What universities could learn from Richard Robson, our 88-year-old Nobel Prize winner
The problem is deciding how much to spend on projects that may or may not change science in 20 years when there is an insatiable demand for funding on research to deliver national dividends now.
“This is a testament to Professor Robson and others who are inspired and motivated by a deep curiosity about how the world works, and to the institutions that support and enable long-term fundamental research for the benefit of society,” University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Emma Johnston said.
The ideal of discovery research is funding scientists to advance knowledge regardless of whether they find what they are looking for in the hope they come up with something else.
Like John O’Sullivan and CSIRO colleagues working in radio astronomy when they did the maths that made wi-fi happen.
And like the work that won the Nobel for Robson and Omar Yaghi (University of California, Berkeley) and Susumu Kitagawa (Kyoto University). Robson started what became their achievements in 1989 when he was doing the high science of mucking around at work and created a new molecular structure, “like a diamond filled with innumerable cavities”. The problem was these metal-organic frameworks were unstable until separate work a decade later by Yaghi and Kitagawa found ways to fix that and design new ones.
The Nobel citation states that chemists have now created tens of thousands of MOFs, with applications including capturing carbon dioxide and “harvesting water from desert air”. It is an example of what the Australian Research Council calls pure basic research, “carried out for the advancement of knowledge, without seeking long-term economic or social benefits or making any effort to apply the results to practical problems”.
But while the work Robson started makes a case for funding science that may or may not go anywhere, it is not one that convinces the policy establishment.
Certainly the importance of discovery research is universally acknowledged. “Australia’s universities support independent, broadbased exploratory research that is a precondition for innovation and are the place where new ideas and discoveries are generated” is doctrine in the National Science Statement.
And the review into research and development funding now under way for Industry Minister Tim Ayres calls curiosity-led research “a pillar of innovation”.
But the ARC is focusing on funding science with immediate objectives in a new grant system expected to be imminently adopted by the government. Under the new model, funding for basic research will be allocated in all programs and there will be small grants for “potentially transformative projects”. But the overall emphasis is on “work of researchers which can provide a launch pad for the tangible creation of value for the cultural, economic, environmental and social benefits for Australians”.
And the R&D review suggests aligning university research policy with “more purposeful-led R&D settings”.
Peak lobby Universities Australia is not having it, warning funding for discovery research is actually declining and stands firm against reorganisations of grants that will move money into time-limited projects with specific objectives.
“Without the fundamental insights and discoveries of basic research, there is no new knowledge to translate or commercialise,” UA says. “This fundamental, or ‘blue-sky’, research does not always fit easily into accepted short-term incentive frameworks, yet history repeatedly demonstrates the central role of basic, curiosity-driven research in driving prosperity and progress.”
And the Australian Academy of Science points to Robson’s results, “we take for granted the often decades of research behind every major discovery that improves our lives – each begins with curiosity, eventually and unpredictably ending with products.”
One problem with this is: Where is funding to come from for decades of work that may be a fizzer? The Group of Eight research-intensive universities say they have paid for research with booming international student fees, which are no longer a sure thing.
Plus, academic workloads are changing, with the old model of staff having 40 per cent of their time quarantined for research now not the norm. Pauline Ross (University of Sydney) points to huge expansion in teaching-focused jobs (1000 to 28,000 since 2008) and states the 40 per cent research time share in the old system has dropped. Certainly the number of research-only academics has more than doubled, to 18,000, but the focus is on winning grants to keep the cash flowing.
Plus betting on blue-sky research is a hard sell when there are demands for answers to known unknowns that are turned into products to meet needs now, which is the sort of science government likes. The Coalition created new university research funding schemes, continued by Labor, to take ideas from laboratory bench to marketplace, and Ayres’s R&D review team is focused on science as an arm of industry policy, with government deciding national priorities for R&D, set out in 10-year plans.
And it wants universities to publish less, the traditional metric of research performance, and work with industry more “to better recognise translational impact, industry engagement and societal benefit”.
Overall, Ayres says, “getting our innovation system right involves Australians and Australian institutions working together, with the government providing strategic leadership”.
Where people such as Robson would fit in this is not obvious. A University of Melbourne profile in 2019 reported that his “contribution in all of this has been more like that of an artist or an architect” and that he was happy in his lab designing and creating new and interesting structures. Which is where he started in the 1970s when he began creating wooden models of chemical structures to teach first-year students, work that ultimately led to a Nobel.
Try explaining that to officials working on a 10-year plan.
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When Richard Robson won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last week his boss was quick to point out his achievement demonstrated what “blue-sky research” could deliver.