Politicians, don’t interfere with science

I’m sure I’m not the only researcher who felt a chill down my spine on hearing that, over the two years, Australian politician Simon Birmingham had vetoed $4 million worth of Australian Research Council grants while education minister.

The grants had been rigorously appraised by experts and ranked in the 20 per cent to be funded.

As minister, Birmingham’s job was to give those experts’ decisions his seal of approval. Instead, it seems he took one look at their titles and decided they were a ludicrous way for the council to spend its money.

‘‘The music of nature and the nature of music’’?

‘‘Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar’’?

How could Australia possibly benefit from such research?

But here’s the thing: We often can’t tell how the world will end up benefiting from lots of taxpayer-funded research.

I’ve made a career out of making nasty bacteria glow in the dark. In my lab we use these bacteria to try to find new medicines to kill antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

With superbugs threatening vulnerable hospital patients and our ability to do routine surgery safely, it’s not hard for me to convince people of the value of my research.

But my glowing bacteria wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Edmund Newton Harvey, who more than 100 years ago was curious about why and how fireflies glow and wrote his paper ‘‘On the chemical nature of the luminous material of the firefly’’.

Or Marlene de Luca and her team who, in 1985, cloned the gene that fireflies use to turn a chemical called luciferin into light, paving the way for me to engineer that very gene into the bacterium that causes tuberculosis in 2010.

Our version of the Australian Research Council, the Marsden Fund, last week allocated $85.6m to fund 136 projects, covering topics ranging from the quantum entanglement of atoms to the learning ability of bumblebees.

Act’s David Seymour has said he’d cut the Marsden Fund, which he sees as a waste of public money.

But now more than ever we need to safeguard research from political interference. How can we expect to understand the world without it?