Ireland is gaining a reputation for world-class research, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL

IT MAY not have had the phones hopping on Liveline, but comments in the recent report from An Bord Snip Nua about funding basic research surely set the test tubes rattling.

In the section on science, technology and innovation (STI), the report recommended that “any further STI investment must yield clear economic returns. The evidence adduced to date for the impact of State STI investment on actual economic activity has not been compelling.”

But does taxpayer-funded scientific research in Ireland really deserve to be cast in such a drab light?

Over the last decade, injections of State funding have transformed basic research here, multinationals are investing and setting down mutually beneficial roots within Irish universities, high-tech spin-outs are starting to blossom and Ireland is seeing increased entrepreneurship in technology. And the signs point to bigger returns if we stay the course.

Those who worked as scientists in Ireland in the old days (before the late 1990s) will recall that scant public funding – which often came from Brussels rather than Dublin – meant scrimping on consumables while watching many colleagues pack up and move abroad.

But a foresight exercise towards the end of the century changed our tack on technology investment – the government decided to inject relatively large amounts of money into basic life sciences and ICT research.

So while the Higher Education Authority beefed up the physical labs and institutions, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) started to strategically fund research, and Enterprise Ireland provided funding and support to pull the resulting discoveries out of academia and towards industry.

Almost a decade on, the investment is bearing fruit in tangible forms such as increased publications and spin-out companies. And on a wider scale Ireland is gaining a reputation for world-class research in some fields.

Those changes have not gone unnoticed internationally, and big hitters such as Wyeth, GlaxoSmithKline, Intel and IBM are now collaborating directly with university-based researchers here.

Against that backdrop, Snip’s comments on the lack of compelling evidence for a return on taxpayers’ money in science seem a little astounding to some of those researchers.

“It’s terribly short-sighted, it’s misguided, I don’t know where they get their numbers from or what the basis for their opinion is,” says Luke O’Neill, professor of biochemistry at Trinity College Dublin.

“I can see that there’s a set pot of money that the government has to dole out, and the question is who should we give that money to. But certainly it’s well known internationally that to invest in your brightest and best people through science always pays back hugely in the long run.”

Good research takes time, and the tills don’t always start ringing quickly – particularly in the biotech and pharmaceutical areas, where large companies invest billions each year and it can take up to two decades to go from idea to product, explains O’Neill.

His own story is one of the big successes from the State’s investment strategy – SFI funded his research into how inflammation is switched on inappropriately in auto-immune conditions, pharmaceutical giant Wyeth linked in with the innovative research and a spin-out company, Opsona, is now developing drugs to target conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.

Turning our back on basic research at this stage could lose us the confidence of the big private investors, argues O’Neill. “If we take our eye off the ball it will be another reason for multinationals to leave, and we have to focus on retaining them.”

He is also concerned at Snip’s suggestion that State funding should focus on research with a fast-yielding commercial return, rather than supporting a wide basic research platform from which discoveries can flow, sometimes from left-field.

O’Neill knows about this first hand – his own work on auto-immune diseases led to a fortuitous breakthrough in understanding how malaria affects the body.

“It’s chance favouring the prepared mind. This whole notion that this investment in basic research is somehow a waste of money is such complete nonsense,” he says, noting how such research provides the resources to adapt when the going gets tough.

The concern too is that we could see another brain drain from Irish research – already a small number of scientists have pulled out of taking up posts here, and it’s not a trend we want to see increasing, according to Dr Ruth Freeman, head of industry research development at SFI.

But she notes that Government commitment to science funding has been strong, even in the current economic climate, and the metrics show we are doing well – you just have to go looking for the figures.

“For journal paper citations we were at about 27th in the global ratings in 2003, and now we are up to 17th. That sends up a beacon to companies that there’s good quality here, ” says Freeman, who explains that publicly-funded research attracts private investment.

“Ireland has managed to maintain something which is pretty impressive – that for every euro the government puts into research, private enterprise puts in two.”

Last year 19 out of 50 RD wins for the IDA involved collaborations with SFI-funded researchers, and out of seven high-tech start-ups last year, three were from SFI-funded research, notes Freeman. “It’s early days, but the numbers are all going in the right direction.”

And while public spend on science here is well up on pre-2000 levels, it’s still modest by international standards, she adds. “Even though there’s a perception that massive amounts of money have gone in, we are still only at 1.6 per cent of our GDP.

“The average in the OECD is about 2.3 per cent.”

Signs now are that our investment is beginning to pay off, says Dr Keith O’Neill, director of life science and food commercialisation at Enterprise Ireland.

“We are starting to see the balance shift in the overall economic profile towards higher-tech knowledge-based industries,” he says, referring to recent surveys from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor that suggest a relatively high proportion of early stage entrepreneurs in Ireland are active in technology.

“And I think the Government understands that building the knowledge economy is a long-term investment, that it is not going to happen overnight.”