Very few become Nobel laureates. But we all have something to learn of the conditions of those who were the authors wrote. The picture is from last year’s award ceremony. Photo: Anders Wiklund / TT
Young researchers need more time than that given today to grow into the academic system.
Nobel Prize bestows luster to science and to the country in which it is awarded, as well as to the entities responsible for the selection of its celebrated recipients. The presence of royalty and political leaders at the ceremonies and festivities at the awards ceremony contributes to shine.
But the Nobel Prize shedding light also on the conditions that best favor the growth of all of this acclaimed knowledge that we can take to us to understand the world better and use in serious and practical matters. In the discussion of these conditions is the politicians’ commitment to welcome and indicate the location – even when the festivities are over. It should also be in their interest because the Government is currently preparing a new research policy bill.
Net prices provide some pointers on how a sensible research policy should look like. Here rewarded a research that spans a broad spectrum of scientific endeavors, from neutriners change of identity, the cell’s ability to repair its DNA, the active agent against malaria and parasitic worms. The stakes are different in many ways. For example, the discovery of neutrinos characteristics answer to the fundamental questions of theory, as yet no identifiable related to people’s daily lives and society, while the identification of the enzymes that repair damage to DNA’s genetic code after many years of research may be helpful in the fight against cancer. The research on parasitic diseases seems not to have had the improvement of human health in sight and currently contributes to saving the lives of millions of people.
In this way varies all research. But qualified science also has a lot in common. So also this year’s Nobel prizes. The work that led to prices have taken a long time – and it has been allowed to take a long time. This ensures the opportunities for both sudden leaps, often unexpected, progress cumulative development of science, where new results build on old results, whether they confirm, modify or even repeal them.
Another common denominator most of this year’s winners is that the knowledge gains they made are the answers to the questions they themselves have set. Sometimes it has occurred with the support of others, but sometimes during the resistance or lack of interest, as in the case of the skepticism in the beginning met Aziz Sancar, one of this year’s Laureates in chemistry when he was in the 1970s tried to understand why blue light can repair DNA damage caused by UV radiation. The Chemistry Prize shows that the promising cancer therapy that now promises to fall out as a result of the Laureates’ discoveries have many years of basic research that condition.
Nobel Prize history also illustrates that science is an international business. And this in a double sense: first, by qualified research rewarded wherever it has come about, both by scientists to be the prices in many cases carried out their work wherever conditions were favorable to satisfy their particular scientific curiosity, in many cases, someone completely other than in the environment where they were born and grew up. This is also true for several of this year’s Nobel Prize winners.
We have a lot to learn from Nobel laureates as well varied as similar experiences and of the favorable conditions they worked under. In order to provide a solid contribution to knowledge development, science must have room to operate in the long term, and therefore politicians ensure a stable and predictable support for basic research, even to the research whose relevance to the daily lives of people and society is not always possible to identified at once. This means that the question must be clear, therefore, that a substantial part of the tax-funded research must be free from being controlled by the most short-sighted generated social issues, the temporary ups and downs of the economic cycle or in other social processes. It also means that governments must provide young researchers more time than given today to grow into the academic system by extending the qualification services, as well as to enhance support for international mobility of researchers.
Allowing short-term innovation orders directing Research everyone would however lose. Think about the 1600′s researchers had had to limit themselves to their times most pressing issues. How long would we have had to wait for a theory of gravity, a theory of long-term, but in its time unsuspected implications for virtually everything we humans since then has touched. The same intellectual diversion can be done about the emergence of the theory of evolution, the identification of carbon emissions impact on the Earth’s temperature, primes mathematics, as well as in research that can never be considered for a few Nobel Prize: many years of archaeological research on human födoämnesvanor or the long Islam immunological research tradition whose earlier esoteric knowledge gains in today’s hot demand.
The freedom of scientists to independently formulate their questions and hypotheses is an important prerequisite for scientific breakthroughs, which in the long term often lead to important applications in society.
The lessons will be posted here has been given many times before. They must be repeated again and again. This is particularly important because the policy – research policy included – are so easy to give in to the impulse to short-term solutions instead of sticking to what gives the yield in the long run.
Very few become Nobel laureates. But we all have something to learn of the conditions of those who were there, and all researchers deserve good conditions for his important scientific missions. It is the society in the long term, everything to gain.
Arne Jarrick
The vice-president of the Royal Academy. Sciences
Christina Moberg
The president of the Royal Academy. Sciences
Mr Anderson
The vice-president of the Royal Academy. Sciences
Dan Larhammar
The vice-president of the Royal Academy. Sciences
Göran K Hansson
The Permanent Secretary of the Royal Academy. Sciences
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