Australian Politicians Need to Stop Meddling with Basic Research
In nations like Denmark and Germany, gifts are given on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas morning. Furthermore, on Christmas Eve 2021, 587 groups of researchers at universities around Australia got a festive present from the Australian Research Council (ARC), in the form of information that their 2022 Discovery Projects were to be financed.
More brutally, 2,508 other groups of scientists also got the less than festive news that their proposed Discovery Projects were to be rejected financing.
This acceptance rate was also lower than it should have been. Among the 2,508 unfortunate applications, six passed the ARC’s extensive peer-review process. However, they were vetoed by Stuart Robert, acting federal education minister, because they “do not show enough significance for taxpayers’ money nor add to the national interest.”
Science and politics
On January 10, Toby Walsh, a Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW, and 62 of his fellow ARC laureate colleagues– including a Nobel Laureate– complained vigorously in an open letter to the minister and the chief executive of the ARC about this political intervention in the funding of basic research.
Discovery Projects are among the main mechanisms to finance basic research in the sciences and humanities in Australia. They are an especially important source of funding for early-career researchers. The Australian government invests around A$ 250 million of public money yearly on these grants. These awards are prestigious and very affordable, with an acceptance rate of just 19%.
The last time such ministerial interference became public was in October 2018, when it emerged that education minister Simon Birmingham, at the time, rejected funding to 11 ARC grants over the preceding 2 years. There was understandable outrage.
In reaction to substantial criticism about that intervention, the government launched a national interest test. Furthermore, Robert used this test to veto financing last month.
The six grants denied last month were all in the humanities and featured two on understanding contemporary China and a third on the mass mobilization of school students in climate change protests and what that signifies for their participation in democracy.
It is difficult to think about two topics more vital for Australia’s future than understanding China and the climate change movement. However, let’s put that aside for a second.
The worth of basic research
How and why should a nation invest its valuable tax revenue on basic research? The “why” is simple. Life span has approximately doubled in the past 200 years due to investments governments have made in basic research. These investments have provided us vaccines, for example, eliminating numerous diseases that are utilized to kill us at a young age.
Besides being longer, our lives are likewise a lot more delightful, thanks to innovations such as smart devices and lasers, and much more educated, as a result of insights about anything from dinosaurs to political history.
The “how” is undoubtedly more challenging. By the very nature of research, you do not learn the result before you start. However, time and again, it has been revealed that the best way to select winners is not to select winners. Instead, just allow brilliant minds to follow their curiosity.
The australian researchers stance
Recalling the laser, Walsh says that it is difficult to imagine our lives without lasers. They are utilized everywhere, from eye surgery to industrial welding, from the undersea cables that connect the internet to barcode scanners in your grocery store checkout. Charles Townes, who won the Nobel Prize for helping find them, never envisioned these myriad usages when he decided to investigate the sensation of “light amplification by promoted radiation emission”.
Charles wrote in his book How the Laser Happened, in 1999:
“The truth is, none of us who worked on the first lasers imagined how many uses there might eventually be […] Many of today’s practical technologies result from basic science done years to decades before. The people involved, motivated mainly by curiosity, often have little idea as to where their research will lead. Our ability to forecast the practical payoffs from fundamental exploration of the nature of things (and, similarly, to know which of today’s research avenues are technological dead ends) is poor. This springs from a simple truth: new ideas discovered in the process of research are really new.“
Walsh says that he is lucky enough to have the opportunity to do such research. In 2021, he won an ARC Laureate Fellowship, the biggest individual grant awarded by the ARC, to learn about how to develop trustworthy AI systems. He does not know yet how it will work out.
However, he knows there is no room for government interference in the ARC’s funding choices. Equivalent nations do not let governments interfere this way. As an example, in the United Kingdom, this is enshrined in the Haldane Principle. In contrast, in the United States, it is directed by engineer and science administrator Vannevar Bush’s provoking postwar manifesto, Science, the Endless Frontier, which helped power that nation’s economic rise.
If Australia wants to leave the pandemic healthier and stronger and tackle the many wicked issues we now face– including social difficulties like handling the national politics of an altering climate and managing our troubled relationship with China– we must ensure basic research is not subject to political interference.
Read the orginal article on The Conversation.
