The science ecosystem has been restructured regularly during my career, and I often wonder to what effect.
Effective science, and effective research thrives when there is
- social space for personal initiative and creativity,
- time for ideas to grow to maturity,
- openness to debate and criticism,
- hospitality towards innovation, and
- respect for specialized expertise.
I have regularly reflected on these words written by John Ziman 30 years ago, and on advice I received early in my management career – “you cannot, and should not try to manage the research – your job is to manage the environment in which you people do their research.”
I recently re-read ” Prometheus Bound: Science in a dynamic steady state” written in 1994 by Ziman, and was intrigued by how much the context in which science is conducted has changed in 30 years, yet the substance hasn’t.
John Ziman had a distinguished career in the natural sciences. In Prometheus Bound (ISBN 0 521 43430 0), he wrote about the problems scientists have with governments, administrators etc. His preface starts:
“Science is reaching its ‘limits to growth’. It is expected to contribute increasingly to national prosperity, yet national budgets can no longer support further expansion to explore tempting new research opportunities, by larger research teams, equipped with increasingly sophisticated apparatus. As a result, science is going through a radical structural transition to a much more tightly organized, rationalized and managed social institution. Knowledge-creation, the acme of individual enterprise, is being collectivized.
This transition is pervasive, interlocking, ubiquitous and permanent. It affects the whole research system from the everyday details of laboratory life to the politics of national budgets. “Changes in one part of the system, such as the abolition of academic tenure, have repercussions elsewhere, for example in the commercial exploitation of scientific discoveries. A new policy language of ‘accountability’, ‘evaluation’, ‘input and output indicators’, ‘priority-set-ting’, ‘selectivity’, ‘critical mass’, etc. has become commonplace throughout the world, from Finland to Brazil, from Poland to New Zealand, from the United States to Papua New Guinea. Indeed, science is becoming a truly international enterprise, organized systematically on a global scale.
I am sure there are many people who would like to write this in 2024 – and lament that we may not have made much real progress in the understanding and practice of public policy around science and technology. But we have made enormous inroads into our understanding of the world and our ability to put science to work over the last 30 years. Sure, we still have a lot to do, but I do not subscribe to the view that science has reached its limits.
In a very real sense we have risen to the challenge set by Ziman when he elegantly posed:
“Many scientists and scholars look back regretfully to a more relaxed and spacious environment for academic research. But nostalgia is a fruitless sentiment.
What all scientists know is that science cannot thrive without
- social space for personal initiative and creativity,
- time for ideas to grow to maturity,
- openness to debate and criticism,
- hospitality towards innovation, and
- respect for specialized expertise.
The real question is not whether the structural transition is desirable, or could have been avoided: it is how to reshape the research system to fit a new environment without losing the features that have made it so productive in the past.”
The challenge is still relevant in 2024 and will remain for some time.
- Social space|Time|Openness|Hospitality|Respect can be practiced in any system and structure – if we let them.
Science is still limitless.