The many faces of science are discussed during an event at FAPESP

The dynamics and complexity of the scientific process and its relationships with culture, the economy and education were debated at the 1st Planning Meeting for the 2013 World Science Forum

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – When the results of scientific studies are viewed in isolation, it seems simple to fit them into predetermined categories such as applied science, fundamental science, innovative research, or exploratory research.

However, when the whole scientific process is observed from start to finish, it is clearly much more dynamic and complex. A discovery can have applications that were never imagined at the inception of the research or open pathways for conceptual progress that the authors never would have suspected.

These different faces of science were debated on August 30 during the 1st Planning Meeting for the 2013 World Science Forum, held at FAPESP headquarters between August 29 and 31.

FAPESP scientific director Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz opened the event by discussing how science is based on ideas that can have different trajectories. Some of these ideas have such great impact that they change human history, such as the discovery of the transistor, patented in 1951 by John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain and William Bradford Shockley at Bell Laboratories in the United States.

“It was a completely new type of idea that demonstrates a particular trajectory of scientific research. They didn’t limit themselves to exploring one area of science and creating an application for it, but in fact, created a new area of physics, giving rise to microelectronics. It was no accident that the authors won the Nobel Prize in Physics. That idea is still changing our lives today,” said Brito Cruz.

Other ideas tend to quickly win market share, said Brito Cruz. Such was the case for Stanford University researchers Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

“They published an article in Computer Networks journal in 1998 describing the algorithm of a search engine that would later become Google, one of today’s largest and most important companies,” said Brito Cruz.

Occasionally, ideas can appear as complicated and incomprehensible to anyone who is not a specialist and therefore take a very long time to come to market, yet they represent an advance of incalculable importance to humanity.

Such was the case for an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2007 by a team led by Julio Voltarelli of the Universidade de São Paulo Riberão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP), who died in March 2012. “The article described an experiment with stem cells that eliminated the symptoms of diabetes in 19 patients, something that science has been seeking for a long time,” Brito Cruz said.

He also noted that some ideas arise from completely abstract interests but later have unexpected applications. One example is a study carried out by Jurandir Yanagihara and Mauricio Ferreira at the USP Polytechnic School. Published in 2001, the study calculated the dynamics of heat conduction in three-dimensional cylinders with elliptical cross sections.

“It was a highly abstract idea. The researchers wanted to know how a body of this shape gains or loses heat. In 2009, they realized that the elliptical cylinder could be a model for calculating heat conduction in many parts of the human body and published another article. The result was applied by the FAPESP-Embraer Research Center for Comfort Engineering at the USP Polytechnic School to design more comfortable airplanes,” said Brito Cruz.

According to the FAPESP scientific director, applied research is intended to increase industrial competitiveness, heal sick people or make people richer, while the role of basic research is to make humanity wiser. He said that all these roles are equally important.

“You can’t undervalue research dedicated to knowing more because this is humanity’s history. Since the beginning, we have always wanted to know more than we did the year before. This type of science isn’t just philosophy, the arts or human sciences, but also includes particle physics, fundamental chemistry and all of science that is interested in the foundation of the natural world,” he declared.

Science and the arts

Luiz Davidovich from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) noted another facet of science: its relationship with culture and the arts. An example of this relationship is the profound influence that mathematician Henri Poincaré had on eminent figures in the arts, like Pablo Picasso.

“Poincaré used to say that scientists don’t study nature because it is useful, they study it because beauty delights them. Picasso, on the other hand, said that a painter’s studio should be a laboratory because painting is a game of the mind. And Einstein noted that the mysterious is the most beautiful thing we can experience because it is the source of all art and of all science,” said Davidovich.

He also touched on science’s economic side, saying that investments in basic science are already valued by nations such as China, India and Russia as the best response to the global financial crisis.

“After the projection in March that China’s growth would fall from 8% to 7.5%, the Chinese prime minister announced that he would increase financing in research universities by 26% and invest US$ 14 billion in basic research. Unfortunately, this example isn’t being followed in Brazil,” he said.

According to Fernando Galembeck from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP), nobody questions the need, importance, benefits or beauty of innovative science. However, the model that science and innovation strive for must be defined.

He said that the question was recently discussed by the Research Installations of Global Interest group of the G8. “Investments are usually geared toward large particle accelerators and astronomical observatories. They concluded that there is no infrastructure available to meet the needs of science working toward sustainability and the transition to a green economy,” said Galembeck.

The professor said that science should be original, relevant and competitive, and create impacts that are radical and significant in a broad context.

“Science shouldn’t be based only on trends or tribes. It should help take on humanity’s big problems. It’s also important that we abandon erroneous and outdated ideas about the structure of science that still consider positivist hierarchies,” affirmed Galembeck.

Informal teaching

Marcelo Knobel, Graduate Dean at UNICAMP and member of the FAPESP Adjunct Board of Research Collaborations, highlighted the challenges in education and the dissemination of science. He said that the government of the United States, the nation that produces the most science worldwide, has measured a decline in the quality of teaching of science, technology and mathematics.

“A special committee designated to this issue declared a need for improved basic education in mathematics and the sciences, and for renewed commitment on the part of the American government to long-term basic research. The international PISA study indicated that the situation is worse in Brazil, ranking it 53rd. Over 40% of our students scored lower than level 1 on the test—meaning they don’t know how to cross-multiply—and only 0.8% or 150,000 young people passed at level 5 or 6,” he said.

Knobel stressed the critical role of informal education, which includes resources such as museums, zoos, botanical gardens, parks, television programs, magazines and books. According to Knobel, informal education provides the learning acquired outside the educational system, which accounts for 92% of people’s lives.

“It’s a sector that we still don’t value in Brazil. We have some initiatives, but nothing that comes close to the 350,000 science museums in the United States, whose 177 million visitors generate US$ 1 billion every year,” he said.

Roberto Lotufo, from the UNICAMP Innovation Agency, spoke about the need to connect universities and small industry. To compete globally, he said, technology companies need to be located in knowledge-rich regions with synergy between research and entrepreneurism and innovation infrastructure. This place could be a university.

“We know that new businesses will be appearing all the time. With the new challenges related to sustainability and the opportunities created by the Internet, there are excellent opportunities for new companies to emerge. I don’t see why they can’t emerge in the university environment,” he said.

Lotufo asserted that the function of the university, which in the past was limited to education, has grown to include research and the advance of knowledge. Today, innovation and entrepreneurism are being incorporated into this mission. The interaction between university and industry is mutually beneficial, he said.

“The university gains better quality teaching and research, contact with the challenges of the real world, and gains in curriculum and research areas as well as motivation and experience for students. Industry gains access to state-of-the-art technology, the identification of talented students and increased capacity for innovation,” said Lotufo.