Defending curiosity-driven research

Irrespective of their political leaning, recent governments in Britain have sung the praises of science as an investment in the economic prosperity of the nation. Should this be music to our ears or should we view such adulation with caution and reflection? I think the latter is wise. 

At the same time as investing more in research, recently the Government has said that it will reduce the funding allocated to curiosity-driven research year on year until 2030. This is another way of saying that it will invest an increasing amount in those things it thinks are most important. The robustness of this position depends on how much one trusts government to make a judgement about what is likely to be important. One only needs to look across the Atlantic, to what the Trump Administration is doing to climate science, to understand how dangerous this can be.

To my mind, scientific freedoms are as fundamental to democratic society as press freedoms and there is a public duty on politicians to support them. But as politicians get a grip of the political power that sits within science, there is an inexorable drift towards dictating priorities from the political centre. When does pressure to ensure there is value from taxpayers’ money turn from research in the public interest to research in the interest of those in power?

I suggest the public has a right to be involved in helping to make these decisions at all levels and we now have methods  — thanks to science — to make them feel more involved

Intangibility and ethics

Google the point of scientific research and you will read that it “provides benefit to society by driving technological and medical advancements, solving complex global challenges like climate change, fostering economic development, and improving public health and policy through evidence-based knowledge”. This is probably the way most commentators, funding agencies, politicians and governments seethe value provided by research too, but it is incomplete.

This instrumental, directional view fails to mention the many intangible benefits of research. Tangible benefits are, by definition, easier to appreciate, describe, quantify and reward. Intangible benefits – such as helping us to appreciate the meaning of natural justice, or the distinction between right and wrong – are much harder to pin down, but are equally important to how society functions. It may be rare for research to explicitly focus on these kinds of intangibles, but they are emergent properties of how curiosity reveals to us how the world works.

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) suggested that knowing why things happen, and how we might respond to them, can be viewed as a fundamental ingredient of ethical living. I would wager, for example, that the ‘harvesting’ of species such as whales and seals has been rendered unethical by research that has progressively uncovered the richness of the private lives of these animals, something I have worked on for much of my own career.

I also suggest that without curious, free-thinking scientists, we would never have realised that many agricultural chemicals are toxic to life in general and not just to specific pests. The ‘free’ nature of science is just as essential to engender trust when people ask questions of science, such as those surrounding the safety and ethics of vaccines. As soon as researchers are perceived to have interests, such as ensuring their research has a tangible impact, trust becomes eroded.

When curiosity-driven research comes under pressure, a common tactic is to argue that it eventually leads to tangible benefits. But, conveniently for bean-counters, this means that research that does not lead to tangible benefits is deemed wasteful.

The drift towards overvaluing tangible versus intangible goals in scientific research seems to me to be a symptom of the same narrow economic thinking that has created many of the global problems that science is currently involved in solving. Will it make us better and happier people? I suspect not.

So, in practice, how should we judge where to draw the line between how much public investment to make in outcome- versus curiosity-oriented research? In the past the Haldane Principle has been used to suggest that scientific decision-making should be independent of government. Until recently, government has set aside a chunk of money and said: “There you are, over to you.” It has been the scientific community itself that has decided where to draw the line.

We can debate whether scientists found the right balance in the past, but in the present the Haldane Principle is being challenged – and it may be time to ditch the idea anyway. It was always a moveable feast depending on what level of scientific decision-making was being referred to, or whether one believes scientists themselves make ‘independent’ and ‘free’ decisions based on their curiosity.

In pursuit of trust

There is increasing recognition that public interest lies in almost everything that happens in science, from the way money is allocated at a national level to the ethics of decisions made at the laboratory bench. I suggest the public has a right to be involved in helping to make these decisions at all levels and we now have methods (thanks to science) to make them feel more involved. If free, curious scientific research is to have a future, scientists need to have a central role in communicating the full breadth of what they do, and they need to trust that our fellow citizens will see its value.

Greater involvement will also create the conditions for greater trust and fairness. If, as political theorist John Rawls (1921–2002) suggested, justice equates to fairness, then perhaps the process of democratising, rather than politicising, science will lead to greater justice in the world.

Professor Sir Ian Boyd FRSB is RSB president and Bishop Wardlaw Professor at St Andrews University.

Read more on the RSB's response to changes in UK research funding here.