Inkless Wells

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There's a brain drain going on and we're inviting

by Paul Wells on Sunday, May 25, 2008 9:22am - 0 Comments

Neil Turok’s appointment as executive director of Perimeter Institute continues to be ignored in Canada and followed with interest elsewhere. But this piece is particularly interesting because it reveals the extent to which Turok was becoming very frustrated with science and research funding in Britain. It suggests that Stephen Hawking may soon be joining Turok at Perimeter for extended stays. And, lest Canadians get too cocky, it reminds us that too much of Canada’s research landscape still resembles the mess that Turok is leaving behind him in Britain…

Turok complains, for instance, that Britain’s science minister isn’t a scientist. Well. Canada doesn’t have a science minister and, following what could almost be called the constructive dismissal of his national science advisor, Stephen Harper is not precisely being guided by tippy-top science advise even when setting science policy per se. And when Turok talks about researchers being “ground down by bureaucracy… and hunting for grants,” he is describing the experience of too many Canadian researchers, especially molecular biologists who have to deal with Genome Canada, and that’s a situation that predates the Harper government. (I don’t know enough about the teaching load of Canadian researchers to know whether Turok’s complaint on that score is transferable to Canada.) One hopes Turok won’t lose his franc-parler when he moves to Canada.

Canada really has become a place that can attract the world’s best researchers, and Perimeter is one of the centrepieces of that attraction. Harper is hardly unaware of Perimeter’s importance. But its lessons — that the basic, hard questions are worth asking, even if the immediate payoff isn’t evident; that scientists are best left to decide for themselves what’s worth investigating — are still too often taken for granted.

UPDATE: More on Turok.

Tags: Arthur Carty, Neil Turok, Perimeter Institute, Stephen Hawking

More by Paul Wells

http://www.LHCFacts.org JTankers

Quote: “scientists are best left to decide for themselves what’s worth investigating”

Should the general public be told the real risks involved in some experiments, or be told when scientists are not even able to calculate risks that might in reality be closer to 100% than to 0%?

Dr. Raj Baldev writes:

“ … the scientists are fully aware that it is not a project without a grave risk to the life of the Earth.”

(Dr. Raj Baldev is Director of the Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research)

Goto LHCFacts.org to view a growing list of prominent scientist who are concerned that the the unknowns and the real risks may be significant and extraordinary.
Ross Trusler

Although not a researcher, I am a scientist. I do not agree that “scientists are best left to themselves what’s worth investigating”. Sure, it’s easy to nitpick any absolute statement, but there’s a lot to nitpick here.

If accountability is to mean anything, it must surely entail that those who pay the piper call the tune. Note that accountability does not preclude the piper from delegating that authority, but such delegation should not be automatic or without caveats.

For example, do ethics matter? How about the catastrophic consequences of some areas of research?

For these reasons, I reject the notion that the scientific community should (uniquely) be accountable only to itself. Without oversight, both accountability and transparency quickly wither. Opaque bureaucratic industries are built upon such well-intentioned but naive approaches.
Jim Woodgett

There is already plenty of external accountability and oversight for researchers. One problem is that much of science is so complex, jargonized and advanced that only other trained scientists can interpret and understand it’s relative worth (aside from the dollar costs, etc). This leads to the perception of a closed club. It is not.

A second problem is both the public and politicians expect scientists to be performing work of immediate relevance. The fact is that only a small fraction of total research and essentially no basic research has short term outcomes. The biggest discoveries over the past few decades have required 10-20 years to develop into “useful” applications and, of course, most do not. Thinking we can predict these discoveries or that we can somehow short-circuit research and accelerate benefits usually leads to a reduction in quality, and, in the a longer term, a big waste of money.

Science is like new industry. To attract the best scientists (who are eminently translocatable), you need to give them a regulatory environment that they can respect and that has clear guidelines and limits with severe penalties for transgression. These guidelines should not be based on irrational views of lobby groups or political expediency.

Scientists also need to do a better job of justifying why they do what they do and politicians need to recognize that there is no substitute for competitive excellence. This is not something that can be prescribed. It is, however, a quality that is relatively easy to measure.
http://dandylittlecdnblog.blogspot.com d. andy jette

Monsieur Wells, I figure this comment string is as good a means as any to bring your attention to a related discussion on Justin Fox’s Time blog. Paul Romer and others weigh in on the rationale, and preferred method, for enhanced public support for scientific research. Blog post title “Paul Romer explains why we need more science PhDs than we think we do.”
A

The struggles with Canadian science funding bureaucracy are familiar to me. 4 years ago,
I came to Canada as an assistant professor, after finishing my Ph.D. in US. At that time,
Canada looked like a great alternative to both US (whose immigration system was becoming increasingly unwelcome to foreigners) and my native European country (where research was severely underfunded).

Now, I’m about to leave for Europe. The reasons are partly personal, partly due to my disappointment with the way research is managed in Canada.

Out of all funding programs I encountered, NSERC Discovery Grants are about the only program that does not burden researchers with unnecessary bureaucracy. Yet, the grants that they give to junior faculty (even ones with outstanding record) are small and barely sufficient for paying one graduate student’s salary.
And the average grant has been decreasing during the last 4 years, even if we do not take inflation into account (and even more in inflation-adjusted dollars).

Other programs impose a lot of burden on researchers. And, it seems that, more burden that a program imposes, bigger a chance that the government will send more money through it in the next years.
Paul Wells

I find A’s last paragraph particularly interesting, because it suggests a trend line away from the kind of openness that’s attracting Neil Turok.