Canada and science: NRC will now only do science that promotes “economic gain”

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/13/canada_and_science_nrc_will_now_only_do_science_that_promotes_economic_gain.html

by buo • 13 years ago

72 71 13 years ago

slate.com

zeteo4• 13 years ago

From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was going to say no? Now everyone's addicted to public funds, and waking up to the realization that who pays the piper calls the tune.

rayiner• 13 years ago

Through that entire time, the cost of every incremental discovery has increased exponentially. It's not that people are addicted to public research funds, it's that it's no longer possible to do experimentally-rigorous science without massive amounts of money.

You see this phenomenon all over the place, and it's impact on industries. E.g. each generation of microprocessor fab is exponentially more expensive than the last, and the result has been that companies have been spinning off their fabs until only a handful have fab capability left.

bhb9162• 13 years ago

I agree with the trend you're describing although I slightly disagree with the absolutism (i.e. "every incremental discovery" and "no longer possible"). Still, regardless of this increasing demand for funds, there are other ways to procure funding other than taxation.

zeteo4• 13 years ago

There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary.

First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys. They got financed through private means anyway.

Second, the number of subfields that truly demand massive capital investment is small, and mostly confined to physics. Many, if not most projects these days can be conducted with a few graduate students / postdocs, who are paid close to minumum wage and use existing equipment. Still, this kind of "cheap" research is nonetheless conducted overwhelmingly with government funds.

Third, money doesn't guarantee quality. Major scientific advances of the past were achieved not so much by people who were very well funded, but rather who had leisure to think about their field in novel ways (Maxwell, Darwin, Mendel, Einstein etc.). The constraints, stress and uncertainty of the grant-award process are not conducive to a similar environment.

Finally, increased costs are also a symptom of lack of innovation [1]. Maybe we're just on the final legs of existing logistic curves and have no new ones to latch on to?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

nickff3• 13 years ago

If you think that these researchers require more money, why not convince others of this, and ask them to donate money voluntarily? I would be happy to donate money to research scientists, if my money was not being taken by the government, and used without my consent.

I do not understand your point about microprocessor fabs at all. As the fixed costs of manufacturing silicon-based systems have increased, the industry has become less vertically integrated, and there are less companies focusing on manufacturing, and many more "fabless" companies. This is certainly different, but not necessarily better or worse.

Daishiman2• 13 years ago

The most important sailing expeditions to the New World were funded by European crowns.

The atomic bomb was developed exclusively through government research.

The vast majority of space program was developed through government funds, and what wasn't done by them was delegated and coordinated by them (and ultimately paid for as well).

Public universities are the largest and most important institutions doing basic research, and doing a lot of the actual innovation in medical research. Fewer and fewer companies are still dedicated to that (witness HP and Xerox withdrawing from the field; IBM is pretty much the only giant still putting resources into that).

The German and Chinese governments are subsidising solar energy research to the effect that its viability as an alternative power source has increased dramatically in the last decade.

Tell me how many companies nowadays are actually spending real money into research programs where the expected outcomes will reach fruition in 20 years or more.

caseysoftware• 13 years ago

Most of the successful "government research" projects were to make money or engage in war better.

Those sailing expeditions were to gain resources (make money) or conquer new lands (make money).

The atomic bomb and space programs were built for military ends. The internet was built for military resiliency. GPS was for targeting and tracking.

Basic research does require a long term view.. but I would suggest that even government doesn't have that as evidenced by the financial messes they've caused because the bills don't have to be paid until "later."

zeteo4• 13 years ago

Can some kinds of projects be conducted better with government support? Yes. Should almost all scientific research depend on the same support? Probably not. Projects that are not due to realize either great profits or publicity coups within a politician's expected term of office will find government a very fickle and small-minded master.

darxius• 13 years ago

As a Canadian, this makes me extremely sad. I always saw Canada as progressive ... hopefully the next government will flip this around.

nickff3• 13 years ago

The next government will flip it around, and use NRC to further THEIR ends. Please forgive my cynicism, but the act of thinking that one political party is "better" than the other is a triumph of optimism over experience.

tensor4• 13 years ago

It is actually possible for one party to be "better" than another. In this case, we are talking about science, and it is very obvious that limiting science in this way is "worse." Science doesn't respect your political bias.

drpgq• 13 years ago

Meh, as a Canadian I've always been disappointed in how despite spending a lot of money on government R&D we've never really got much out of it. NRC has always been a bit of a weird beast and NSERC is still around.

themstheones• 13 years ago

This is a pretty thinly veiled attempt to defund climate science.

edmond_dantes2• 13 years ago

"... at the NSERC conference this week. It's crazy. They don't want to fund research unless it is run in collaboration with an industry partner. It's killing primary research and making all of the scientists crazy."

-- My coworker

bhb9162• 13 years ago

If true, why veil it at all? Why not just defund it alone? The government reserves the right to not fund whatever it wants to. This will have an awful lot of collateral damage. So much so that I doubt the primary motivation was simply defunding climate science.

vkou• 13 years ago

The Cons have never been overly concerned about collateral damage. (And have been stung by government-critical environmental findings enough times as-is.)

It's a government that's made it explicit that it does not govern on the basis of scientific findings.

corresation7• 13 years ago

I think it's fairly good proof of the religious nature of climate change that anything and everything somehow must relate to it in some grand conspiracy. Sorry for being hostile, but your claim is simply ridiculous.

The NRC already was a completely captive vehicle of the government. With this change they're essentially trying to make it more self-sustaining by moving it to contract research, which obviously includes a lot of renewable energy research, health sciences, etc.

Such a change (to funded "partner" research) is short-sighted and foolish, but it's all about dollars. It isn't a "veiled attempt" at anything, yet is an obvious, open attempt at reducing costs.

pyre2• 13 years ago

The current government in Canada has been pretty hostile towards science. Do a couple of searches on how government scientists are no longer allowed to talk to the public in Canada.

grecy2• 13 years ago

Canada have also sold out public museums.. they'll only cover topics approved by the current in-power government, making them the definition of the ministry of truth.

corresation7• 13 years ago

Canada have also sold out public museums..

Do you have any citation or source for this?

grecy2• 13 years ago

Sure, take your pick.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/museum-of-civil...

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/10/16/civilization_e...

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/05/03/harper-conservatives...

http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-s-...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/10/16/ottawa...

edmond_dantes2• 13 years ago

If research is done purely in the private sector, then how do the research findings make it into the wider scientific community? Especially if the processes become patented. There is no communal well of scientific knowledge to draw from.

freshhawk• 13 years ago

As a Canadian ... how are the broadband speeds in New Zealand these days?

thangalin• 13 years ago

Not amazing when I visited there last year. Stick to the larger cities and you should be fine, though. If you are on the West Coast of Canada, I'd highly recommend moving before October, 2014 -- that's when higher concentrations of Caesium-137 (from Fukushima) are predicted to strike our coastal waters.

geoka9• 13 years ago

Citations or sources please?

ucee0545• 13 years ago

The example from the article is really ignorant and self-defeating. Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself, he just formalized and turned into Greek squiggles what Faraday had discovered. And Faraday's claim to fame was working for Davy, doing things like inventing electric motors and lamps. So if you want to use that history as an example, it says applications come first, and hypotheses and research papers and scientific conferences and the rest of that crap are just the documentation of the new invention.

mchouza• 13 years ago

Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...]

Maxwell "invented" the displacement current:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current

jjoonathan2• 13 years ago

The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter.

It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!

protomyth• 13 years ago

I find it interesting that sentence in the article that the title is taken from actually says 'they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”'. A bit of a change. That sentence is a hyperlink to the following article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/research-counci...

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

It's like Stephen Harper knows he's running out of time, and he's trying to screw up as many remaining parts of the Canadian federal government as he can before the end.

cperciva• 13 years ago

A note for the non-Canadians reading this: NRC is a government agency which does "in-house" research, but it is distinct from NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR, which provide funding (almost exclusively via universities) for research into the sciences-and-engineering, social sciences, and health.

I'm still not a big fan of this change, but it would be incorrect to read this as meaning that all government-funded research is limited to "social or economic gain" projects.

corresation7• 13 years ago

"Over the past few years, the Canadian government has been lurching into antiscience territory. For example, they’ve been muzzling scientists, essentially censoring them from talking about their research. Scientists have fought back against this, though from what I hear with limited success."

The government has not muzzled any scientific research: It is posted just as it always has been, uncensored and without any approval process.

What they did do is essentially try to reign in government paid researchers who were looking to make a name for themselves, often by providing dire sounding, attention grabbing soundbites from preliminary research to a media too ignorant to understand what they were being told. I think all of us know that the general media is horrendous at reporting on research, and when they had a complicit partner in crime who is interested in seeing their own name in print, things get ugly.

If you work for someone, they often have a say over what you do with your work. There is nothing particularly surprising about this, and the Soviet-style descriptives -- almost all of it politically motivated -- does nothing to clarify the situation.

jgon• 13 years ago

Yes exactly, it was all about glory-chasing who just wanted to see their names in print. It had nothing to do with climate and environmental scientists warning of the impact of governmental policies when their studies and models fell on deaf ears.

Of course the Canadian government hasn't muzzled any research, they have just systematically defunded all research aimed at establishing the environmental impact of the petroleum industry as it operates in Canada. Experimental Lakes project? Good-bye, but of course that is not "muzzling" science. Polar Environmental research lab? Axed, because we don't need studies of the warming arctic getting in the way of those petro-dollars. And now we finally get down to brass tacks. Unless you have industry funding or backing, don't bother. And of course industry just loves to fund rigorous investigations into the externalities they create.

I don't know why you are trying so hard in this thread to shout "Nothing to be seen here!" but I really have to ask why you are trying so hard to remain oblivious. The current government's stance on the environment is pretty well established and is in no way secret. To claim ignorance of this requires serious effort, or serious dishonesty.

corresation7• 13 years ago

Experimental Lakes project?

Your best example of the oil agenda of the government is a very long running project having nothing to do with global warming or the oil industry at all? The other one -- an arctic station built to monitor the ozone layer -- provides zero scientific measurements that aren't replicated a thousand times over by many other arctic measurement stations, but maybe that'll hide global warming?

Good stuff.

Sarcasm, a bit of a conspiratorial closing note (such a nice way of offering a counterpoint). Absolutely nothing proving anything.

And yes, I despise political-agenda driven bullshit, which is just incredibly common in Canadian politics. The misinformation and vilification for anything and everything grows tiring to anyone with a concern for discerning reality from fantasy.

arcosdev• 13 years ago

You appear to be knowingly disingenuous. The Cons are doing exactly what they do with their caucus and what they're trying to do to the CBC - control any message that doesn't fit Father Harper's tightly controlled script. If scientists speak out in a way that is dishonest or threatens their credibility it is the citizens of Canada and the scientific community that shall be the judge. Not the evidence-averse Conservative party.

throwaway1980• 13 years ago

This isn't limited to the Canadian government. Try to get a STEM paper published in a respectable venue in any field that has no appreciable economic utility. Nobody cares about finding things out simply because they are interesting (at least not enough to do something about it), they all have to have an obvious application that generates money.

Another way to look at this is that it's Canada's way of increasing the publication rate of its scientists.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

Governments should only fund science that doesn't promote immediate economic gain - such economic gain will fund itself.

Government funding should be un-economic.

dnautics9• 13 years ago

that's a cute thought. How do you, then pick which projects aren't run by total charlatans - to fund them? I suppose you could have grant review boards. But these grant review boards are then populated with other 'expert scientists' who are merely people who were funded by the exact same process. Eventually the whole thing becomes a cyclical echo chamber populated by an elite cadre of politically connected scientists, who, because of perverse, monetary or non-monetary incentives (such as status), performance might be unhinged from any character traits actually important to science, like ability to craft smart experiments, ability to pick up scientific insight, or ability to do experiments without fudging data.

ronaldx2• 13 years ago

I'm not exactly sure if that's different from current academia :)

Canada and science: NRC will now only do science that promotes “economic gain”

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