer to be realized. But they promise to be substantial. Add to that the far-reaching benefits from the climate of intellectual rigor and scholarship such changes would bring. In the end it is these influences which will help to define our culture, not the search for profit. In the past, the creative processes underlying art and science were seen to be closely linked. In recent years the two have begun to diverge. Let’s bring them closer together again.