A description of Venture Research - our Blue Skies Research initiative.
The wizard's warning
A short bio for Donald W Braben
A Table showing some successes arising from the Venture Research programme
A new collaborative venture with private funders
A Report from the US National Science Board's Task Force on Transformative Research
Links to the Wiley website, and recent articles published in Times Higher Education and New Scientist.
In 1987, The American economist Robert M Solow won the Nobel Prize for Economics when he proved that some 90% of economic growth stems from "technical change", as he called it, rather than the trinity of capital, resources and labour as had previously been assumed when he started work in the 1950s. Nowadays, the most reliable route to technical change is through science. One might expect, therefore, that the-powers-that-be would be careful to preserve the sources of new science. Instead, they increasingly subject them to ill-considered constraints designed to enhance efficiency and accountability. The consequences of these actions could threaten the very future of civilization.Before about 1970, tenured academics were usually endowed with modest funding so that they could tackle any problem that interested them without reference to anyone. Academics could therefore readily satisfy their curiosity free from external constraints. Many industrial scientists were similarly free. Consequently, there was no need to distinguish Blue Skies Research from other types of research. Creativity already had maximal support. After that approximate date, however, unconditional sources of funds became increasingly difficult to find. Today, they are virtually nonexistent. For the first time in science’s long history researchers must now submit their proposals in writing to a funding agency. In turn, the agencies then routinely subject them to an arcane set of tests - peer review - designed to flag what they perceive as the best, expecting thereby that the rest will probably be lost.
These well-intentioned changes have created lumbering bureaucracies to ensure compliance. They have also inhibited challenges to convention and exploration outside the mainstreams. This is most unfortunate because the great discoveries that transformed the 20th century came out of the blue. There was no demand for them.
The work of such great scientists as Planck, Einstein, Rutherford, Fleming, Avery, Perutz, Crick and Watson Townes, McClintock, Black, and perhaps ~ 300 more of similar calibre - I call them the Planck Club - transformed the 20th century, and spawned huge levels of economic growth. Life without them would be unthinkable.
Nevertheless, their would-be successors are now unlikely to get funded because their radical ideas are unlikely to impress their peers before they have been confirmed. Consequently, there has been a dearth of major scientific discoveries in recent decades. We are living off the seedcorn. That can only have one outcome.
My good friend, the wizard, whom I meet occasionally in my dreams, explained all this to me recently using a somewhat different emphasis, as you can see in The wizard's warning .
If civilization is to survive, it is vital that we begin to create a 21st century Planck Club. We cannot know, of course, what major discoveries they might make. There is therefore an urgent need to estabablish Blue Skies Research initiatives that would be worthy of the name. Unfortunately, woolly thinking abounds. The concept of Blue Skies can surely only have meaning if the research it enables is totally free from external constraint. This means that selection procedures must pass what I call the Planck Test, that is it could reasonably be assumed that they would have led to the support of Planck Club members when they were starting out. But funding agencies seem determined to base selection procedures on peer review, which is perhaps the most severe external constraint ever devised. It was only rarely used before ~ 1970, and then only for expensive projects
There is at least one successful way of going about this. Venture Research - that is our Blue Skies Research initiative - was set up by Donald W Braben. with BP sponsorship. It ran for ten years throughout the 1980s. It was Planck-Test compliant, so to speak. In particular, it did not use peer review. It was very successful. It would also seem to have uncovered a way of sponsoring low-risk, high-reward research, an apparently self-contradictory concept that was nevertheless pioneered by Planck Club members, of course. Some of its successes are given in the Table .
However, its resuscitation requires imaginative and far sighted sponsorship, and the funding agencies generally have shown little interest in such an initiative. However, in 2005, the US National Science Board, the governing body for the National Science Foundation, set up a Task Force on Transformative Research on which I served. The Task Force Report was published in 2007. It recommended the setting up a Transformative Research initiative (Venture Research by another name), but has yet (as of February 2008) to make progress. My experience indicates that a possible way forward might be via a collaborative venture between say a public funding body and private investors.
These issues are discussed in more depth in two recent books published by John Wiley and Sons Inc:
The earlier book was reviewed in Nature, 27 January 2005, p361 (reproduced by permission) - and there is more information on both books at the Wiley website. Two recent articles focus on specific aspects of the book. One in New Scientist might be of general interest. The other in Times Higher Education (reproduced by permission) might be of more interest to UK scientists.
- Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization (2008).
- Pioneering Research: A Risk Worth Taking, (2004)
Don Braben
Venture Research International
March 2008E Mail Don Braben at don.braben@btinternet.com or telephone +44 1992 577 909.