It’s the kind of story researchers love to tell people who question the usefulness of what they do: between 1975 and 1988 William Proxmire, a United States senator, gave out “Golden Fleece Awards” to researchers he felt were wasting public money. One recipient, Seymour Benzer, was doing research on the sex life of the South American fruit fly.
Most lay people, including the senator from Wisconsin, would say that such research had absolutely no relevance for the people of the United States. In reality, however, the flies were a serious problem for the country’s farmers. By understanding and modifying the breeding cycle of the fly researchers eventually managed to substantially improve crop yields. Benzer’s work was vindicated.
“The reality is that if governments try and be too prescriptive in the funding of research, the hidden gems tend not to be discovered,” Kit Vaughan, a medical researcher at the University of Cape Town, spells out the moral of his story.
The fear that governments could stifle groundbreaking research by being too prescriptive in their funding is not new. But the recent awakening across Africa to the health- and wealth-creating potential of research and innovation has provided fresh fuel for the debate.
In January, African leaders made a promise to increase research and development funding to 1% of national GDPs by the end of this decade. But the windfall is not a free lunch for academics. It comes on a wave of expectations from leaders that it will help their nations out of poverty, and the focus is likely to be on getting bang for their buck.
However, knowing what research investments will pay off is anything but straightforward. Countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, whose science spend dwarfs that of African nations, struggle with how to direct funding without stifling innovation. Increases in the science budget in these countries have been accompanied by a huge effort to map the science base and measure outcomes in the form of patents, publications and citations. Some disciplines, like astronomy, have had a hard time proving their usefulness for the economy. As a result research in these areas has starved, while other areas have boomed.
With the recent focus on science as a tool to kick-start development in Africa, the continent is importing this culture of science management. Africa will see its first “league table” of science and innovation investments in 2009 in the shape of the first African Innovation Outlook. But the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), which is coordinating the survey, is aware that African science is not well served by the indicators traditionally used to measure science and innovation.
The continent’s journals generally fail to reach the international stage. Thompson Scientific, the company whose international index dictates who’s who in scientific publishing and lists 3 730 journals, contained a paltry 22 African journals in 2005, of which no fewer than 20 were South African. Patents, meanwhile, pick up only a narrow sliver of innovation that takes place in developing countries.
To solve the problem, Nepad has set up an inter-governmental panel to develop truly “African” indicators. The panel, which met for the first time last month in Maputo, Mozambique, grappled with questions like whether to count academic articles published in local journals that have little international impact, but perhaps reach local stakeholders. Many policymakers believe that such research, although not influential on the international scale, could benefit Africans in a more immediate way than Nobel Prizes. That Africa should be striving for a different kind of research excellence than the rest of the world enrages many of its best scientists. This is especially the feeling in South Africa where R&D investments — although large by continental reckoning — keep disappointing academics.
“The National Research Foundation [NRF] budget is terribly starved by the department of science and technology and the treasury — we won’t have a science base in 15 years time,” says Renfrew Christie, dean of research at the University of the Western Cape. If usefulness becomes the sine qua non for funding, matters would get worse, he says. Research areas that are not seen to have an immediate impact on wealth creation, such as many of the humanities, are already horribly starved: not even the best get enough, he adds.
The wish in South Africa to allocate a limited amount of funds to a small number of research areas has had some baffling consequences. Vaughan had a proposal for a breast cancer screening project turned down by the NRF. However, in turn it has won funding against much fiercer competition from the United States National Institutes of Health, one of the most prestigious medical research funders in the world. “It’s absolutely nonsense,” he says.
However, it would be unfair to say the South African government is giving up on basic, curiosity-driven research. The government is pulling out all stops to secure the $1-billion Square Kilometre Array astronomy project — a high-risk, long-term investment in the intellectual health of the nation. And the research chair initiative, recently initiated by the department of science and technology, gives top researchers the autonomy to get on with the research of their choice.
Giving up on excellence would be to “capitulate to mediocrity”, one South African professor told the Mail & Guardian. It’s not a case of either doing well in international league tables or focusing on poverty relief, or of engineering versus pure science, he said — Africa can and must do both. “South Africa has the best and highest ranked universities on the continent. If these flagship institutions drift or slide rapidly out of international reckoning, the psychological and material consequences for the country and for the continent are dire,” he said.
But with so much riding on the hope that science will save Africa, it is unlikely that politicians will lift many “usefulness” requirements from the funding they offer. “However false the dichotomy is between research for its own sake and for development, this perception continues to loom large in the minds of many in public positions and in civil society,” says Daya Reddy, an applied mathematician at the University of Cape Town.
Instead, if international experience is anything to go by, African researchers can expect more strings attached to their grants. For example, many UK and US funders now stipulate that researchers spell out the public benefit likely to come from the research they propose to do. Progress is then monitored and failure to deliver could count against a researcher in future funding rounds.
This should be an eye-opener for academics since most tend to be over-optimistic when describing the future applications of their work, says Vaughan. But, with the increased focus on results, he adds, “More and more scientists are going to realise that research that makes an impact is what matters.”
But scientists themselves can only bear some responsibility for the transformation of their work into practice, says Calestous Juma, professor of international development at Harvard University. In fact, he says, the complex nature of knowledge transfer is the very reason that many ministries of finance are reluctant to fund research. “What is needed is a range of incentives that reduce the risks of failure. A focus on traditional methods of accountability similar to those used in development projects will undermine research and stifle creativity. Development will not occur when actors are afraid to experiment.”
Scientists across the continent seem to agree that a failure of policymakers to understand the sometimes haphazard path that innovation takes is a real threat to their work and to Africa’s development as a whole. But, by the same logic, they must understand — and perhaps grudgingly begin to accept — that future funding boosts will have more strings attached. Otherwise, they might risk being cut out of the game altogether.
An alternative was spelt out by a senior speaker at the January leaders’ summit: fed up with the “silo” mentality that he felt pervaded African science ministries and universities, he muttered that one might deflect the lion’s share of R&D investments into engineering projects that apply existing knowledge in an African context. The end result may be the same — innovation for development.
Of course, he could have been bluffing. But it is a bluff Africa’s academics cannot afford to call.
Linda Nordling is the editor of Research Africa
South Africa’s 10-year paln for science
The department of science and technology (DST) in South Africa has given researchers a good idea of where future research funds will flow. A 10-year innovation plan, adopted by the Cabinet in July, identifies five “grand challenges” that the nation’s scientists should tackle.
The challenges have been cherrypicked to give the country maximum bang for buck in terms of alleviating poverty and boosting economic growth. They are: biotechnology “from farmer to pharma”; space science with a focus on Earth observation; safe, clean and efficient energy generation; social science to study and understand changing social dynamics; and climate change.
The plan sets out how South Africa will move from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based one.
Over the next decade it aims to double South Africa’s share of world research, double the number of researchers and make research more collaborative. The DST is currently working on an implementation plan for making such plans a reality.
Phil Mjwara, director general of the DST, said that researchers should study the government’s priorities and see where their work fits in. But there is no reason to panic, he added. The 10-year plan, which has been approved by Cabinet and is rumoured to have had a good reception in Treasury, expects the science budget to increase from 0.92% of GDP this year to 2% of GDP by 2018.
“We hope researchers will join the party. We don’t want them to think they are being forced into these areas.
There will still be room for other research,” Mjwara said. However, he added, the time for R&D done for its own sake is well and truly over. — Linda Nordling