Introduction and Flashes of Brilliance that change it all

Introduction
The research landscape in Ireland has been transformed over the past two decades. Twenty years ago state investment in research was almost non-existent. Now, enough money is available to encourage postgraduates to consider pursuing a research career within Ireland

A little matter of €2,540 million arriving via the National Development Plan certainly helped matters along. In the mid-1980s budgets were being slashed in an arbitrary fashion. Not even medical research escaped cost cutting despite the potential benefits to patients. Now, world-class medical research is underway in purpose-built laboratories that link university to university but also university to hospital complex. The transfer of research findings from lab bench to bedside is certainly well underway here.

Admittedly, much of the change has come about only since 2000, when the €40 billion National Development Plan was announced. It ring-fenced unprecedented amounts of money for the conduct of scientific research in Ireland. It also opened the doors, both for the return of expatriate Irish scientists and for the arrival of scientists of any nationality interested in sharing in the government’s research largess.

The actual spark that brought about such rapid change, however, was the Technology Foresight initiative set in motion by government in March 1998. It was surprising for a number of reasons, principally because of its independence but, more importantly, because it was told to cast ahead more than 15 years to decide what Ireland needed to do if it was to exploit the advance of future technology.

For those unfamiliar with the workings of government, this represented the lifetime of three full-term governments. The powers that be were looking for recommendations that would long outlive the lifetime of the government that had asked for them. The 2015 horizon represented one of the first clues that this time things were going to be different for scientific research in Ireland.
The Technology Foresight exercise recommended that Ireland focus its energies on two key areas: biotechnology and information and communications technology. It also suggested that support be given to the basic sciences that underpinned these areas. Most importantly, it called for the establishment of a Technology Foresight Fund that would help build up Ireland’s research infrastructure.

Sure enough the fund was delivered when details of the National Development Plan 2000-2006 were announced. New funding bodies such as Science Foundation Ireland and the two research councils were created and existing ones like the Higher Education Authority’s Programme for Research in Third-Level Institutions and Enterprise Ireland were ramped up and given fresh supplies of money.

Scientists working in the third-level sector had been almost entirely dependent on EU sources for research funding. The people and the capacity to do good science were already available, however, and scientists here, to their credit, rose to the occasion. All they had been waiting for was the finance and a chance to pursue their scientific goals.

The result after more than six years of National Development Plan funding can be seen today in new, well-equipped labs, lots of research activity and an entirely new level of co-operative activity that links the various third-level institutions and their shared research goals.

I started writing about Irish science during the dark days of the mid-1980s, when Irish scientists excelled at getting more financial support per capita out of the EU’s various research programmes than anyone else in the Community. These are changed times, and now researchers here have the capacity to do world-class science.

The research community now also awaits sight of the government’s next national plan and the science budget it might contain. Everyone is now convinced that the funding will continue and that scientific endeavour can go from strength to strength here. It makes the goal of a truly knowledge-based economic future that much more achievable.

Dick Ahlstrom

Flashes of brilliance that change it all
The splitting of the atom, the description of DNA and the development of computers may have been the great scientific advances of our age, but their impact on society has depended on social, political and economic factors. Our failure to grasp this fact has led to our fear of science in this century.

No other human endeavour has a greater influence on society, a greater ability to bring about change than science. Waging war comes a close second with its ability to reconstruct a population or redraw the political map, but war is almost exclusively a negative and wasteful undertaking, nothing like the creativity and innovation that flows from science.

Science is also an evolutionary process, punctuated by a few but remarkable revolutionary interjections, discoveries that don't as much nudge as kick the process forward. Every century has its scientific punctuation, the past 100 years perhaps more so than previous ones. In the past, discoveries had the potential to affect science as a study—today, they have the power to alter the way we live, the way our society is structured. However, any examination of the past century's science must start with some appreciation of what science actually is. Few people readily make the connection between science and creativity. Many believe art and creativity lurk on one side of the brain while cold logic, mathematics and the pure sciences occupy the other. The popular perception is of two mutually exclusive halves, fighting for control to determine whether a person will write odes or don a white coat.
In fact, there is no effort more creative than research. Although science imposes a tightly controlled regime that dictates how experimentation proceeds and what conclusions can be drawn from it, the ideas that initiate the research spring from the same well of inventiveness and original thought that refreshes the poet, the novelist or the musician.

Many may perceive the self-imposed scientific tyranny that rules the laboratory and the research effort as a burdensome yoke that forces the scientist to conform to particular methods, no matter how bright the initial flash of a new idea. In reality, these strictures are no different from the despotism under which accomplished musicians must labour to achieve mastery of an instrument or total control over the magic of a wonderful voice. The novelist's accomplishment is also seen as inspiration. But to learn what it is really like to be a writer, take your absolute favourite novel, sit down and try to type it out. The mechanical labour that attaches to the process will show that delivering creativity in a way that demonstrates its true worth is hard work, whatever the discipline.

Genuine creativity, particularly when it touches that rare thing, genius, is recognisable as such no matter whether it is found in the arts or sciences. While you don't have to be an artist to see the beauty in Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ, or a musician to appreciate Mozart or Brahms, the self-same achievement is visible in Einstein's theory of relativity for those with eyes to see. His creative genius is less immediately visible to the casual observer. Yet Einstein's work and the creative efforts of other great scientists have had a more tangible and a more profound impact on society than any concerto or novel.

Great literature and art are wonders to behold, but they move only those with the inclination to appreciate them. No law has yet been passed to force people to exploit the treasures on display in the world's museums or to read the writings of Nobel laureates. As a result, these works are fully appreciated by relatively few people. Science, however, manages to turn society around, even if the individuals in society remain ignorant of or indifferent to its discoveries.

It doesn't matter if you understand Einstein's little formula E = mc2, even though it tells you how big a bang to expect from a nuclear warhead. Know for certain, however, that humanity has lived under the spectre of mutually assured nuclear destruction for almost two generations and no other influence has had a greater impact on the geopolitics of our shared planet. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, might sound vaguely familiar, like the names of a comedy duo you once heard on the BBC, or the names of political commentators you should probably know. Yet their scientific discoveries about the nature of DNA, the genetic blueprint for life, sparked a revolution in biochemistry, which so far has delivered genetic engineering, genetically modified foods and a whole new way of looking at human health and disease.