NZ urged to be ‘the Athens of modern world’
OPINION Zealand the Athens of the modern world’’.
Sounds like a great idea but, hey, the world’s scientists are already here.
The staff establishment teaching mathematics at Victoria and Canterbury universities includes a lot of foreign names. Among them are professors and lecturers Barpalias, Chako, Dakim, Koh, Marco-reale, Mitsotakis, Sainudin, Voloch, Wichitaksorn, plus 17 others with exotic names. I’m told that most of these mathematicians are foreignborn and that 45 per cent of the staff at Victoria University are from overseas.
More telling are the names of scientists who have just won hundreds of thousands of dollars each from the Government-backed Marsden Fund.
This year, more than 1000 mathematicians, cosmologists, physicists, engineers, chemists, biologists, geologists, medical researchers, psychologists, sociologists, linguists and Maori scholars competed for the $53 million ‘‘blue skies’’ Marsden research money but only 80 were successful.
Among the winners are professor or doctor Bensoleil, Calude, Carere, Chen, Chong, Colon-rios, Dalli, Decima, De Pietri, de Ru, Hannula, Huang, Kleijn, Ledefogel, Leitao, Liu, Nakatani, Osaga, Pang, Rosen, Scheyvens, Stouflar, Susila, Tups, Xue and Zhang.
Nearly a third of the winners have foreign names. I don’t know how many of them are New Zealand-born but I’d bet most come from overseas.
We were well served by 19thcentury continental geologists Ernst Dieffenbach, Julius Haast and Ferdinand Hochstetter, who mapped our coal and gold deposits, and by Scot James Hector, who established our meteorological office, our geological survey and national museum, and also standardised our time system.
In the 1960s, Romanian-born Thomas Paulay, a professor at Canterbury University, became the world leader in earthquake engineering. In California, Japan and Christchurch, buildings built to his design have withstood earthquakes while others collapsed.
Czech geologist Alfred Steiner had a big role in developing our geothermal power and American biologist Thane Rhiney successfully suggested we treat deer not as pests to be eradicated but as commercial assets to be exploited. The great thing is foreign scientists bring different points of view, new techniques and new approaches to old problems. More newcomers would surely boost our scientific, economic and cultural lives.
The trouble is, New Zealand science functions on a shoestring, so these British and American refugees must bring their own research money with them.
But not everybody is happy with Dawkins’ suggestion. Some Kiwi women scientists reject his idea. They don’t want to see a batch of elite, ageing, white males competing with them for jobs.