Why don't we take science seriously?

Why is it we don’t take science and research half as seriously as many of us take footballers who are paid obscene amounts of money just to kick a misshapen ball around a field in front of a hysterically screaming crowd?

Somewhere our priorities have slipped when world-class organisations such as the Garvan Institute have to rely on donations as part of their income to survive and carry on work that most governments should be proud to support.

Our very own CSIRO struggles each year with progressive cuts to its budget yet still it comes up with groundbreaking developments that often put much larger countries to shame.

It seems we have a two-pronged problem. Not enough young people are being attracted to the world of science and research and not enough governments are seeing science and research as an investment in the future and therefore worth supporting.

Science, certainly, is not a favourite flavour with school students perhaps because it is perceived as being overly laden with mathematics and blackboards full of mysterious equations. Perhaps it is still associated with white coats and horn-rimmed glasses on a face that never smiles. Perhaps it is the prospect of relatively low salaries coming at the end of arduous study.

This is a great pity because Australia has a long and proud heritage of invention, from the stump jump plough to a blood test to prevent stillbirths. In between, with electronics sharing a good part of the limelight, have come the bionic ear, ultrasound and the heart pacemaker.

Adding to the formidable list are the black box flight recorder, Jindalee over-the-horizon radar, the electric drill and the refrigerator. Even Wi-Fi has its roots in Australia, having been developed at the CSIRO although now the trademark is held by the Wi-Fi Alliance in America.

There are many other inventions including the tank, an idea that was offered to Britain in 1912 but rejected until 1916 when South Australian Lance de Mole asked to be recognised as the inventor of the machine. He was eventually awarded £987 and given the army rank of honorary corporal for his contribution to saving life on the Western Front.

For a country this size, we have made an enormous contribution to the world of medicine from the already mentioned pacemaker to cancer treatments and vaccines to antivenenes for the various nasties that lurk around us.

Yet, in spite of these achievements we are not good at following through on the legal side and protecting what we do from the global sharks who are only too eager to snap up our ideas and benefit from them because we failed to protect them with a simple patent. Neither are we good at persuading industry to reach for their wallets.

When it comes to getting the best from limited resources, we seem to have a fragmented and ad hoc approach to both directing and funding science and research. There are lots of ‘cells’ of activity, each clamouring for money, but no overall guiding hand as to where our priorities might be. Commercialism plays a major role in what is seen as a desirable line of research. Of course, organisations want to recover the often huge costs of development and testing and one of the best ways is to sell the product but retain the patent rights.

But despite all these downsides, there is still plenty to inspire the would-be scientist - but interest is languishing. Fewer school children are opting for it as a career and governments’ fickle funding of research institutions from universities to small highly specialised centres does nothing to give confidence for long-term programs or long-term employment. Emissions control and climate change are two dominating issues. But we vacillate and dicker around.

We need governments to take science seriously. We once had in parliament, Barry Jones who, as a former teacher, realised the importance of science starting at the school level, but he was shackled in what he could do as the rest of the government became focused on what it saw as more important issues and pushed science out of sight. Governments require men of vision, passion and knowledge coupled with enthusiasm to inspire other governments into treating science with the importance it deserves. So far no one has put up his or her hand.