Countries cannot trust their economic futures to yesterday's ideas, writesPatrick Fottrell
When the world's most competitive economies all invest in key areas of scientific research, Ireland should consider doing so, too. The Government adopted that strategy in 2000 when it created Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) to recruit and retain world-class researchers in biotechnology and information and communications technology. This past July, the Government took another major step by making SFI a statutory body. In doing so, it made clear that Ireland's new research-based knowledge economy is - and must be - here to stay.
Already, SFI is helping to support 130 world-class researchers at Ireland's universities and institutes of technology, including 45 who have moved to Ireland from abroad. Not only are these researchers leading a new era of Irish discovery, they will also be employing more than 700 researchers and research support staff. Together, they will help make Ireland more than a consumer of the ideas that shape the next advances in science and technology.
SFI's goal, after all, is to fund research that builds the knowledge-economy - an economy in which discovery leads to products and processes that society values, an economy with high-paying jobs and continued opportunities for individual and business growth.
From Finland to India to the US, countries are investing in this type of productive research in biotechnology (BioT) and information and communications technology (ICT). They recognise how valuable BioT and ICT research are to national development. In England, Germany, and France alone, there are more than 1,000 biotech companies, while employment in Europe's BioT industry totals 190,000. Successful outcomes of ICT research, meanwhile, shape daily life - from mobile phones to satellite television. In the US, between 1996 and 2000, ICT-producing industries accounted for some 28 per cent of overall real economic growth.
As these countries recognise, nations cannot trust their economic futures to yesterday's ideas.
SFI has been charged to act upon that principle. The Government targeted BioT and ICT specifically because in these areas Ireland has the best chance not only of developing an outstanding core of research leaders, but also of generating valuable discoveries and products. In BioT, such results might come from investigations into methods of strengthening human resistance to disease or into biosensors capable of reducing the side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs. In ICT, important results could come from research into computer systems that manage global shipping or lasers capable of improving eye surgery. SFI-funded researchers are pursuing these and many other promising areas.
SFI, however, takes a broad approach in deciding what to fund. While BioT and ICT include disciplines ranging from mathematics to chemistry, from biology to electrical engineering, SFI asks researchers who seek funding to define what they consider the best avenues for exploration. Internationally distinguished experts then review the proposals and advise SFI on which researchers have the greatest capacity to transform their ideas into meaningful results.
Science and engineering require this comprehensive approach because they change so rapidly. It was, after all, not even 10 years ago that organ transplantation and the World Wide Web became common. Other countries have also shown that an approach to research driven by expertise and supportive of bold ideas can succeed dramatically.
The US has, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), supported countless scientists who have gone on to become research leaders at the university and industrial levels and fuelled advances in understanding and treating disease. In the past five years alone, researchers funded by the NIH discovered a proven, affordable strategy for reducing the transmission of the HIV virus from mother to infant, invented a laser technique that safely removes targets as small as one cell (of great value to people suffering from cancer, for example), and completed the first sequence of a human chromosome, chromosome 22, which has been implicated in congenital heart disease, mental retardation, birth defects and leukaemia.
The US has learned the lesson of these accomplishments. In the 1950s, it created the National Science Foundation (NSF) to invest in the best university researchers to develop new generations of research talent, and support individuals with compelling ideas. NSF-funded researchers have carried out the seminal work that since spawned discoveries such as the Internet and computer mouse, as well as entire fields of exploration, including speech-recognition software. Meanwhile, companies from Microsoft to SUN Microsystems to thousands of smaller enterprises have sprung up around the universities where NSF-funded researchers work.
On its own scale, Ireland can enjoy similar results. In the 1990s, Ireland proved its ability to attract investment in leading areas of research and development.
Ireland is home to nine of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, 13 of the top 20 medical devices companies, and 630 software companies. It has earned its place in the knowledge-based economy.
But this success is only the first step to lasting growth. This success gives us an opportunity to create the very links between university and industrial researchers that other countries desire. Ireland can retain its scientific and engineering talent. It can attract the finest researchers from overseas. It can support new, vital partnerships between researchers in academia and industry. It can say to students, the future awaits you here in Ireland. Ireland's ability to build 130 research programmes in only two years and its effectiveness in recruiting high-tech companies suggests that these goals are all attainable. Now that the Government has made SFI a statutory body, the partnership focused on these results has become even stronger. The knowledge-based economy of the 21st-century need not be built only by other countries. It can and will also be built right here at home.