Striking the right balance between basic and applied research
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.010109
The transistor, the LED, and the medical isotope technetium-99m are important applications of science, yet as far as I know none of them was invented as the result of a government initiative to fund industrially relevant research.
The transistor was invented at Bell Labs. The LED was invented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and technetium-99m was discovered —and its usefulness to medicine recognized—at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
My short list is not meant to buttress an argument that governments shouldn’t fund applied, goal-directed research. They should. The challenge lies is striking the right balance between basic and applied research. If a government overemphasizes applied research, it risks depriving basic researchers of the funds they need to make discoveries and inventions that could prove industrially important.
The question of basic versus applied research has been in the news this year. In February, Nature‘s Jane Qiu reported that
China is betting that an ambitious programme of applied research will help to secure its future as an economic superpower. Innovation 2020, unveiled last week by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), maintains support for basic research. But the plan will place a new emphasis on translating the research into technologies that can power economic growth and address pressing national needs such as clean energy, said Bai Chunli, vice-president of the CAS, at the academy’s annual conference in Beijing, where the plan was announced.
Earlier this week, another report in Nature outlined a controversial plan to refocus Canada’s National Research Council toward applied research.
Whether China and Canada will benefit from their newfound fondness for applied research is hard to predict. I can say, having visited several industrially focused research labs in Singapore, that success appears to entail working closely with industry—very closely, as exemplified by Singapore’s Institute of Microelectronics.
If you visit the Industry section of IME’s website, you discover that
IME has collaborations with every sector of the electronics industry in Singapore from IC design, wafer fabrication and packaging to niche technology industries such as MEMS and leading edge photonics.
IME aims to provide advanced technology support for a competitive electronics industry through advanced services, technology transfer and R&D manpower development. These collaborations provide the essential inputs to guide IME’s R&D programmes, thereby ensuring that IME stays relevant to the industry.
Canada’s new direction for its National Research Council does not appear to envision such close cooperation with industry. Rather, the plan calls for research in four strategic areas and includes projects—to quote the Nature story—that are aimed at “developing a strain of wheat resilient to environmental stress; improving the manufacture of printable electronics; increasing domestic production of bio≠composite materials; and using algae to soak up carbon dioxide emissions from industry.”
One of the first feature articles I edited for Physics Today was “Amorphous Semiconductors Usher in Digital X-Ray Imaging ” by John Rowlands of the University of Toronto and Safa Kasap of the University of Saskatchewan.
Back in 1997 when the article appeared, flat-panel detectors based on amorphous selenium were in their infancy. Now you can buy them from a company called ANRAD, which is based in Saint-Laurent, Quebec.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the 1995 paper in Medical Physics in which Rowlands and Wei Zhao first described the detectors. Funding for the research came from the National Cancer Institute of Canada, whose aim, I presume, was not the promotion of Canadian industry. But that’s what its money ended up doing.
