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Editorial |
This has recently been a very exciting time for biologists, especially those lucky investigators who happen to focus on the biology of human diseases and injuries. The $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 injected an enormous bolus of new federal support into the budget of the National Institutes of Health, and overall, science has clearly been a priority of the new Obama Administration. Nevertheless, on nearly every occasion when I'm up on Capitol Hill or attending some think tank talk here in Washington, I'm reminded that the basic biological research that we so prize in this journal is relatively undervalued by decision-makers and our other stakeholders who are enamored with the applied, clinical and translational aspects of bioscience.
This trend is not exclusive to the United States. A recent report in Science Magazine cites neuroscientist Matsuo Ito's grave concerns about the lack of support for basic science in Japan's recent stimulus package (Normile, 2009).
How do we account for the current state of affairs? How can we, as a community, address what clearly is a worrying trend? To my mind, the problem lies with the way the lay public understands scientific progress, especially in the high-consequence fields of science related to public health.
Very often, when I am called upon to discuss public funding of biology with elected officials or decision makers, the framework for the discussion is technology as opposed to Popperian science. By this I mean that progress in science is mistakenly viewed within the popular meme of Silicon Valley success: two highly motivated and smart individuals (investigators) tinker in their garage (laboratory) and come up with a better widget (cure). They get venture capital funding (grant support) by giving an excellent 30-second elevator speech (university press release) and eventually go public—spinning-off their widget (cure) to the private sector (large pharmaceutical company). This last constitutes their exit strategy.
In fact, as we well know, biological discovery proceeds along quite a different path: an investigator is trained in a given area of biology (e.g., cell biology) and over time becomes interested in one specific area (perhaps the mitotic spindle). She regularly reads the literature in this area and additionally has a history of experimental science. These two threads intertwine in the generation of a falsifiable hypothesis about some biological process of the spindle—a process that is amenable to the design of experiments to test her hypothesis. Those experiments produce results that either support or disprove the hypothesis and are subsequently interpreted in the context of the extant literature to create theories—the bread and butter of experimental basic biology.
Successful theories (such as the molecular biology dogma) do not represent practicable applications or cures. Rather they make possible the applied or clinical research that might result in such a payoff for society. But just as importantly, practical payoffs in the biologically based health sciences are very nearly impossible without the underlying fabric of good theories. This is why the effective treatment of infectious disease awaited the development of the field of microbiology before there was much practical success.
Even in the case of more recent exploratory (non-hypothesis-based) biology, the researcher (or team of such scientists) looks to the experimentally generated data for the hint of theory. Future personalized-medicine approaches will rely strongly on an underlying theoretical substructure, even as they scan an entire individual patient's genome. Without that theoretical skeleton, the amount of biological data is simply too vast for much practical value to be gleaned from it.
It is this need for theoretical underpinning that must underscore the case for basic biological sciences. Unlike the I-Phone or Wii, cures for cancer or Alzheimer's disease will not simply be embodied in a better widget. Rather, those cures will be built upon the process of biological discovery, which in turn is built upon a system of scientific theories that extend from biosphere to origin-of-life.
If we can, as a group, begin to frame our justification for government support around the centrality of scientific theory to practical progress in the high-consequence public health arena, we will have begun to change the basic tenor of our conversation with the public who support our research through their taxes. My sense is that by reframing the conversation, we can improve the long-term prospects for success.
Literature Cited
This article has been cited by other articles:
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  K. M. Halanych and L. R. Goertzen Grand challenges in organismal biology: The need to develop both theory and resources Integr. Comp. Biol., November 1, 2009; 49(5): 475 - 479. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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