We should nurture curiosity-driven research

Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, President of the European Research Council

In several countries in Europe, the recent financial crisis has led to cuts in many areas of government spending, including research and innovation. Austerity measures have often been accompanied by attempts to focus spending on research that has a supposedly foreseeable short-term impact. But this strategy of immediate gratification is highly damaging to the prospect of more comprehensive scientific innovation. In all research systems, it is essential that a significant proportion of funding is designated to exploratory, curiosity-driven research.

In the past couple of decades, Ireland has made significant advances in its research and development investment and has rapidly caught up with other European Union member states. Academic institutions across the country appeal to high-level researchers, who are drawn by quality scientific equipment and infrastructures and the prospect of working with top colleagues and students.

Yet Ireland is also tempted to privilege a top-down approach. It is not inappropriate for policy-makers to determine research funding priorities, provided that enough room is left for bottom-up and curiosity-driven research too.

Funding for research that has an intended application is no doubt worthwhile, but investment in basic research is investment in cutting-edge innovation. The link between intellectual creativity and innovation requires some thinking; it is a critical relationship which cannot be judged merely in terms of patents and statistics.

Research vs Commercial Purpose

We would do well to remember that many successful inventions, which we now take for granted in our daily lives, are the result of research that had no apparent commercial purpose. Consider many of the building blocks of the computer age: Turing machines, programming languages, even the internet itself. They are among the many inventions that can be traced back to genuinely new ideas conceived in the academic world as products of basic research projects. Yet they have contributed significantly to our lives if they have not changed them altogether.

To achieve such great innovations with lasting impacts on our societies, we need solid foundations in basic scientific research. Only led by the principles of academic curiosity and scientific excellence can we hope to discover the unexpected. We must invest in understandings before we can expect the tangible applications.

If we look at the most successful regions and countries in terms of innovation, we see that their achievements are without exception built on a bedrock of excellent basic research. This foundation produces not only new knowledge, but also highly skilled researchers, access to international networks, new technologies and spin-off companies. Scientific breakthroughs such as the discovery of penicillin or the isolation of graphene added first to the overall pool of knowledge before they could contribute more broadly.

The European Research Council (ERC) is committed to the development of basic, frontier research at the highest level. Since it was created by the European Commission in 2007, the ERC has set a clear inspirational target for many researchers, young ones in particular. It continues to fund the most promising ideas across Europe and supports those scientists who strive for developments in yet unexplored fields. But European research funding bodies such as the ERC cannot act as a substitute for national research funding. This is because the ERC’s budget, for example, amounts to only 2% of EU public expenditure on R&D. The responsibility to support the potential of human curiosity rests equally with national and regional governments as well as with charitable foundations.

If science is to make truly influential innovations, funding cannot be short-sighted. To maintain a healthy research ecosystem, it is right to invest in long-term curiosity-driven research.