Dialogue: When it comes to science, we're 10 big steps behind

Achieving technological excellence is not much different from achieving sporting excellence. Thus we can learn from our rugby success, writes DICK WILKINS*.

We have been enjoined to catch the knowledge wave, take our turn, and have been exposed to voyeuristic vignettes of countries that have successfully embraced the new technologies. All good stuff, and certainly a change from the Think Big espousals of the 1980s.

But when it comes to how we actually do it, most commentators are long on hope and short on pragmatics. Simply, we have run science and scientists down to a level that renders many technological ventures neither viable nor competitive.

Let's look at 10 straightforward steps that will go some way to putting us on track for a sustained technological future.

But before doing this, consider this imaginary scenario. Denmark (one of the world's technological wizards) becomes very impressed with the All Blacks and decides it wants to become a world-class rugby nation.

The Danes travel the world watching rugby, give lectures on their return, invite All Blacks to speak in Denmark, set up management structures, recruit a team with the right physical attributes, pour money on the venture and expect to succeed on the world scene. Without a second thought, you and I would both confidently predict they would fail.

More to the point, we would both agree on the reasons for this failure. Denmark has no history of rugby endeavour, no education programme that teaches youngsters basic skills, no infrastructure of clubs and provinces that ensures fierce competition before a player advances to a place in a national team. There is also no pool of experienced former players who can coach and administer the game and, finally, no public with a deep and passionate understanding of the game.

Achieving scientific excellence is not all that different from achieving sporting excellence. The factors that contribute to success are strikingly similar, and once we move out of mainstream sports such as rugby, our successes are equally sporadic in both.

We have periods in which a group of scientists or sportspeople excel in a certain discipline, be it animal research or long-distance running, and long droughts of relative failure.

What we are now asking of science and technology is a sustained effort that makes us competitive and brings us success on the world stage. But I fear we are going at it in much the same way as the Danes in the fictitious rugby example.

Here are 10 basic steps to bring the same common sense to science that we all have when it comes to rugby success.

* Enhance public awareness. The general awareness of science is appalling and we urgently need to bring science into the life of the public.

Comparatively little Government input would be required to promote a much better understanding of the general principles of science and the profession of scientist. In particular, promoting an understanding of scientific method would bring huge dividends when debating issues such as genetic manipulation or the latest cancer scare.

* Improve school education. Most people's science education ends with their schooling. We must improve the teaching of fundamental areas of biology, such as evolution and genetics, which are key to an understanding of growth areas such as biotechnology and genomics. Recruitment of top-calibre science teachers is imperative.

* Update our university courses. Much has been written of declining academic standards. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to meet the market, whereas we need to move in the opposite direction and increase the academic content and the level of our courses, especially in areas such as biology in which a huge increase in knowledge has come in the past 20 years.

* Create attractive career pathways. Scientists do not have attractive career development pathways. Schoolteaching is not attractive to top science graduates, universities work scientists harder and provide fewer facilities than ever, crown research institutes value administrators and managers much more than scientists, and the few scientists who succeed in supporting themselves on research funding live a perilous existence. To remain a credible profession, the upper end of the scientist salary scale must be doubled - and quickly.

* Make doing science attractive. The young scientist starting a research career has a pretty dismal choice, either slaving it out in a university with few startup facilities, or joining a crown research institute to work on some preordained project. Very few have the chance to get into a research area of their own choosing, yet this alternative is probably the one into which they would put the most energy and enthusiasm, and the one that would deliver the most to New Zealand in the long run.

* Liberate research and development funds. We are letting the old, the infirm and the established capture and maintain a stranglehold on Government research funds. The young, bright scientists and entrepreneurs need a level playing field.

* Make funding competitive. A huge percentage of the research funding is dispensed without assessment of scientific merit. This means that scientists with the best ideas and the best abilities are regularly shut out of the funding system. Our scientific mandarins refuse to implement a system of peer review which is universally recognised as the one system that allows for both competition and the empowerment of scientists. They claim it is unmanageable here, yet the Marsden Fund for basic research has been spectacularly successful in implementing such a system with very modest overheads. We must extend peer review.

* Replace science managers with science leaders. We have embraced a culture in which managers with very little contemporary scientific knowledge, but double the salaries of their top scientists, are running some of our largest institutes. This craziness must stop.

* Spin off real commercial research and development companies. It has often been said that in their efforts to become commercial operations, our crown research institutes have disenfranchised the taxpayer from their public good-funded research without returning a meaningful profit on the money invested. We would do much better if we viewed the crown research institutes as an engineroom turning out science for the public good and encouraging startup commercial companies to capitalise on this work.

* Ensure our scientists and institutions are public-friendly. At the moment, the public finds it extremely difficult to get unbiased scientific information on matters such as genetic manipulation. The relevant crown research institutes are all deeply into the technologies, intellectual property and confidentiality and their staffs are limited in what they can say by company policy. Even university staff may be almost as limited in what they can say because of funding, collaborative and commercial concerns.

All of this is common sense and if I substituted the words "rugby" and "player" for "science" and "scientist," these suggestions would hardly cause a word of dissent among the rugby fraternity.

Why is it that when we come to science, we seem to lose our marbles and think there is some magical quick fix that is going to give us rapid success, just like the imaginary Danish rugby team?

These 10 steps might not guarantee us the World Cup every time, but we should at least make the semi-finals.

* Professor Dick Wilkins lectures in biological sciences at Waikato University.

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