publich research, who has a say?

ok, this is so funny i want to put it here. it's from the same page talked about in the last post:


Public control could be a nightmare for researchers

Dan Graur

Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-5001, USA

Nature 450, 1156 (20 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/4501156b; Published online 19 December 2007

Sir

Last night I had a nightmare. In my dream, all the recommendations made by Pierre-Benoit Joly and Arie Rip in their Essay 'A timely harvest' (Nature 450, 174; doi:10.1038/450174a 2007) became a reality here in the United States. The public were consulted and actively engaged in practical scientific matters.

I dreamed that the dos and don'ts of science and research were dictated democratically by the American public, of whom 73% believe in miracles, 68% in angels, 61% in the devil and 70% in the survival of the soul after death (see http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=618). In my dream, this majority dictated through vigorous 'public engagement' that science should deal with virgin birth, the thermodynamics of hell, the aerodynamics of angel wings, and the physiology and haematology of resurrection.

Suddenly, I found myself in my old lab. There my students were not dealing with the prevalence of gene duplication in bacterial evolution, but were engaged in a heated argument on the virtues of old-Earth versus new-Earth creationism. I woke up in a cold sweat, thinking of what Bishop Samuel Wilberforce's wife reputedly said when confronted with Darwin's theory: "Let us hope it is not true. But if it is, let us hope it does not become widely known."

If Jolie and Rip's proposal for public engagement is workable, let's hope no one ever finds this out.


(and it's wrong of me to put the whole of this article in my blog. but most of people do not have nature subscription :( and i hope dr. graur and npg forgive me. )

it's a very relevant issue. yesterday, i was having a discussion with two of my friends about the singapore's biomedical policies, and the mission of Singapore's research funding agencies. we didn't reach any conclusions about how just it was for anybody other than scientists to dictate the directions of publicly funded research. whose opinions matter in research, as yf pointed out, depends on the mission of the particular institutions, and it not only concerns the direction of the research done per se, but also consequentially determines the executive leadership in the research institutions, and directly affects the way an institution is organized and run. if the mission of a funding agency is to do science, clearly the scientists, who know the science the best, should be the ones determining where the research should go, and should play central role in the leadership of the institutions. whereas in the dreadful situation described by the article, if you subscribe to the logic that because America is a democratic society, science should represent the knowledge the people want to acquire, then it is arguable that science is justly used to study the aerodynamics of angels' wings. and it wouldn't be inappropriate for the leadership of NIH to be fundamentalist christians. in the case of Singapore, because of the pragmatic nature of the society, the mission for the research institutions are stated as promoting economic growth. hence, the direction of the research will be determined by the economic planning section of the government, and the leadership will be a group of management-trained executives.

how beneficial is any one arrangement is debatable though. as long as the scientists insist that they know the science best and the people paying for the research or governing the state claim that they know how to best spend the money, the discussion will not conclude. most people will tend to take a middle ground i imagine, to say (like yc did say) that there should be space for both parties to have a say in the research. However, I still stand by the opinion that the open-endedness nature of scientific discoveries requires that scientists be allowed maximal autonomy. stale and still true is that no one knows what will come out of any studies. and it's not like none of the scientists cares about the survival of the species, or the country's economy, for that matter. some scientists are interested in basic research, some in applied research. therefore, it's a fair mixture of people and interests. I don't see an urgent need for smearing public opinion in their faces, let alone dictating the research. However, a quality control system that puts scientists' progress under public scrutiny is quite just, although it'll involve the high complexity of panel organization and selection.