Author: David Bradley

The May issue of my Spotlight column over on the Intute site is now online, this month featuring:

Flush with nanoparticles – What happens to carbon-based nanoparticles when they enter groundwater? Can municipal water supplies filter them out? And, if they cannot will they cause health problems? These are crucial questions that need answers now, as nanotechnology grows. Now, a new study by Kurt Pennell, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, and colleagues, suggests that subtle differences in the solution properties of the water carrying such particles can determine their ultimate fate.

Ocean oxygen starvation – Oxygen-poor regions of tropical oceans are expanding as the oceans warm, limiting the areas in which predatory fishes and other marine organisms can live or enter in search of food, according to a major ongoing marine exploratory project. The phenomenon could cut overall marine biodiversity.

The Collaborative Research Centre programme – Climate: Biogeochemistry Interactions in the Tropical Ocean – funded by the German Research Foundation is working in close cooperation with the University of Kiel, and researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Carbon balls to the dinosaurs – Palaeontologists presume that an asteroid impact led to such enormous and widespread environmental upheaval that it wiped out the dinosaurs and thousands of other species when it struck the Earth. Now, researchers from Italy, New Zealand, UK, and USA suggests that the impact force was so great that it would have liquefied carbon in the planet’s crust and sprayed tiny airborne carbon beads into the atmosphere in unimaginable quantities.

You can check out the Spotlight archives via the Sciencebase recent scientific discoveries page.

How does one measure the worth of the science base? From the scientists’ perspective it is their bread and butter, or low-fat spread and rye biscuit, perhaps, in some cases. From industry’s standpoint, it is occasionally a source of interesting and potentially money-spinning ideas. Sometimes, it sits in its ivory tower and, to the public, it is the root of all those media scare stories. At worst, the science base is perceived as a huge drain on taxpayers’ money, especially when the popular press gets hold of ‘spiders on cannabis’ and the ‘scum on your tea’ as the lead science stories for the year!

For the government though, which more often than not is providing the funds for basic research, the science base is crucial to all kinds of endeavours: wealth creation, the development of fundamental science into practical technology, the demolition of those ivory towers and the mixing of scientists with the great industrial unwashed through collaboration. As such, governments try to ensure that the science they fund is accountable – to government, to its sponsors and to society and the public as a whole.

But, I come back to my first question. How does one measure the impact of basic research on society? If one went begging for funding for a new area in chemistry with no practical applications anywhere in sight, funding would likely be meagre. It can be dressed up, of course, natural product chemistry almost always has the potential for novel medicinally active compounds while even the most esoteric supramolecular chemistry could be the nanotechnology breakthrough we have been waiting for. You’ve seen and maybe even written the applications yourself. On the other hand, take any piece of genetics with the potential to cure some likely disease and the cash will usually roll in, at least relatively speaking.

So, what does quality mean when applied to scientific research? Was the discovery of the fullerenes quality science? Well, yes it obviously was in that it stirred up the chemistry and other communities and generated mass appeal for a subject that gets rather less of an airing in a positive light than certain other sciences. Fullerenes also provided some of the scientists involved with a Nobel Prize so someone in Sweden must have liked it.

But, if we were to apply any kind of standard criteria of usefulness to society we would be hard pushed to give it the highest score except only as a demonstration that fundamental science can still excite. After all, have you seen any real applications yet? I touched on the potential for medicinal fullerenes early in the fullerene rising star and it is probably unfair to single them out for accountability, especially as ultimately they inspired the carbon nanotubes. You might say that they are simply one of many examples of science as art. They allow us to visualise the world in a new way, they are beautiful – chemically, mathematically, physically.

The pressure is now on scientists to face up to some imposing questions as government-mandated requirements begin to come into effect. [This has become a moot point in the UK since this article was first aired, given funding cuts for big, esoteric science projects]. Efforts to make science accountable come with a massive burden of controversy and are hindered by the almost impossible task of measuring creative activities such as research. Added to this, accountability requires increasing levels of administration especially at times of formal assessment for the scientists themselves.

The careers of most scientists hinge on these assessments, in more ways than one, as the pressure on faculty pushes them in directions they may not naturally go, producing research papers just to satisfy the assessment process, for instance. This coupled with a general drive to bring science to the public – through media initiatives – and so demonstrate to people why science is important and why their money should be spent on it – just adds to the pressure.

However, despite the marketing-style talk of stakeholders, and the close industrial analogues, the shareholders, basic scientific research is not about customers and churning out identical components on a production line. There are usually no targets and no truly viable and encompassing methods to assess the quality of any part of the scientific endeavour. Ironically, this means the end-of-year bonus is something on which most scientists miss out, regardless of their successes. Science is the art, technology makes it pay, but some art is fundamental or avant garde and some finds its way on to advertising hoardings. Which do you prefer, fine art or glossy brochure?

By forcing basic science to become accountable in terms of product and efficiency there is the possibility that creativity and autonomy will be stifled. If done right, accountability can strengthen the relationship between research and society.

Measuring the socioeconomic benefits from specific scientific investments is tough. Basic research gets embodied in society’s collective skills, putatively taking us many more directions than we would otherwise have headed. As such, it can have a future impact on society at entirely unpredictable points in time. Who knows where that pioneering fullerene chemistry will have taken us by the end of this century?

Sir Harry Kroto, co-discoverer of the fullerenes told me in an interview once that, “Scientists are undervalued by a society that does not understand how outstanding someone has to be to become a full-time researcher.” Maybe the measure of science is in its beauty rather than its assessment scores.