Scientific Research and Economic Development

Introduction

Professor Pravin J. Patel’s article, ‘Research Culture in Indian Universities’, gives very useful information about the history of research in European and American universities and about what should be done for revamping Indian universities, for example, in terms of research culture. The article correlates quality and quantity of research in a country’s universities with the economic status of the country. Professor Patel says, ‘Knowledge creation through scientific research is a key to economic development’. This is an unexceptionable statement, and I fully endorse it.

There is, however, one catch, that is, one needs to recognise that the relationship between the extent of new knowledge created and economic development would show up only to the extent that the new knowledge created per unit population is above a threshold. India is such an example. In terms of sheer number of scientific research papers published per year (but not in terms of the number of papers published per year per unit population), India ranks amongst the top ten countries of the world, but the largest number and the largest percentage of poor people in the world are also in India. Furthermore, when we talk of scientific research today, we cannot ignore the stand-alone research laboratories promoted by government agencies or departments and the ones in industry.

Research outside the University System

In the early part of the last century, various government institutes and private organisations around the world realised the need for setting up scientific research institutions outside the university system. As science and technology developed, their requirements also changed. Certain crucial facilities now required large amounts of money and could, therefore, be set up only as national facilities, and this was best done under the aegis of autonomous national research institutions. A need for people who could engage in full-time scientific research work increasingly began to be felt, as in a university, one has to fulfil the major obligation of teaching. Moreover, the university system was compartmentalised into departments. As science progressed, the need for a multidisciplinary approach grew exponentially. It was found much easier to satisfy this need by setting up institutions designed for it, rather than by trying to adapt the university system to it. For reasons such as these, governments all over the world began to set up research agencies to complement the work that the universities were doing. Thus came into existence, in Britain, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in the second quarter of the last century—which was subsequently closed down in the third quarter of the century—the Medical Research Council in 1920 and the Agricultural Research Council in 1931. Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique (CNRS) was founded in 1939 in France, which is the country’s major government-funded scientific research agency today. In Germany, a very large proportion of scientific research today is done under the auspices of the institutes of the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft, which was earlier known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute). In the states of the erstwhile Soviet Union as well, most of the scientific research, today, is carried out by the institutes of the respective academies of science. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) came into existence in 1887. The NIH complex in Bethesda, near Washington DC, employs close to 13,000 people as of now. The NIH has produced over eighty Nobel Prize winners, if one includes those outside the NIH who have received major financial support from it.

In India, between 1900 and the beginning of the Second World War (1939), we had only two such non-university agencies for research: the Imperial Research Fund Association (now the Indian Council of Medical Research, ICMR), founded in 1911, and the Imperial Council of Agricultural Research (now the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, ICAR), founded in 1929. The reasons, perhaps, were that (a) India’s agriculture was contemporaneous with European agriculture at that time and the provision of enough food was rightly considered essential by the British for continuance of governance. And (b) the plethora of tropical diseases—many of which were infectious (such as small pox and cholera)— provided exciting material for research by British scientists and their containment was considered both economically and politically expedient. By 1950, two other scientific agencies were established: the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 1942 during Second World War and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1948. The provisional budget for the AEC in its first year (1948–49) was put at ₹ 1 million, which was to be raised to ₹ 4 million in the fourth year.

As regards industry, today, there are stand-alone research labs set up by industry such as Hoffman la Roche’s Basel Institute of Immunology, or their institute of molecular biology in Nutley, New Jersey, in the United States. The output of scientific research from the government and industrial laboratories in many countries far exceeds the output of research from the universities and, therefore, should be taken into account when looking at the relationship between the quality and the quantity of scientific research and economic development in a country. Incidentally, in India, the number of research laboratories under various research agencies (Department of Space, Department of Atomic Energy, Council of Scientific and Industries Research, ICAR, ICMR, Defence Research and Development Organisation, Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Forestry and Environment, Department of Information Technology and Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Resources) exceeds the number of universities in India that are engaged in serious scientific research. Still, the threshold that I have mentioned previously, in terms of both quality and quantity of research done in the country, does not seem to have been reached.

Then, there is the question of what kind of research should the universities, stand-alone government research laboratories and industries’ research laboratories do. There are three kinds of research possible: basic research, applied research and developmental work. There are important differences between the three kinds of research. The short-term gains to the country are mostly from developmental work and the long-term gains are mostly from basic research. The investment required is also the largest for developmental work and the least for basic research—although, today, the picture may be changing for basic research in certain areas of physics and biology, the investment is substantially high. Nevertheless, it is often said that, ideally, universities should do basic research, industry laboratories should do applied research and developmental work and the government-funded, stand-alone national laboratories, taken together, should do all the three. However, it is generally agreed that, at the national level, there should be an appropriate mix of the three kinds of research for maximising economic gain, and that this mix should not be static.

It is important that there is close research interaction among universities, stand-alone research laboratories of the government and industrial research laboratories. Industry should support research in universities and government laboratories. Government laboratories and universities can interact by having joint research projects, with the laboratories being recognised by universities for their doctoral work. Industries would fund their own laboratories and may also receive funding from some government agencies that run government laboratories. The government laboratories would receive funds from the government and industry, and the universities’ scientific research should be supported by a core grant from the university system, the government agencies that support government research laboratories and from industry.

I can give an example of an industry with which I was associated with—Sun Pharma. I was its principal scientific advisor in the mid-1990s, when it was a rupees nine-crore company in the pharmaceutical sector. I had the pleasure of making its management aware of the importance of research and helped set up its research laboratory called Sun Pharma Advanced Research Centre (SPARC). Today, Sun Pharma is the largest pharmaceutical company in the country and the fifth largest in the world, with its chairman, Dilip Shanghvi, being the second richest person in India. Many such examples can be given from all over the world. What this implies is that just as scientific research in universities is related to economic development of a country, the quality and quantity of research in industry is also an important determinant of the economic status of a country. The same would be true of research done in stand-alone government laboratories.

Knowledge Society

Professor Patel says, ‘A knowledge society heavily dependent on knowledge economy, creates, communicates, and uses knowledge for the people’s well being’. In his perception, ‘members of a knowledge society attain a higher average standard of education, a growing proportion of its workers employed as knowledge workers’. According to Professor Patel, in knowledge societies, ‘increasingly digitised knowledge provides enhanced access to information, data banks, communication technology and internet by the population’.

In 2005, the Government of India, at the initiative of the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, decided to set up a National Knowledge Commission (NKC). Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked me to be its vice chairman with Sam Pitroda, who was not living in India, being its chairman. The primary objective of the NKC was to make India a true knowledge society. Both, the prime minister and I, strongly felt that, as of then, there was no knowledge society anywhere on our planet. This assignment made me think about what knowledge society would imply.

I felt that in a knowledge society, every adult (every citizen) would possess a certain minimum amount of knowledge that would enable him to claim his rights, discharge his responsibilities as an informed citizen and take part in major decision-making process in the country at various levels (local to national) that would affect the citizens of the country. I felt that for the above objective to be met, twelve years of formal education was required. It was clearly important that curricula, syllabi and their delivery satisfied certain criteria, including those related to the generation of values and commitment to world peace. Decreasing numbers would go beyond these twelve years of high school. This decrease should be as gradual as possible. If the environment is right, a substantial number would go for scientific research. In a knowledge society, excellent, world-class facilities for scientific research in carefully chosen broad areas would exist at any given time. For India, today, the examples of such broad areas where we should invest substantially are modern biology and biotechnology, product creation in information technology and agriculture and agro-technology. An example of an area in agro-technology would be the identification of a single diseased plant from space to prevent infection from spreading and destroying the entire crop.

An Important Hierarchy

Professor Patel rightly talks about the data explosion and the challenge of its conversion into knowledge. I think it is important to recognise the hierarchy between data, information, knowledge and wisdom. For wisdom, you need knowledge; for knowledge, you need information and for information, you need data. To convert data into information, information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom, one needs a great deal of expertise and commitment. This is going to be a major challenge around the world in the coming years.

Culture

Professor Patel has mentioned some very important attributes of scientific culture. I would like to point out another important ingredient of the culture of scientific research: understanding the scientific method and the attributes of knowledge gained through this method such as verifiability and falsifiability, and the ability to make predictions not made till now which have been or can be tested. Furthermore, for outstanding scientific research output, especially in basic science, certain amount of freedom and independence (coupled, of course, with accountability) is an absolute requirement. What happens often in basic scientific research is that you set out to achieve one objective but, in that process, you discover something totally unexpected and far more important than you had set out to achieve.

Tables

In Table 1 of Professor Patel’s article, he says that the distance one can comfortably cover in a day, today, is 600 miles—the distance that a plane would cover in about one hour; supersonic aircraft will do even better.

In Table 2, DNA fingerprinting is shown to have been developed first in the United States. This is not true. It was first developed in the United Kingdom by Sir Alec Jeffreys. Similarly, insulin was first synthesised by Chinese scientists and not American.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Professor Patel’s main thesis that there is a relationship between quality and quantity of scientific research output from a country’s universities and the economic development of the country is valid and important. However, there is, perhaps, a much tighter relationship between a country’s total research output comprising scientific research done in the universities, stand-alone government-funded research laboratories and industrial research laboratories on one side and the country’s economic development on the other. There are also nuances in this relationship that need to be understood. An example would be the threshold mentioned in the introduction. Unfortunately, Indian universities fair very poorly from the point of view of both quality and quantity of research output. The country also lacks the scientific culture. We have still far to go as regards the impact of scientific research done in our universities on our economic development.