Dialogue: Time to get science working

By DICK WILKINS*

Looking back over the past 10 years of science in New Zealand, the biggest non-event has undoubtedly been the creation of the nine Crown Research Institutes.

I am not saying that the CRIs do not spend science money, employ scientists and make scientific discoveries. Of course they do. But they have not really contributed anything new that would not have come from the old DSIR, MAF and other Government laboratories that they replaced.

Ignoring this simple fact and consuming an endless diet of jargon such as "MoRST" "FoRST," "Foresight," "Knowledge Economies," "inputs," "outputs," "outcomes," etc, is great fodder for a stoush such as that between Research, Science and Technology Minister Pete Hodgson and Dr Doug Edmeades, the former head of AgResearch's soils and fertiliser group.

In their comparisons of apples and oranges, however, they are clearly confused. As for the public, it probably does not care.

The simple fact is that these so-called science reforms were no more than a repackaging exercise that burdened an under-funded science sector with an additional management structure that was intent on pursuing pseudo-commercial goals.

These reforms were no more likely to conquer the lush high-tech pastures of Nokia-land than Bob Semple's concrete covered bulldozers were likely to conquer the battlefields of the Second World War.

What has happened to the much-vaunted commercial promise of the CRIs in the high technology end of science - things like biotechnology and biosciences? These are areas that, incidentally, are beginning to flourish privately, almost in spite of the CRIs.

First of all, Mr Hodgson is quite right in refusing to reverse the 1992 "reforms." This would achieve nothing. What he must do, however, is accept that serious mistakes have been made in the past 10 years and get some real reforms in place.

As a scientist observing the progress of the CRIs over this time, four things are apparent:

First, although all are touted as commercial businesses, it is strange that, since their inception, none of the nine has undergone any of the substantive changes (such as growth, demise, takeovers) that have been the hallmarks of most other businesses over the past decade.

Second, as Dr Edmeades rightly points out, the CRI "profits" are indeed bogus and have always been deducted from Government grants when first received.

Third, despite occasional knee-jerk glowing support for the CRI model, in their more considered moments both Mr Hodgson and Finance Minister Michael Cullen are on record as being concerned about "extracting better results from the CRIs."

Fourth, in recent years it has become impossible to determine whether excellent science is being done in the CRIs because of the rejection of internationally accepted methods of assessing scientific programmes by peer review.

Indeed, a quick perusal of international databases would suggest that, while a few CRI scientists perform very well, the overall publication rate in key areas of biotechnology and biosciences is well behind international standards.

More seriously than all of this, we are creating a "lost generation" of young scientists. Usually in their mid-thirties to forties, they have studied for a PhD and done excellent post-doctoral research overseas, only to come back to a job in a CRI and discover that they have very little freedom to pursue their research strengths, that their input into the higher level scientific policy and directions of the company is neither wanted nor welcomed, and that they are actively discouraged from offering opinions on the raft of shonky "commercial" science projects that are going on around them. In short, the profession of "scientist" is not being respected.

In case you think I exaggerate, I have at least one young scientist a month covertly seeking my advice on the problems outlined above. Just to rub salt in the wound, they are completely frustrated by the fact that they have no real career structure, and over the past few years I have seen many mid-career people, once they reach a salary of around $55,000 to $65,000, essentially move away from active research into the management ranks, simply because they see this as the only way to progress.

For a profession in which performance is everything, it is absolutely disastrous for management roles to be so much more attractive than performing roles.

Imagine the shambles if surgeons, musicians, rugby players or pilots all wanted to be managers.

What advice can be given to this "lost generation?"

Little more than the sage observation that most muck-ups take a generation to correct, whether they involve farming, Muldoonism or science.

Usually, when politicians are involved, there are strenuous denials for the first 10 years that anything is wrong, then there is a flutter of "fine-tuning" and, finally, around the 15-year mark, people get up collective courage in the Koru Club, convince themselves that radical change must occur ... and it does.

With science, we are clearly at the 10-year stage. Mr Hodgson is doing a lot of fine-tuning and instigating a lot of modest programmes and measures that will go some way to improve science and its commercialisation.

Where to from here? What one would hope is that politicians, mandarins of government, etc, will accept that the fundamental error in setting up the CRIs was not to insist that they were "science-led."

Virtually without exception, active scientists lead all research institutes of note everywhere else in the world, the career structures are designed for scientists, and management structures complement the science.

What we did in 1992 was confuse two issues. The first issue was how to best create research institutes capable of doing world-class science.

The second issue was how to ensure the maximum commercial uptake of science so as to create a prosperous knowledge economy.

For some bizarre reason, we felt that we were going to kill two birds with one stone by creating research institutes led by managers who were neither active scientists nor proven businessmen, support them with large management teams and complement this with new Government agencies with like credentials.

Add to this a continuing diarrhoea of theories on how scientific research should be done that encompassed everything except the tried and true methods that have worked in North America and Europe for 50 years and led to huge commercial spinoffs.

Many of our more commercially- minded CRIs now operate in a cloak of secrecy and talk the talk of intellectual property, patents, portfolios, etc. But, one keeps hearing of projects, often involving millions of dollars of expenditure, that do not appear to be in contact with contemporary scientific or commercial reality.

Operating in this vacuum has dangers that can continue even after a "discovery" is patented.

As an example, when I was asked to look at the merits of one such local product, easiTrace, which is a neat DNA tracing system for meat carcasses, I was somewhat amazed to find that the Irish had, long before, comprehensively patented a very similar system (TraceBack) and that there was at least a third competing system on the market.

I had no choice but to recommend that the local product be viewed with some caution.

This extreme obsession with confidentiality, IP issues, and the like, and an unwillingness to interact scientifically, is also frustrating commercial businesses.

So, to those of you in the "lost generation" of scientists, hang in there and remain true to your profession as, like Muldoon, it cannot last forever.

Once we take pseudo-business out of science and pseudo-science out of business, we will have research institutes and commercial companies that, with a little catalytic action from a new age government, will make a real, appreciated and honest contribution to the wealth of New Zealand.

* Professor Dick Wilkins is in the department of biological sciences, at the University of Waikato, and a former senior scientist in AgResearch.