The eminent young Anthony Fejes has written an excellent post recently entitled 4 Freedoms of Research.
He starts off by saying that we have no rights – meaning, we have no particular swearing-in ceremony by which we say we will adhere to certain universal ideals. I thought he meant we have no right to determine our research subjects and no particular right to funding, which is not completely off the mark.
As an aside I am struck by how the hot topics of the day in biology have evolved over my fairly short professional lifetime from topics in cancer to topics in longevity. Aside from anything having to do with contagious viruses. Will the hegemony of baby boomers and their preoccupations never cease? Will my generation (in my case, born precisely one generation later) forever be paying to support them, not to mention keep them alive ever longer? < /rant >
Anthony points to Science Buddies and their flowchart – or now I’m learning to call such procedures workflows – on the scientific method. There is a more recursive – and therefore, realistic – version cited right here.
He goes on to distill the rights of scientists down to:
- Freedom to explore new areas
- Freedom to share your results
- Freedom to access findings from other scientists
- Freedom to verify findings from other scientists
and then demonstrate that all of these freedoms are slowly being eroded. Or maybe we did not really ever enjoy them all to their full extent.
As a palliative, Anthony suggests that we can, among other things, but he is still taking suggestions:
- Publish in open access journals to help disseminate knowledge and bring down the barriers to access
- Maintain blogs to help disseminate knowledge that is not publishable
I would say that to the best of our individual abilities, informing the public (who can be your father-in-law) about the importance of your work is key in ensuring that funding exists which can underwrite all of those freedoms. Freedom can be an expensive venture. But information need not be.
I am not too bothered that there are fashions and trends in research topics. For example, if the current strain of H1N1 influenza mutates into a very lethal strain, I will be quite happy that a lot of research money has been diverted to infectious diseases recently and will be first in line for the vaccine. And I suppose that when I am old and grey, the massive efforts made to help cure cancer and explore longevity issues might seem a lot more relevant to me, personally.
I started writing this and then it turned into a whole essay…the rights and responsibilities of scientists…wow, what a topic! So I’d just like to pick up on one point Heather opens with and say that whilst the freedoms listed are great, more basic freedoms and individual rights are needed first before these can be achieved.
“Or maybe we did not really ever enjoy them all to their full extent.”
I think this is a really important point. If you look back over the very recent history of science it is clear that these are ideals that we have never all been able to enjoy to the full extent. Many people have been refused visas at various times and for various reasons to go to conferences or other labs. Currently it is very difficult for chinese researchers to share reagents they have generated with people in other countries. Here are just a couple of examples of scientists and medics being put on trial for crimes that did not occur for purely political reasons – there are many more.
“Iran has summarily tried two of the nation’s HIV researchers with communicating with an “enemy government,” in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court.” (2008)
“6 medical workers are on trial in Libya under the accusation of infecting children with HIV, and if convicted they could be executed.” (2006)Scientists have always had to fight for the freedoms you list, as well as their own human rights, and I hope that we as the new generation will continue to defend the importance of these freedoms and to fight for them.
I think that engaging/informing the public is so important, not just for us but for them that I might just start a whole new topic on the subject!!
HT Richard for correcting my spelling – that wasn’t a typo for once; it was one of what is known in France as a “faux ami” – words that exist in both French and English; but either are spelled nearly but not quite the same, or are spelled the same but have entirely different meanings. (“Pas terrible” comes to mind for the latter category.) It is, indeed, “responsabilité” in French. I’ve been here too long.
@Samantha – when the comments tend toward essays on a frequent basis, you are probably ready for your own blog. The more, the merrier!
You are of course right about needing to guarantee more basic rights than the Platonic freedoms mentioned here. One of these would be the right to be paid for one’s work. More times than I care to mention have I seen Ph.D. students and postdocs working for free for some period of their training.
In France, it is no longer legal to employ people directly off of fellowships such as the ones I had – they must be converted into salaries, while money is paid to the government towards retirement, the 37.5 working years clock to be able to get that back in theory starts ticking, and you have a right to health and unemployment insurance.
So the individual gets less money, but then they have a statute and the right to ask for a more reasonable salary. And fewer scientists get recruited of course, since there’s no more money out there than before.
Hm… I’m not sure I really like Anthony’s second point as a blanket solution:
2. Maintain blogs to help disseminate knowledge that is not publishable
We’ve already seen a lot of crap science in blogs/private websites, science that is most assuredly not publishable (a certain longevity expert of our mutual “cyber-acquaintance” jumps to mind, Heather). I can’t imagine trying to troll through umpteen bajillion “MyScience” blogs in order to determine what is useful, what isn’t, and what’s just plain fake. Me, I’ll stick to peer-reviewed journals, thanks.
On the “Freedoms”, I’d argue that all of them are impaired (eroded, if you like) by restrictions placed on them by funding agencies, institutions, or private-sector funding partners. You can’t be truly free to explore new areas if your research grant only covers a specific topic; you can’t share, access or verify results from yourself or others if you’ve got IP tie-ups or confidentiality agreements in place. In fact, you can’t really be “free” to share your results if there is competition in your field, unless you want to be scooped.
None of this is new of course; Anthony’s Utopia never existed. In my mind, it’s a bit like making pop music, or writing symphonies, or poetry: if you do it only for your own gratification, you have absolute freedom; as soon as you want other people to pay for it, you’re to some extent at their mercy, since in a way, they’re the customer. The same is true of funding agencies, industry partners, or the institutions that pay our salaries. They all have expectations (of success, or “impact”, or whatever) that are almost never going to be in line with what we as scientists “want” to do.
Hm, seems Samantha’s “essay” inspired one from me. Sorry ’bout that. :)
a certain longevity expert of our mutual “cyber-acquaintance” jumps to mind, Heather
snort
Bloody good point. Although some people might maintain that as ‘trusted’ entities (you, Heather, me) identified the ‘G’ character as a muppet/nutter, then peer review in this sense actually works. Was anyone else on the SAB actually taken in by his rantings before we got him banned?
I was always rather amused by that person’s rantings, though, and consider that if science is a market – and assuredly, Richards x 2, it is – that he could have been left in place with some sort of (peer-decided) warning sticker on his profile, or something alternative to banning per se. Caveat emptor.
Anyhow, I do understand that we as humans are supported by patrons, and the activity we exercise is a luxury. So this has acquired overtones of idealism versus realism, now.
In an ideal world, the funding we receive for research into a particular topic is not so narrowly controlled that we can not explore a related tangent should the occasion arise or the results require it. As things stand, one must complete a project under schedule and under cost in order to still have some discretionary funds with which to do any sort of exploratory work. Funding for just exploratory work is painfully difficult to acquire.