Science cannot be left to the market alone

Most leading industrialized nations, and an increasing number of developing countries, are realigning their publicly funded research more closely with the perceived demands of economic competitiveness and sustainable growth. The USA recently announced a substantial increase in its funding for physical sciences, and last year the European Union (EU) created the European Research Council (ERC) with a commitment to support only high‐quality research across all sciences. India and China are increasing their investments in basic research, to catch up with Europe and North America scientifically as well as economically. Meanwhile, smaller nations are homing in on specific sectors in both basic and applied research, such as pharmaceuticals and nanotechnology, rather than spreading their limited resources thinly across the whole scientific spectrum.The fact that research, technological progress and economic growth are closely linked is beyond dispute; however, there is still debate over which strategy is best suited to deploy finite resources and to stimulate technology transfer. A useful starting point is the observation that major ‘disruptive’ inventions, which change the course of an industry or the world as a whole, are almost always based on results from basic or fundamental research, according to Jorn Erselius, Managing Director of Garching Innovation (Munich, Germany), which organizes technology transfer from the Max Planck Institutes to businesses in Germany. “Examples [of major inventions] include monoclonal antibodies, PCR [polymerase chain reaction] and RNA interference,” he said. These emerged from fundamental research and became important platform technologies for the life sciences. Surveys during the past two decades support Erselius' argument—for example, one study showed that 44% of innovative pharmaceutical products were derived from basic research (Mansfield, 1995).> …major ‘disruptive’ inventions, which change the course of an industry or the world as a whole, are almost always based on results from basic or fundamental research…Another, …