Science for all Curiosity-driven research in an unequal world

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There is ample evidence that the big leaps science achieves from time to time are often built on scientists asking simple questions, driven solely by their curiosity and not because they wanted to develop a specific technology.

In a widely circulated piece in The New York Times, the journalist Katrina Miller wrote how one of the physics Nobel laureates this year, John Clarke, probably did not know how his work on macroscopic quantum tunnelling would lead to contemporary quantum computers. It goes somewhat similarly for the medicine and chemistry prize laureates as well. Ms. Miller goes on to cite the examples of Agnes Pockels, “whose fascination with the soap bubbles made while washing dishes laid the groundwork for the field of nanotechnology”, and “Isaac Newton, whose musings about an apple falling from a tree inspired a first theory of gravity, a bedrock that eventually took humans to space.”

Such examples also show that we can’t always know what applications will come up tomorrow by asking and answering some questions today. The deeper idea is that the more we know about the universe, the more we will know what to do with that knowledge.

But like all important matters today, there is at least another side to this coin (there are in fact several sides but let’s stick to just two here).

Science today is an integral part of society. It has got there quickly as well. Just in the last two centuries, but especially since the late 1800s, science has become much more organised, more specialised, and — importantly — more expensive. It was expensive in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, but it is even more so today. That it has become more organised is also important because that played an important part in quelling many superstitious beliefs and paving the way for scientific thinking while allowing scientists to make more and more intricate discoveries.

The scientific enterprise of the 21st century operates like an industry, with its own inputs and outputs, planning, budgeting, construction, recruiting and training labour, requiring policies and laws, and so on. While there are many laudable pockets of low-cost science, it is by and large a resource-intensive enterprise — and that means the countries that fund it need to think about where those resources will come from and how best to use them.

Now, there is a refrain in not-so-wealthy-but-still-quite-wealthy countries like India that there isn’t enough money to fund everything. Based on following science administration and public spending in India for over a decade, I think this claim is false: India has lots of money; what’s often lacking is the political will and the vision to fund specific enterprises over others.

But even after accounting for this argument, or perhaps because of it, many experts have said that there is a credible need for the scientific enterprise to thoroughly justify the way it spends public money. And this is the other side of the coin where curiosity-driven research presents a problem: it often cannot say what benefits it will yield in future, and developing and distributing those benefits often takes time (and more resources).

As a result, those experts have continued, there is a case to be made that India — with its vast appetite for technological solutions to improve working conditions and labour productivity in so many sectors — can’t afford curiosity-driven research alone and that it should provide special incentives for scientists and engineers to pursue research in particular areas. As any researcher will attest, this is also a long and difficult road, equally laden with the risk of dead-ends, but in many ways it’s one that administrators have had an easier time justifying and providing (some) funding for.

I’m a firm believer in the virtues of curiosity-driven research. Despite my difficult relationship with the Nobel Prizes, I’m often quite excited about the scientific work they reward. I’m particularly fond of the 2016 chemistry prize, “for the design and synthesis of molecular machines”, which involved a not insignificant amount of playful thinking. One of the laureates who shared this prize, J. Fraser Stoddart, had written in a 2005 essay:

“It is amazing how something that was difficult to do in the beginning will surely become easy to do in the event of its having been done. The Borromean rings [which the laureates spent some time and effort making, in the process advancing chemistry] have captured our imagination simply because of their sheer beauty. What will they be good for? Something for sure, and we still have the excitement of finding out what that something might be. And so the story goes on…”

His words illustrate the power of curiosity-driven research to change the world, even reshape it. It’s the same power a child wields when she asks questions like “do people in Antarctica stand upside down?” or, as a friend’s daughter recently asked me, “why does poop smell so bad?”.

Despite my own inclinations, I don’t think we can afford to ignore or dismiss the need for research that is more tailored to the needs of particular sectors. Both paradigms have their problems even as no country can afford to adopt just one or the other in its pursuit of technological development. For example, as the work of this year’s winners of the special Nobel Prize for economics says, every country needs to meet certain conditions for its scientific output to translate to technological wealth followed by economic growth. If these conditions are not met, simply increasing the scientific output won’t help; in fact it could become counterproductive.

So while it’s heartening to tout the virtues of doing science led only by the guiding light of curiosity, it’s important to remember that there’s a bigger world out there and that science is a part of it.