SFI's director of biotechnology says consistency of funding is essential tosustain good research, reports Dick Ahlstrom
Change is going to be a key word for the new director of biotechnology at Science Foundation Ireland. He wants to interest people in science, wants academics to consider getting involved in high-tech start-up companies and wants steady growth in state funding for research.
This sounds like a tall order - particularly making the general public understand the value and importance of scientific endeavour. It needs to be appreciated as an essential part of society, however, not just as an instrument of government policy, according to Dr John Atkins, the foundation's director of biotechnology.
"Part of the goal is to try and get people more involved in a broader way. There is a real need to engage people," he says. "It is so important to have a broad appreciation of what is coming down the tracks. It is better people feel a part of it than feeling alienated."
Dr Atkins was born in Dunmanway, in Co Cork, and did a BSc and PhD at Trinity College, Dublin, where he signed up for a strange new research area and became the only genetics student in his final undergraduate year. He has spent the past 24 years in the US, at a variety of leading research centres, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He joins the SFI team from the University of Utah, where he is research professor in the department of human genetics.
He was also a lecturer in biochemistry at University College Cork and says it is exciting to be coming back to the Republic. He was here during the years of limited funding for research and wanted to be part of the new environment, in which funds are becoming available for academic research.
"During the lean times it was quite clear to work in research was going to be a hard road," he says. Now things have improved, he wants to be part of it.
SFI will back biotechnology - along with information and communications technology - with a €635m budget to 2006; on the face of it, his job is straightforward. "We are trying to find the best possible people in the area and fund them," he says. He hopes SFI will do a lot more, however, with additional goals to promote "curiosity-driven research" and "to try and improve the environment for patenting and the utilisation of findings and discoveries that spring from the research".
He also wants to "help promote an environment where academics want to be involved in start-up companies", but he has no confusion over where the balance between research and commerce lies. He wants research to bring new knowledge rather than solve short-term problems. "You don't want to get into funding for the terminal application of something. This is better left to companies. This funding approach is to support the research underpinning these areas."
He believes it will quickly be clear whether SFI is having an impact on research. The "whole thing will fail" in six or eight years' time if postdoctoral researchers coming out of third level can't find jobs at home, "if it doesn't lead to productive careers".
One way to help this along would be consistency of funding, he argues. There "must be sustainable growth" in research funding and, therefore, activity to allow viable career paths to develop for Irish researchers.
He would like to see a situation similar to that in the US National Science Foundation, where there is always funding available for research, no matter who devises the policy or what party leads Congress.
"People change but [in the US] there is certainty there will be funding," says Atkins. "There has been far too much chopping and changing in Ireland."
This is why he believes science and research should become important to the public, because the will of the people becomes the will of the government, he says. If the people see value and significance in the work being done by Irish scientists, then they will want their representatives in the Dáil and in government to continue the work by continuing to fund it.