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Further to my smaller post last month I’ve been thinking further about the way research is carried out and its perceived merit in wider society.  The basic outline for this post was written in a lecture.

Is research outside of applied science pointless?  Currently I’m looking at the behaviour of snails for my MRes project; some would question how worthy of investment to the research councils this is.  Why should the public care about snail behaviour?  What possible application does this have in the “real” (anthrocentric) world?

The answer to the first and last questions is most certainly No, but the second remains unknown for now.  Providing we are successful (which now looks more unlikely than when I wrote the post) then there may be scope for a genetic model for this lateralised behaviour that may be applicable for humans.  But why is this necessary?  Why do we need to know this?  Naturally my argument is that I think its both important in context and interesting thus worthy of research.

First off science is a whole raft of things but its essence is “an imaginative adventure of the mind seeking truth in a world of mystery” (Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood).  Therefore the accquisition of knowledge is not just a flight of fancy by scientists but the sole reason science was conceived in the first place!

But is something that is merely interesting yet has no obvious application to our world worth researching in general?  Obviously everyone is entitled to their own opinion but people outside the research environment need to accept that scientists don’t get funding for any old experiment.  Conversely academics and other members of research community should recognise that there are perhaps problems with the current methods used for communicating the point of research to members of the general public.

Here is my somewhat “informed” opinion.  I firmly believe that most research is correctly direct and is valuable to at least the scientific community if not the wider world.  Research to expand our knowledge is valuable to a similar degree as research that directly leads to clinical cures of disease etc.  If science were only performed for direct benefits then we would’ve never got started anyway!  Newton would have never been given a reason to think further about the apple tree and Darwin would’ve been remarkably uninterested in the finches on the Galapagos.  This surely would’ve been a loss not just for evolutionary biology but the whole world and our understanding of it!

Related posts:

1. Science for Science’s sake (Part I)