Shift in Canadian National Research Council’s emphasis ignites controversy

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Canada’s National Research Council NRC is shifting its science emphasis from basic to applied. The consequent controversy, as reflected in the Canadian press, likely merits attention from scientists and science stakeholders in other countries.

This excerpt from the Winnipeg Free Press summarizes the situation of the century-old NRC:

At the Ottawa Citizen, a similar report showed that the change has been building for some time at Canada’s biggest research institution. In 2010, it said, NRC scientists published 746 articles in refereed journals, but only 200 in 2012.

Not all voices in the debate oppose the shift. At Canada’s Financial Post, columnist Dan Ovsey reported all sides of the controversy, including the observation that distinguishing basic from applied is often a tricky business in the first place. But he argued that statistics show that in Canada, ‘leaving scientists to their own devices to create dramatic breakthroughs’ hasn’t been working anyhow.

A pro-shift Ottawa Citizen letter ended, ‘Good on the federal government to understand how life in the real world works.’ It was signed, ‘Tim Page, President, Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries.’ Also in that paper, an op-ed by Robert Atkinson—identified as the Canada-born president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, DC—called faith in the straight-line progression of basic research to commercial products ‘ill-suited to today’s intensely competitive global economy.’ Atkinson reasoned that as a global public good, basic research gives other nations a ‘free ride.’

But plenty of voices do oppose the shift, and Goodyear and NRC president John McDougall have said plenty to energize them:

* A February interview piece in the Ottawa Citizen quoted McDougall: ‘Really the discovery part of everything we’re going to do for the next couple of decades is already discovered. You know the science but you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to do with it.’

* Ovsey at the Financial Post reported that McDougall calls the academic community’s furor a ‘tempest in a teapot.’ (Science magazine quoted McDougall’s statement that if ‘the academic world was doing what industry needed, they wouldn’t worry about this.’)

* The Toronto Sun quoted Goodyear: ‘There is [sic] only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge...second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.’

At Maclean’s—Canada’s national weekly, which boasts a circulation of 2.4 million—Paul Wells opened a recent column by quoting Slate blogger Phil Plait’s condemnation of some of these statements as ‘colossally ignorant’ and the shift itself as ‘monumentally backwards thinking.’ Wells noted that Canadian research spending has actually been rising, and observed that ‘the government is paying more tax dollars for a lousy reputation than its predecessor paid for a good reputation,’ which ‘matters when a researcher is deciding whether to move his family from Stanford to Edmonton.’

Tarnished reputation? At the Ottawa Citizen, that was the headline for a shift-opposing letter from a professor of biotechnology. Another scientist’s letter lamented, ‘Sadly, thousands of highly trained expert scientists in a range of fields, myself included, have been thrown aside by these sorts of short-sighted decisions.’ A letter from Roger Voyer, former research director of the Science Council of Canada, argued that firms have other avenues than the NRC to get government support for research.

At the Toronto Star, a letter opened with this frequently heard criticism: ‘Conservatives are meddling with the pure and applied scientific research capabilities of Canada in order to meet their ideological agenda.’ An op-ed at the Western Star called the shift ‘corporate welfare’ and charged that ‘making the NRC’s senior bureaucrats pick winners’ is ‘a mug’s game, almost certainly destined for failure.’

At the Ottawa Citizen, columnist Andrew Coyne argued that far ‘from a pragmatic matching of public research dollars to the real-word needs of industry,’ the shift ‘reveals a basic confusion about the appropriate public and private roles in funding research....What the government’s supporters might think is hard-headed realism is in fact simply central planning by another name—an illustration, once gain, of the difference between being ‘pro-business’ and ‘pro-market.’'

In an Ottawa Citizen op-ed earlier this year, Gabor Kunstatter, president of the Canadian Association of Physicists, opened by praising the general idea of harnessing science for prosperity. But he cautioned that public policy needs to be informed by sound basic science, and he emphasized the linear model of progress, whereby basic research, its outcomes ‘unforeseen,’ underpins and precedes applied research and industrial competitiveness.

An editorial in that paper said much the same, arguing that ‘applied science rests on a bedrock of pure science.’ At Huffington Post Canada, a lengthy blog posting also defended the linear model.

So did a Toronto Star editorial . It called the shift ‘short-sighted and wrong-headed’ and predicted that it ‘will serve business at the cost of the public good and won’t serve business well.’ The editors observed that even leaving aside the public interest, and even rejecting ‘the idea that knowledge is valuable in itself,’ the shift ‘still makes no sense,’ for it ‘wrongly assumes that basic research is a distraction from, rather than a prerequisite for, innovation.’ The editors made the case for the linear model with examples:

On 10 May, the Globe and Mail published 11 letters . Almost all opposed the shift. One in particular distilled the anti-shift argument’s linear-model core: ‘To dictate the direction of basic research based on today’s needs,’ wrote University of Toronto biochemist Reinhart Reithmeier, ‘is incredibly short-sighted. Discovery research shines a light into the future, illuminating the way to endless possibilities.’

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.