Scientists opting out of ‘fundamental’ research
Lack of funding in decade before 2015 has pushed many into projects with an immediate application
A team of Canadian scientists says a decade of tight federal funding for “fundamental” science — bigpicture questions about our world — has driven many to study shortterm topics of applied research.
As a result, they say most Canadian labs are thinking less like Einstein, and more like someone designing the next iPhone or heart drug.
The analysis by the University of Ottawa’s Jeremy Kerr, Megan Dodd at McMaster, and Julia Baum and Kristina Tietjen at the University of Victoria will be released Wednesday.
Fundamental research funding — for work that tries to understand the world we live in, without an immediate application — has dropped by about a third in the period from 2005-2015, the group says.
That is because inflation ate away at research budgets at the same time as there were more and more researchers, Kerr said.
As funding was spread thinner, “researchers are getting out of the business of doing just fundamental research.” Fewer than two per cent in Canada now do only this work, their survey found. The figure used to be about 30 per cent, Kerr said.
“They have been forced to chase the money ... If one of the benefits of fundamental research is Einstein-scale discovery, then Canada has been slowly losing its capacity for that sort of heavy-hitting breakthrough.”
One problem: Provinces wanted more university students, “so you’ve got to have professors in classrooms who can teach them, and the research reputation of the universities and the research ranking exercise mean that universities are strongly under the gun” to produce big research, said Kerr.
Federal budgets haven’t reflected this. “The federal ship is going one direction in terms of funding — this is up till 2015 — and the provincial ships are sailing in the opposite direction.
“We’re using student tuition more and more to subsidize university research missions and that’s a tricky problem.
“For people who do discoverybased research, people who are just curiosity-driven, their capacity to support those kinds of questions has been fading and fading up until 2015. In 2016, we saw a fairly big infusion of money. It was the beginning of turning this around.”
The analysis is not connected with the national task force under physician-scientist David Naylor that was appointed by the Liberal government to study basic research. Its report came out in the spring, calling for massive new funding.
Kerr, Baum and their team argue that “fundamental research funding should be linked to the number of active researchers in the Canadian research ecosystem.”
The Liberals so far have been a “huge” help, adding $76 million for basic research in 2016 and “massive infrastructure support” this year, Kerr said. “It’s been a pretty good couple of years for us.
“The other thing is the minister actually takes our calls,” he said. “You couldn’t have a conversation with the previous government very easily.”