Does science matter to the future of Ireland? Today, that question may not be as absurd as it sounds. A month ago, Intel became the first large-scale employer in history to warn that Ireland's students were showing starkly decreasing interest in science.
Meanwhile, students with third-level science degrees often leave our country because they feel advanced research opportunities here are inadequate. Further, the dot.com meltdown and job losses in technology continue to worsen. From education through the economy, the prospects for Irish scientific know-how might seem bleak.
Science Week Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland, however, have another view. We are determined not only to show why science matters to Ireland these days but also to help it become one of Ireland's greatest permanent resources.
For the sixth straight year, the Office of Science and Technology is sponsoring Science Week programmes that highlight the tremendous scientific work of our young people. Schools will focus on student scientific projects. Media discussions will explore the richness of Irish science. And lectures, publications, and events will remind us of the awesome intellectual potential of youthful Irish minds. Science Week runs until Sunday.
Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) exists precisely to transform this potential into a driving force for our State's well-being. Created last year by the Government, SFI pursues three goals. First, SFI aims to help our third-level institutions recruit and retain scholars capable of developing internationally significant research programmes in the fields that underpin both biotechnology as well as information and communications technology (ICT).
Second, SFI strives to foster related programmes across all levels of Irish education so students can learn about the excitement in these fields and why it's worth considering careers in them. Third, SFI seeks to develop and join governmental, educational, and industrial efforts that bolster Ireland's scientific, engineering and entrepreneurial cultures and promote their resulting technological innovations throughout the world. Through SFI, Ireland will invest more than £500 million in this work by 2006. This investment begins a long-term, determined national effort to transform how science is perceived and pursued here, and to establish the intellectual and scientific foundations for the next wave of advanced Irish business development.
SFI targets such ambitions knowing that Ireland has a history of innovators upon which to build - scientific innovators, that is. George Stoney of D·n Laoghaire named the electron and profoundly shaped our understanding of atoms. Mathematician William Rowan Hamilton of Dublin named the vector and developed a mathematical formula now used to create the finest computer graphics. Ellen Hutchins of Co Cork discovered and classified numerous varieties of non-flowering plants such as mosses and algae that remain among the rarest of their kind.
In the 21st century, SFI intends to help Ireland enjoy the maximum educational, cultural, and economic benefits of such potent minds. We will invest in world-class researchers, foster their research programmes here, and enable them to train both graduate and postdoctoral students to become Ireland's scientific and technological leaders of tomorrow. We will give Irish brainpower competitive reasons to stay, and return, to strengthen Ireland.
America's success with such efforts reflects the possibilities. Since the 1950s, the US has invested through such agencies as the National Science Foundation in its best individual researchers. As a result, it has cultivated generations of outstanding scholars, kept its finest graduate students at home to train and learn, and built what amounts to a massive scientific savings account.
Along the way, American industry has benefited too. Industrial operations have grown, for example, in Silicon Valley near Stanford University and at the Research Triangle near Duke, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State. Businesses have begun sharing the research costs. University scientists, meanwhile, now move to business, to government agencies, and back to universities as innovation drives itself like a perpetual motion machine.
So far, this intellectual talent has created such amazing developments as the Internet and e-mail, computer animation, medical imaging, and speech-recognition software. It has also led to successful start-up businesses, and spawned blockbuster companies such as Microsoft and SUN.
Now it's Ireland's turn. Through the Technology Foresight Ireland, dozens of leaders in Government, academia, and industry have assessed how the Irish economy, from the life sciences to manufacturing, might evolve, specifically by 2015. They have concluded that biotechnology and ICT will be "the engines of future growth". Basic research through SFI will therefore focus on the sciences that underpin these fields. And we will remember that the most impressive developments will likely occur in synergies among these sciences that we haven't yet imagined.
The SFI mission calls us to a leap of faith. When another Irishman, physicist Nicholas Callan, invented the induction coil, he didn't know that he was making the X-ray machine possible. His work, though, led to such inventions. SFI will help make planning, instead of chance, Ireland's first scientific ally.
Researchers will see that Ireland values their work. Irish students will see that excellent careers in science and technology lie ahead for them as researchers, teachers, industrial innovators, and entrepreneurs.
New businesses and new jobs based in Irish headquarters will rise. Co-operation among our Government, universities, and industries will spin-off patents and products. Ireland's science and technology will propel itself with its full educational, cultural, and economic might.
From scientists to schoolchildren, great Irish minds will know that their ideas have a home at home. Today, maybe the world knows Irish inventiveness best through its artists and writers. Tomorrow, they will know why our scientists deserve their respect and appreciation just as well.
William Harris is director general of the Science Foundation Ireland