Tag: funding

‘Free Indian science’: Responses, rebuttals and retrenchments

In the April 3 issue of Nature, Joseph Mathai and Andrew Robinson published a Comment on the afflictions of scientific research in India – and found the interference of bureaucracy to be chief among all ills. Most of the writers’ concerns were very valid, and kudos to them for highlighting how it was the government mismanaging science in India, not the institutes mismanaging themselves. In the May 8 issue of the same journal, three letters in response to the piece were published, under Correspondence, which brought to light two more issues just as important although not that immense, and both symptomatic of mismanagement that appears to border on either malevolence or stupidity, depending on your bent of mind.

Biswa Prasun Chatterji from St. Xavier’s, Mumbai, wrote about the “disastrous” decoupling of research and education in the country, mainly as a result of newly created research institutions in the 1940s and 1950s. These institutions led bright, young students away from universities, which as a result were parched of funds. The research bodies, on the other hand, fell prey to increasing bureaucratic meddling. Chatterji then points to an editorial in the November 1998 (vol. 75) issue of Current Science by P. Balaram, now the director of the Indian Institute of Science. In the piece, Prof. Balaram describes C.V. Raman as having been a firm believer in universities being the powerhouses of research, not any separate entities.

The latest issue of 'Current Science' (May 10, 2014)
The latest issue of ‘Current Science’ (May 10, 2014)

In 1932, C.V. Raman helped found Current Science after recognizing the need for an Indian science journal. In one of its first issues, an editorial appeared named ‘Retrenchment and Education’, in which the author, likely Prof. Raman himself, lays out the importance of having an independent body to manage scientific research in India. Because of its relevance to the issues at hand, I’ve reproduced it from the Current Science archives below.

[scribd id=223361205 key=key-7pekxcp24ziilj9lef3 mode=scroll]

The second letter’s contents follow from the first’s. Dhruba Saikia, Cotton College State University (Assam), and Rowena Robinson, IIT-Guwahati, ask for the country’s university-teaching to be overhauled. Many professors I’ve spoken to ask for the same thing but are turned to amusement after they realize that the problem has been left to fester for so long that the solution they’re looking for requires fixing our entire elementary education system. Moreover, after the forking of education and research described in Chatterji’s letter, it seems that universities were left to fend for themselves after their best teaching resources were drawn away by the government. Here is a paragraph from Saikia’s and Robinson’s letter:

Hundreds of thousands of students graduate from Indian universities each year. However, our own experience in selecting students indicates that many are ignorant of the basics, with underdeveloped reasoning skills and an inability to apply the knowledge they have.

There was also a third letter, this one critical of the Mathai-Robinson piece. Shobhana Narasimhan, a theoretical physicist from JNCASR, Bangalore, says that she is free to pursue “curiosity-driven science” and doesn’t have to spend as much time writing grant proposals as do scholars in the West, and so Mathai-Robinson are wrong on that front. At the same time, it seems from her letter that those things she has access to that her presumably better-equipped Occidental colleagues don’t could also be the result of a lack of control on research agendas and funding in India. In short, she might be free to pursue topics her curiosity moves her toward because the authorities don’t care (yes, this is a cynical point of view, but I think it must be considered).

So I emailed her and she replied.

“The quick answer to your question is I don’t think more overview of research funding is the answer to improving Indian science. My colleagues abroad spend more time writing proposals to get funding than actually carrying out research… I don’t think that is a good situation. Similarly getting tenure at an American university often depends on how much money you brought in. We don’t have such a situation (yet) and I think that is good.

We shouldn’t blindly copy foreign systems because they are by no means perfect. [Emphasis mine]

I have been on grant committees and I found good proposals always got funded. But I do agree that there is often much dead wood in many Indian departments, but that can also happen abroad.

I am aware that I may be speaking from a position of privilege since I work at one of the better funded institutes. Also as a theorist, I do not need much equipment.”

I would say Narasimhan’s case is the exception rather than the rule. Although I don’t have a background in researching anything (except for my articles and food prices), two points have been established with general consensus:

  1. The Rajiv Gandhi-era promise of funding for scientific R&D to the tune of 2% of GDP is yet to materialize. The fixation on this number ranges from the local – for unpaid students and ill-equipped labs – to the global – to keep up with investments in other developing countries.
  2. Even if there is funding, there is no independent body staffed with non-governmental stakeholders to decide which research groups get how much, leading to arbitrary research focus.

The travails of science communication

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I’ve noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research traction worldwide but is quite tricky to explain in simple terms to the layman.

Earlier this year, one such concept was the Higgs mechanism. Between December 13, 2011, when the first spotting of the Higgs boson was announced, and July 4, 2012, when the spotting was confirmed as being the piquingly-named “God particle”, the use of the phrase “cosmic molasses” was prevalent enough to prompt an annoyed (and struggling-to-make-sense) Daniel Sarewitz to hit back on Nature. While the article had a lot to say, and a lot more waiting there to just to be rebutted, it did include this remark:

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

Sarewitz is not wrong in remarking of the problem as such, but in attempting to use it to define the case of religion’s existence. Anyway: In bridging the gap between advanced physics, which is well-poised to “unlock the future”, and public understanding, which is well-poised to fund the future, there is good journalism. But does it have to come with the twisting and turning of complex theory, maintaining only a tenuous relationship between what the metaphor implies and what reality is?

The notion of a “cosmic molasses” isn’t that bad; it does get close to the original idea of a pervading field of energy whose forces are encapsulated under certain circumstances to impart mass to trespassing particles in the form of the Higgs boson. Even this is a “corruption”, I’m sure. But what I choose to include or leave out makes all the difference.

The significance of experimental physicists having probably found the Higgs boson is best conveyed in terms of what it means to the layman in terms of his daily life and such activities more so than trying continuously to get him interested in the Large Hadron Collider. Common, underlying curiosities will suffice to to get one thinking about the nature of God, or the origins of the universe, and where the mass came from that bounced off Sir Isaac’s head. Shrouding it in a cloud of unrelated concepts is only bound to make the physicists themselves sound defensive, as if they’re struggling to explain something that only they will ever understand.

In the process, if the communicator has left out things such as electroweak symmetry-breaking and Nambu-Goldstone bosons, it’s OK. They’re not part of what makes the find significant for the layman. If, however, you feel that you need to explain everything, then change the question that your post is answering, or merge it with your original idea, etc. Do not indulge in the subject, and make sure to explain your concepts as a proper fiction-story: Your knowledge of the plot shouldn’t interfere with the reader’s process of discovery.

Another complex theory that’s doing the rounds these days is that of quantum entanglement. Those publications that cover news in the field regularly, such as R&D mag, don’t even do as much justice as did SciAm to the Higgs mechanism (through the “cosmic molasses” metaphor). Consider, for instance, this explanation from a story that appeared on November 16.

Electrons have a property called “spin”: Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

The causal link has been omitted! If the story has set out to explain an application of quantum entanglement, which I think it has, then it has done a fairly good job. But what about entanglement-the-concept itself? Yes, it does stand to lose a lot because many communicators seem to be divesting of its intricacies and spending more time explaining why it’s increasing in relevance in modern electronics and computation. If relevance is to mean anything, then debate has to exist – even if it seems antithetical to the deployment of the technology as in the case of nuclear power.

Without understanding what entanglement means, there can be no informed recognition of its wonderful capabilities, there can be no public dialog as to its optimum use to further public interests. When when scientific research stops contributing to the latter, it will definitely face collapse, and that’s the function, rather the purpose, that sensible science communication serves.