Assure its proper supply of oxygen to basic scientific research

By the end of the war, the OSRD had spent more than $450 million and in the process was responsible for developing technologies ranging from antibiotics and blood substitutes on the one hand to radar and explosives on the other. The OSRD made a massive contribution to the Allied victory—and yet Bush’s influence on the practice of post-war science remains his lasting legacy.

After the war, Vannevar Bush wrote a report titled Science, The Endless Frontier, which argued in favor of continued government investment in such basic scientific research that simply could not be done in its laboratories. The problem was that even though government scientific work did not have to produce the same immediate results as industrial research was forced to do, it did have practical applications. However, basic research was carried out without thinking about the practical purposes to which it could be laid. He argued that it results in an understanding of nature and its laws which “provides a means to answer a large number of important practical problems, although it cannot give a complete specific answer to any one of them.”

Bush’s report eventually leads to the establishment of the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency in the US that has been dedicated to promoting scientific research for the past seven decades. During that time, research funded by it has made some of the most notable advances of recent times, including path-breaking technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging, 3D printing, liquid crystal displays, and CRISPR for gene editing.

While India has many scientific achievements to be proud of, we have never adopted the NSF approach to encourage basic scientific research. As a result, we have delivered far below our potential and almost all of our scientific achievements have come from either government institutions or through investments of private capital.

In last year’s budget speech, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that a budget would be allocated to India’s National Research Foundation (NRF). 50,000 crore in five years, setting up a dedicated fund for investment in scientific research for the first time. While this is a small fraction of the more than $9 billion worth of funds that the NSF distributes every year, if deployed strategically, these funds can go a long way towards improving basic scientific research in the country. can decide.

However, to be most effective, it is important to ensure that we take the right approach to the deployment of these funds. Happily, many of the principles we would do well to apply have already been carefully documented in Vannevar Bush’s seminal paper.

The first thing we need to do is ensure that all projects undertaken by the NRF are assured of funding stability—so that the scientists responsible for them have the ability to conduct long-term research without the fear of running out of money. They are constantly being taken away from their duties to have confidence or to get more money. This means, more specifically, projects funded by the NRF must be protected against changes in government and changing political priorities. Science has always operated on a much longer time scale than the election cycles to which our political leadership is under. Accordingly, the NRF funds once given should not be vulnerable to cancellation at the will of the political class.

Secondly, all NRF funded projects must have the necessary operational autonomy to be able to determine the methods and scope of their research. Unlike other government projects, where funding is provided for identified milestones and deliverables, basic research should be free to proceed through a variety of investigations, even if none of them promise any practical application. don’t do Ultimately, it is not an act of applied research to provide practical solutions, but instead to generate the kinds of knowledge and information that will only tangibly inform industrial development. Unless researchers can independently choose the paths that their research takes them along, there is no point in asking them to embark on this journey.

Lastly, no NRF funds should make their way into government laboratories. As discussed above, all government institutions, like their private sector counterparts, are subject to pressures that come in the way of basic research. If the NRF is serious about supporting science, it will ensure that it only funds institutions dedicated to basic research. Wherever possible, the government should prioritize shifting its research projects out of their laboratories and into research institutions where they can get the attention they deserve.

India has a long history of excellence in basic research. We need to nurture that expertise by giving it the necessary oxygen to develop. After all, our greatest technological breakthroughs have come from doing good science.

Rahul Mathan is a participant in Trilegal and also has a podcast called Ex Machina. His twitter handle @matthan . Is