News

One of the issues that concerns me about the immense power of contemporary molecular science is that the extraordinary capacity we’ve seen come to the fore during the COVID-19 pandemic sends out a subliminal message to the broader public that there’s a technological fix to every serious threat that confronts us. But all professional researchers and technologists understand that, while breakthrough discoveries like those that are recognised by Nobel Prizes can change the dynamics fast, we can have no certainty that this will happen to provide a timely solution for some intractable issue. And just throwing money at a problem doesn’t necessarily work, as the immediate response is to try to find a solution in currently available technology, a strategy summarised in the past as ‘funding canon builders to put a man on the moon.’ What can happen is that resources are withdrawn from the type of discovery science that might, often from ‘left field’, come up with a viable solution.