Prime Minister John Howard and Acting Opposition Leader Gareth Evans were on hand on Wednesday night to bask in the reflected glory of Australia’s most recent Nobel Prize … that awarded to Professor Peter Doherty for medicine, but whether Australia’s political leaders have the good sense to heed is message is another matter. Professor Doherty rightly warned of the need for government to invest in basic scientific research.
Professor Doherty is himself at once living proof of what he argues and proof of the folly of not investing in basic research. Professor Doherty won his prize for work done 23 years ago at the Australian National University. It has taken that long for the true implications of his work to be revealed. Long gestation periods is the nature of the fruits basic research. It means, of course, that governments must fund the lion’s share of it. Business organisations rarely look beyond six years; and most rarely look beyond six months. The trouble is that governments are increasingly taking the short view.
In the period of the Labor Government, particularly while John Dawkins was in charge of higher education, universities were virtually directed to concentrate on research that was directed to having a quick industrial application. Funding was skewed to that sort of research. The intention may have been good, but the method was madness. The nature of scientific research is such that applications for it can be neither directed nor predicted; they are often decades away. You cannot pick winners beforehand with basic research. The only way to be sure of a winner is to back the entire field. That means Australia needs to be doing basic research in a full range of scientific endeavours.
This approach has a twofold benefit. The first is that by serendipity and hard work a fraction of the research will bear practical fruit. The second is that Australia will remain part of the world research network in those fields in which it maintains a solid basic research effort. For our 2 or 3 per cent effort we get access to 80 or 90 per cent of the world’s research effort in any field. If we fall below a critical mass in research effort, the world will ignore us as not worth bothering with and we will lose that access.
So it is folly to suggest that Australia is too small to matter or that any effort in basic research will be swamped by the efforts of other countries. To the contrary; we get an entree card. Professor Doherty and the three previous Australian Nobel Prize winners in medicine show what can be done.
The other self-evident element to Professor Doherty’s message is that unless Australia maintains a critical mass in research, our best brains will leave Australia. It would have been better if Professor Doherty had still been in Australia at the time of his prize. Alas, he was in Tennessee. The reason he gave is, “”They offered me a lot of resources.”
Notice, he did not say, “”they offered me more money.” Scientific researchers are not personally demanding and will happily work for less money than could be made in business, the professions or administration; they are happy if the resources are there for them to do their research.
Australia should match that selflessness with the wherewithal to do the research. Ultimately it is in the best interests of the nation. If we do not, we will not be getting any more Nobel Prizes, and the valuable spin-offs that come with them, in 23 years time ….
Australia cannot afford to force its Peter Dohertys to go overseas to do their research.