Which sciences are currently undervalued and which have received too much attention?

Is there an ethical consideration that shoud be addressed? If so, what kind of controls are needed, and who should be responsible for administering them?

Is there room for one or more new branch(es) of science? If so, what is its (their) mandate/scope and what (if any) kind of ethical/legal oversight do(es) it (they) require?

[ 27 July 2003: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

Ed.:

(And there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.)

[ 27 July 2003: Message edited by: Flowers By Irene ]

Me, I think scientists should get together and form an "open science" movement modeled after the open source movement. Have a collection of online, peer-reviewed journals that are available for FREE to anyone who wants them. Make publishing costs as low as possible. Thusly the disadvantaged of the earth will more quickly reap the benefits, and science will progress more quickly with more minds working on more issues.

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Oh, and I should get a job in Canada

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Anyhow, back on topic. The increasing privatization of scientific inquiry bothers me a heck of a lot. This is especially true in biology and biochemistry, of course, with Big Pharma competing with Big Farma to see who can make the most money out of genetic research. However, private institutions tend to lack accountability, and they definitely add conflict-of-interest issues. The words "tobacco company scientist" should conjure up enough issues to get the point across. The Journal of the American Medical Association ahs been having a number of discussions on the problematic issue of whether scientists should disclose their funding support, which may - alas - sometimes bias what they're reporting.

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Originally posted by April Follies:
Oh, and I should get a job in Canada.

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Originally posted by April Follies:
Corporate priorities also drive funding of research programs to an extent, which I see as unfortunate. It's getting pretty severe here in the US, with curricula essentially being diverted toward "applied" sciences, i.e. those that corporations expect to give profitable results in a few years.

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This phenomenon is not limited to the US, unfortunately, April. It's becoming the norm in Canada too.

Someone I know used to work for the National Research Council, the scientific-research department of the federal government. In the "good old days", say, back in the 1960's, the NRC used to be devoted to "pure" scientific reserach, that is, science for the sake of science. Not anymore. Particularly in the last ten years, it's now "applied science" all the way, to the point where researchers now have corporate liaisons constantly looking over their shoulders, poking and prodding them to "invent us this" or "build us that", all in the interest of making a quick profit.

I seriously doubt that those corporate flunkies realize they are effectively destroying science. Because that's not how things work in the real world. Most of the truly great scientific discoveries were made essentially by accident.

Consider the following example: Back in 1819, a Danish professor named Hans Christian Oersted was fiddling with magnets and electric wires in front of his students, trying to demonstrate the principles of electricity as they were then understood. To his amazement, and entirely by accident, he discovered that an electric current run thru a wire caused the needle of a nearby compass to move. (This was actually a little embarrassing, as Prof. Oersted had been telling his students that electricity and magnetism were unconnected to each other!)

To make a long story short, Oersted's chance discovery led to a complete scientific transformation and the introduction of the concept of electromagnetism. Which led eventually to the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and all the other wondrous communication technologies that followed, right thru to this medium of the Internet we're using right now.

The point is, Prof. Oersted did not intend to spark a communications revolution. He was just fiddling around with magnets and wires out of pure scientific curiosity, without any particular application in mind. In fact, if someone from the Copenhagen Chamber of Commerce had come to Oersted and commanded, "Invent us a means of instantaneous long-distance communication!", chances are the good professor would never have stumbled upon his discovery at all -- he would have been doing something else entirely.

The corporatization of research has been something that's been bothering me for quite a few years now, and I regret that I won't be able to do proper scientific research at the master's and doctoral level that has purely theoretical implications - which is not to say it's impossible, but that getting the money for such is harder than if your research appears to have directly practical applications.

I think this is one of the reasons why I resist the idea of being required to do research as part of being a professor (which is what I want to do) and instead wish to find a place where I can do 100% teaching. )

As to the more general questions posed above:

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What are the most important/urgent areas where research ought to be funded publicly (rather than by special interests)?

Which sciences are currently undervalued and which have received too much attention?

Is there an ethical consideration that shoud be addressed? If so, what kind of controls are needed, and who should be responsible for administering them?

Is there room for one or more new branch(es) of science? If so, what is its (their) mandate/scope and what (if any) kind of ethical/legal oversight do(es) it (they) require?

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Any research into the basic nature of the universe at the very least needs to be publicly funded. The example of Oersted is an excellent case in point about how some fiddling around with electricity and magnetism launched a pathway to understanding the universe at a more fundamental level, and in the process unleashed all sorts of what we would term today, "spin-off" benefits.

One example of theoretical research into the basic nature of the universe that may go unfunded is research into the K mesons, or Kaons, which the KAON project a decade ago was supposed to open up opportunities for research in Canada. After the feds killed it, TRIUMF was in a hell of a bind; I don't know if they've ever completed KAON, but if they haven't, then the fundamental discoveries about the nature of strange quark interactions and decays will not come from Canada thanks to a penny-pinching bastard named Paul Martin.

Right now, K mesons are just silly particles that decay in unusual ways compared to other particles, but for all we know it could mean some entirely new vista of practical applications 50 years later.

Ditto for graviton research. Right now one of the big problems with getting anywhere in physics is that the current understanding of the universe rests on two mutually exclusive methods of understanding the fundamental forces that drive it. There is some overlap, as relativistic quantum mechanics demonstrates but in the main the two have not been combined properly - I refer to general relativity, which is a geometric description of gravitation, and quantum mechanics or more properly, quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, which describe the weak/electromagnetic, and strong interactions, which are based on the idea of particle exchange.

The utterly different description of gravity as a result of warping of space-time poses a fundamental problem in understanding how it might be unified with the other three forces, which have a consistent model of description of their interactions via particle exchange.

I apologize if this isn't very clear to any of you, but the basic point I am making is that a successful breakthrough, a la Oersted, in unifying all four of the fundamental forces would open up new horizons of understanding the universe and may have tons of practical spin-offs.

Ideally all research at any university would be publicly funded and the government would own the rights to such research and if a corporation wanted to freeload off it they would have to pay the government a very hefty fee for licencing it, upon which the government could give a portion of the fee to the guy who did the research.

Which sciences are undervalued? I'm biased - chemistry in general isn't quite as sexy as the biochemistry field, as we chemists aren't out to change life as we know it and the more exotic areas of physics I think are also undervalued. Yes, the grand unified theories occasionally get press, but I think most of the time people just wonder why physicists are apparently wasting their time researching something with no immediate practical benefit.

Ditto astronomy and geology. Chemistry's star attraction is probably entirely practical - materials science; you may have heard about all sorts of new polymers and composites that are being designed. The areas of chemistry that are, I think, ignored somewhat are in quantum chemistry and the use of the mu meson as a research tool. Yes, it's getting more interest from chemists, but the muonium research and so on have, as yet, limited practical application except in terms of indirect understanding about the behavior of hydrogen in reactions.

Psychology is also immensely undervalued these days, I think. Psychology has more direct relevance to understanding human motivations and desires with reference to a holistic model of human behavior, rather than the predominant view of human interaction, which is the "economics lens", if you will, which seeks to shoehorn humans into the homo economicus model and thus reduce all human interactions to the exchange of money.

Ethical considerations? As far as chemistry and physics are concerned, since we don't work with animal or human subjects the main ethical consideration is that one's research should not be captured by a big corporation for the profit of a few instead of the benefit of humanity.

As for life-type sciences - i.e. biology and kinesiology, the added ethical concern is that no human or animal trial subject should be harmed.

Communications theory, cybernetics and other multi-disciplinary subjects need funding as they can lead to fundamentally new discoveries just by applying some fresh thinking.

Bring applied math out of the cold. Canada should more aggressively persue technology transfer efforts and get some of the comp.sci and other technologies out from under the spooks and into the public domain.