Friday 13 July 2012

Death of evidence and too much meddling of government in science


Death of evidence and too much meddling of government in science

For the first time in my career, I’ve seen scientists taking to the streets to lobby the government. These quiet behind the scenes people aren’t normally spotted on mass in public.
 http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/behind-numbers/2012/07/scientists-protest-death-evidence-parliament-hill

Given the number of scientists in Canada, relative to that of other jobs, just to see a few in public is akin to a mass demonstration in the oil and gas or forestry industries.

The Harper government is laying off scientists with the goal of saving money or directing “research” into areas of company generation and product development. This isn’t research. This is engineering new devices and products. One of the stated reasons for doing this is that Canada has been good at creating new knowledge, but relatively poor at protecting ideas and creating new knowledge based industries. Solution--make the scientists do something more akin to business, without improving job security, job satisfaction or support. Scientists may not be working for big bucks, but they aren’t stupid. If we are going to have to operate like a business, let’s not get into science at all—let’s just go into business from the getgo. Also, product development is like a pyramid. Only the tip gets developed. If you lop off the base, there are no new ideas moving up the chain to the top and translation to product will dry up.

I find it interesting that Canada has grants for scientists to collaborate with companies, but these grants don’t allow the scientist to be part of the company in any way. I ask myself, why would I spend my precious research time just to make someone else wealthy? In the USA, the SBIR grants encourage the scientists to start their own companies. These get a lot of support.

Another aspect of the new product oriented research is the underlaying premise that since the problem (lack of product development) relates to science, it must be the scientists who are doing something wrong. Hmm, this seems to be a business problem. Can we get the business people more engaged. Can they be more accepting of the enormous risk, and the enormously long lead times between idea and income. Canada’s business community is not keen on supporting startup concepts. There is more of a culture of this in the USA, and so the USA has a better track record.

One of the things that makes me particularly sad about the current government’s plans is that they seem to look forward only a few years: perhaps to the next election. Science looks ahead decades. As an example, it took over 20 years for the National Research Council to grow their MRI development arm into a group that was both world class and that was beginning to spin off companies (as requested). One of these, IMRES, makes intraoperative MRI systems in Winnipeg. This is Canada’s most successful MR hardware company. A second, MRITech, is just getting off the ground. Yet in the past months the NRC announced the closure of the Institute for Biodiagnostics—the institute with the MRI scientists who came up with these products. The government can’t change their mind 4 years from now. All of the accumulated hardware, the buildings in Winnipeg and the highly trained staff will be long gone. I note too that when a scientist looses their job, they are so specialized that they often have to leave the country to get another position. Someone else will benefit from the years of accrued knowledge these scientist will carry with them.

I heard long ago that governments have a hard time picking winners in business. In the case of all of these scientific layoffs, how can we hope that the government can be making educated decisions. For a start, the quick action is giving academic institutions only a few months to make plans to absorb these staff.  Canada is laying off scientists across the country, and silencing them so they can’t contribute to the international body of evidence. These policies put at risk Canada’s academic strength in the international community, they make it harder to recruit new good people and they send a message to young Canadians that a career in science is not valuable.