It's sometimes difficult articulating what the benefits of basic research can be. This week I had to explain this to my students- and sadly the textbook was not as helpful as I had hoped. It was the standard fare, vague claims of benefits that could emerge in the future.
Left to my own devices I came up with I think, was a far better illustration. If we go back to the 1930s to early 1960s we have a lot of basic research going on into genetics. Whilst we take it for granted that DNA is the molecule of inheritance, this had to be discovered. There was for a while, an alternative hypothesis that protein molecules within the cell acted as the inheritance mechanism. The Watson-Crick discovery of the structure of DNA didn't take place until 1953. This basic research then led to some very important medical applications years later.
In the late 1970s there was a looming insulin crisis. Insulin is used to treat diabetes. For decades, insulin was extracted from slaughtered animals and used to treat people. This had two problems. The minor problem was that a small percentage of people had adverse reactions to this animal insulin. The major problem was that the number of diabetics was increasing and the number of slaughtered animals was not. The forecast was that by the early 1980s there would be insufficient insulin supplies. More and more people would simply be excluded from insulin-treatment. This would result in both shortened lives, suffering and of course, deaths. Bear in mind this is from an era where diabetes rates was around 2-2.5% of the population. It is more than double that now.
The solution was elegant. A gene that produces insulin was inserted into a bacterium. Bacteria started producing medical insulin- and at a level that kept pace with medical need. Millions of people with diabetes are basically alive today because of the basic research that occurred decades earlier. Without knowing about genes, where they're located and how they function, none of this would have followed.
The benefits of Basic Research- Genetics and insulin Aug 17
6 Comments Leave a comment
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kemo sabe 303 days ago
I have never heard anyone say that basic research is not valuable, sooner or later.
I have also heard it said that we don’t do enough of it in NZ, which is a different matter entirely. -
Brendan Moyle 303 days ago
@acleron
I think when you’re talking to students you can’t assume that they’re going to be that familiar with science- few will be aware of the links between basic research undertaken decades earlier and the applications that eventually stemmed from it.
Nothing quite says that basic research is valuable like the millions of lives saved by our ability to use bacteria to make insulin. That depended on discovering what the molecule of inheritance was, the structure of genes, and how they worked :)
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acleron 303 days ago
@Brendan You are of course right.
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Brendan Moyle 303 days ago
@kemo sabe
Well, one of the issues is that most things goverments spend on is ‘valuable’. Educating kids how to read is valuable, protetcting water-quality is valuable etc. The first step is giving a rationale for why expenditure on basic research is valuable. That at least gives a reason why governments should consider funding it over spedning elsewhere.
My issue is that this is often expressed in vague terms. That hinders understanding what makes basic research valuable. It’s not enough to sort of wave your hands and promise great things will happen in the future. Having good examples matters.
Just how much we should spend on basic research is a different probelm :)
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kemo sabe 303 days ago
@Brendan
I wasn’t quite clear enough. There are some (many?) who argue that we should spend more on basic research and less on applied research. They usually argue that you can get a big payoff from basic research and cite examples like your insulin one.
In fact the proportion of our research effort in NZ which is classified ‘basic’ (27%) is already quite high by international standards.
I think it is easier to make an economic case for doing relatively less basic research in a small economy like ours. Somebody should be doing it, but not us.
Wouldn’t it be more profitable and quicker to consider those areas of basic research which haven’t given benefits?
The only two I can think of are cosmology and high energy particle physics and I’m sure that someone can point to a benefit from those as well.
Actually, particle physics at CERN gave birth to the very medium we are using but that was a result of the information dissemination problem rather than the basic research.