Max Whitten Writes of CESAR, the Special Research Centre for Environmental Stress and Adaption, and Science Policy
March 14, 2009
Max Whitten was formerly Chief of CSIRO Entomology and Professor of Genetics at The University of Melbourne. His interests include public good research, sustainable agriculture and biodiversity. He has served as Visitor for a number of Cooperative Research Centres and chairs the Advisory Board for the Special Research Centre on Environmental Stress and Adaption (CESAR) at the University of Melbourne.
Here we reprint, with permission, Dr Whitten's forward to CESAR's 2008 Annual Report.
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Funding research, and picking the winners, is a risky business. In justifying major long term investment in research ventures that didn’t live up to expectations, funding agencies might wish to invoke what Gareth Evans once called ‘the streaker’s defence’. “It seemed a good idea at the time, your Honour”. With CESAR, there’s no need to invoke the ‘streaker’s defence’.
The direct and indirect investment of public and industry funds into CESAR during its nine years of operation has been considerable. However, the returns on investment, while not externally quantified, have clearly been substantial. CESAR’s Annual Reports, culminating in this - the final Report - have strived to document the contributions by staff and students to knowledge, from the fundamental to the applied.
Looking back over nine years of
activities reveals a progression that is very different from what CESAR’s
Director, Ary Hoffmann, and staff anticipated. As the Director notes in his
Report, CESAR embarked on its journey of discovery as “an
academic research operation with a strong focus on postgraduate training and
publishing in the scientific literature”.
And there the story might have ended. But CESAR metamorphosed over the nine
years into a very different creature.
Ary rightly claims
that CESAR can now be “regarded as a quality provider in the areas of pest
control, population genetics assessments, insect genomics, and climate change
adaptation”. CESAR’s accumulated publications border on the prodigious, in
quality journals, academic books and industry magazines with impressive citation
indices.
New knowledge
underpins innovation. Sometimes the
nexus is foreseeable such as research aimed at understanding the development of
pesticide resistance. For example, strategic research in the Chemical Program
has placed industry in a better position to design novel pesticides and to
develop improved management systems to extend their useful life. But no one
could easily predict that the more fundamental studies on developmental and
evolutionary processes in the Climatic Stress program would assist in developing
improved approaches to genetic conservation or adaptation to climate change.
As anticipated, the
more tactical research centred around Biomonitoring delivered knowledge of
practical value about pollution management, especially in contaminated aquatic
environments; but even the Biomonitoring Program also came up with surprises for
developmental biology such as the demonstrated failure to link bilateral
asymmetry to development stress.
And no one predicted
that CESAR would develop a fourth program, called the Applied Program, focused
on pest management. Yet, in hindsight, it was a natural and logical progression,
guided by the dictum ‘do good research with an eye to its application’. Not
surprisingly then, CESAR has enjoyed a diverse funding base with increasing
contributions from industries.
Partnering with
CSIRO Entomology, Melbourne Water, the Victorian Dept of Primary Industries and
the Max Planck Institute in
Over and above its
outstanding contribution to knowledge and innovation, CESAR, through its
training focus, has resulted in many “students and postdocs progressing to
become academics, teachers, consultants, extension workers, biodiversity
officers, agricultural scientists and researchers”.
None of these
achievements, in innovation and capacity building, would have been possible
without the Commonwealth Government funding for CESAR as a Special Research
Centre. Those largely untied funds provided the freedom and flexibility
for the Director to draw staff and students into effective collaborative teams
across academia and industry.
Two of the many
lessons we can learn from the CESAR story are these.
First, it is hard to predict pathways for research and innovation. A mix
of solid track record and clear evidence of continuing new ideas for research
seems a better basis for investment, than an undue emphasis on remote
bureaucrats predicting winners.
Research teams with runs on the board should be supported until the evidence
shows that they are running out of steam. Better to overshoot by several years
funding a team with a good track record, then directing the research effort at a
distance by some elaborate bureaucratic process of ‘picking winners’.
Command economies don’t work well for
research and innovation, as the
Second, nurturing
grass-root collaborative networks are more likely to succeed than top down
‘arranged marriages’. CESAR, like some of the early round CRCs, succeeded so
well simply because the researchers were convinced they could achieve more by
pooling resources and skills for common and complementary causes. It mattered
little, in the case of CESAR, that this Special Research Centre was
headquartered for much of its existence at LaTrobe and not
CESAR, as a Special Research Centre, ceased de jure at the end of 2008 but it continues de facto with many of its strategic and applied activities. It limps on, like some other Special Research Centres, without the catalytic benefit of Centre funding. What are the options?
On 9 March 2009 Federal Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, addressed the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Conference in Sydney: "I begin with two premises: First, that research is critical to Australia's prosperity. Second, that the status quo is not good enough to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century." His landmark speech focused on current problems and the way forward. It is instructive to assess the CESAR experience, and its prospects, in the light of Minister Carr’s observations.
Minister Carr notes “
To “solve big problems and generate big opportunities” Minister Carr states “the government has decided that funding mechanisms and compacts will be used to encourage hubs and spokes arrangements that support collaboration between universities and build on research strengths…..This reform will not be imposed from the top down.” The Minister then addresses collaboration between the university sector and industry, and the critical importance of human capital via increased support for graduate students. CESAR’s record stacks up well in the former and justifies additional support in the latter.
Minister Carr concludes with thoughts to
the future “Whatever the immediate difficulties we face, we must continue to
invest in
Now, not when the economic crisis has passed, is the time to address the shortfalls in financial support for research and innovation. Governments of all persuasions have recognised the need for intervention and spending their ways out of the global financial crisis. It should be an easy choice for Minister Carr to select between popular handouts to buy plasma TVs, facilitate gambling or, retiring personal debt as against bolstering education, training and research that drives long term prosperity.
We would urge Minister Carr to use CESAR
and its achievements over the past nine years as one splendid example to
convince the Rudd Government where its spending priorities should lie. Another
challenge will be drilling down quickly to the operational level of
Max Whitten, AM FAA
Chairman, the Advisory Board of CESAR