Basic research and industrial enterprise

Abstract

Our generation has the dubious privilege of living in the midst of a major scientific revolution, but the roots of that experience go back to the seventeenth century. That earlier phase of the new science and its technological consequences bore witness to several remarkable achievements; these included an understanding of the quantitative factors involved in the transformation of matter, a reasonable description and some explanation of the laws of motion, and some grasp of basic physiological processes, such as the circulation of the blood. These accomplishments were also the product of an emerging awareness of the use of systematic experimentation as an essential instrument of understanding. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was itself profoundly influenced byand was influential upon the fluid, formative society in which it found itself. The study of such turning-points has demonstrated that science and society are significantly interactive and interdependent; science is not the product only of individual geniuses, and society is not a self-contained mechanism of material interests. The experiences attendant on major social changes, and the new attitude towards the value of understanding nature, forced the system of knowledge to absorb new and surprisingly large quantities of information and unexpected points of view. With unforseeable consequences, technological apparatus and processes engendered by new inventions and instruments entered into the working of society. This, too, continues as scientific discovery moves from being a theory arising from intellectual imagination and rigour and skill in a laboratory, to industrial or social practicein a sense, from luxury to necessity, from periphery to centre. Fateful and unforeseeable consequences have flowed from the advancement of science. Although it is possible to enumerate an extraordinarily large list of technological triumphs, these have often carried with them a set of subtle, second-order consequences that have only recently been acknowledged as parts of the true cost of progress. It is as if for every overt advance, there is, or has been, an unrecognised covert cost. Conditioned by this history, and accepting the principles that the success of modern industrial enterprise, and of technology which it uses, rests upon the enhancement of understanding through basic research, I try in this paper to assess the issues put before liberal-democratic societies by the developing arrangements between academic institutions and private industrial firms and their possible effect upon the advancement of learning.