Weather warning

There is a saying about my adoptive hometown’s famously fickle climate that if you don’t like the weather in Melbourne, wait five minutes. I sometimes feel this is the same (on a longer timescale) for funding reviews, which tend to oscillate between funding more blue-sky research and more applied work. The Albanese government currently seems firmly in support of the latter but it has come under a barrage of criticism from the Australian Academy of Science and Science and , among others. What’s going on?

Countries around the world are currently grappling with a common set of problems: a post-Covid economic slump, uncertainties in the US political climate, and the (supposed) rise of artificial intelligence. Australia also needs to reduce its economic reliance on mining.

Governments have decided that research and development, and the magic word “innovation”, are the way to survive/get ahead. On the face of it, this sounds like good news for universities in terms of maintaining or increasing research budgets – but, like the weather, it is more complex than it appears.

The Australian government is investing in STEM education but there is a big hill to climb. The proportion of year 12 students studying physics has dropped to the lowest level recorded. Chemistry enrolments show a similar trend. Since science underpins employment sectors as diverse as defence, finance, healthcare and quantum computing, this risks a future science skills shortage.

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True, universities are graduating more and more science PhDs. But funding for basic research is draining away. Each year, the budgets for the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council decline – even as, paradoxically, the flagship Medical Research Future Fund has millions of dollars unspent. The funding system is complex and fragmented, and funders often require a project to be novel and innovative but also low-risk: a rare combination. Thus, more scientists compete for a smaller, more narrowly allocated pot of money. Labs close. Researchers leave.

The government wants to partly make up for this deficiency by encouraging academia and industry to work more closely in both education and research, and by encouraging industry to fund more of the work. There is also an appetite for Australia to be part of international schemes such as Horizon Europe.

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The problem is that there is a mismatch between the type of research academics want to do (usually blue-sky work) and the kind of science industry wants, which is generally focused on solving current problems. In addition, companies are often not as keen as academics are on sharing the results of work they have paid for, for others to use freely. Coupled with the low appetite for risk that many universities now have, that makes doing basic research in Australia feel more and more like an uphill struggle each year.

One might argue that more applied work is a good idea. I have always liked applied research, and I’ve received extensive funding from the water industry to develop new ways to track the fate and behaviour of pollutants. But I have also been part of ARC grants for fundamental work. Both are useful; blue-sky work just takes longer to pay off.

Australian national science agency CSIRO (which recently announced that it would cut up to 350 research jobs) makes much of the fact that it helped invent the modern internet, but it didn’t know what it had at the time. Funding things now for a return that might or might not come later requires playing the long game, something that Australia's three-year federal electoral cycle and increasingly fractured politics are not conducive to.

Should we even do research at all, especially basic research, given that other countries do lots and publish the results? In theory, we could just build on that, saving ourselves a fortune in the process. But that would be a bit like using AI: it can be helpful, but you must know enough about what you are asking it about to know whether what it produces is any use – and you are reliant on sources over which you have no influence.

Research funding is like the weather in two other ways. It is increasingly and worryingly unpredictable because of human-induced change. And, while everybody talks about its looming crisis, nobody does anything.

Research is inherently risky, but I’d argue that accepting the status quo on research (or climate change) is a bigger risk to Australia’s future.

is professor of chemistry at RMIT University.

Looking to the heavens

The ghost of pure research lives on in Australia, particularly in the form of two government research fellowship schemes. Those are the Australian Research Council’s and the National Health and Medical Research Council’s . The words discovery and investigator echo what has long been a primary motivator for humanity: curiosity.

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As Homo sapiens, we have curiosity in our DNA. Children are driven by it, automatically absorbing information. They are insatiable and exhausting to their parents and teachers. But as elders we are also curious. Adults gaze into the heavens, contemplate the natural world and scrutinise the realm of human interactions and politics. Discourse, discussions, theorising and testing ensues, and narratives emerge that allow us to make sense of the things around us.

Curiosity has helped establish the ethical codes and cultures that frame our lives, while its practical outcomes have provided a level of material security and comfort for many people today that would have been the envy of kings and emperors of the past.

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Yuga Kurita/Getty Images (edited)

Gradually, however, society’s faith in curiosity-driven, pure, fundamental, basic research appears to be dying. Pursuing truth is increasingly cast as self-indulgent and out-of-touch. Research grant titles are sometimes laughed at, and commentators make reference to obscure topics by saying “That would be a good subject for a PhD dissertation”. The pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is rarely supported publicly.

In addition, a weariness with pure research has emerged naturally as eye-catching discoveries have become harder to secure. The low-hanging fruit has already been harvested so increasingly expensive, longer and longer, ladders are required to reach higher into knowledge’s tree.

Meanwhile, the arrival of the internet and its constant conveyor belt of bad news in real time amplifies the urgency of other investments – in welfare, infrastructure, defence and regulation. It is unsurprising, in such an environment, that taxpayers and governments ask whether it is really necessary to invest so much in research.

The political polarisation that the internet has exacerbated also makes it more difficult to agree on visionary new schemes to fund research, and it is not always possible to demonstrate the direct impact of specific research projects to impatient commentators – even if the huge impact of research since the Enlightenment is undeniable.

In addition, a storm of self-reflection and critical thinking has sometimes led to lone scientific heroes and achievements of the past being derided. New ways of doing research are celebrated that emphasise cooperation, collaboration, interdisciplinary work and implementation science.

These tend to drive us away from individual investigator-led, discovery research towards large networks and work programmes that focus on delivery rather than discovery and on corporatisation rather than individual initiative. KPIs and project management support the rolling out of pre-agreed solutions rather than the seeking of new, novel pathways that could revolutionise progress and open up unimagined new realms.

But I remain optimistic that pure research will not die provided properly funded research fellowships remain. Australia has fellowships for junior, mid-career and senior academics. Although we are now in an age of applied research, the most curious researchers still tend to secure these awards – and the recipients of the junior awards tend to make up the country’s future academic workforce

Each successive government in Australia tends to emphasise the translation of research and industry connection, creating new schemes whose announcement reassures the electorate that it cares about them – rather than about so-called educational elites.

I value these applied schemes. I believe they have had many benefits for Australian science and industry. But I plead that fellowships be kept to provide pathways for the most curious among us. Although, like all humanity, some might currently feel they are lying in the gutter, our fellows are still gazing at the stars. And, in doing so, they can bring us all closer to the heavens.

is deputy vice-chancellor academic quality at UNSW Sydney.

The future could be over

We in biomedicine have long known that when writing grants, it is prudent to try to link even the most basic research to some sort of potential health outcome. This can lead to funding success superseding the quality of the research.

But discovery science borne purely out of curiosity remains an integral component of the research ecosystem – and unfortunately this has been lost in the past decade, with dwindling support for basic science grants.

The Australian business sector invests A$28 billion (£14 billion) less than the OECD average into research, and funding by the two main bodies overseeing medical research in Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council, has declined for 10+ years, severely compromising discovery science.

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David Gray/Reuters/iStock montage

Last year, the Australian government announced a strategic examination of the county’s R&D system, releasing six over the course of this year. But in October, the Australian Academy of Science put out a damning saying that the review had “failed to address declining investment in fundamental research, instead implying research is only important if it can be commercialised by industry”.

With funding schemes slanted towards health outcomes, it is difficult to imagine scientists working on yeast or nematodes being willing to devote dozens of hours to preparing grant proposals that are doomed to failure not because of their quality but because they won’t impact patient care in a timely fashion.

Which, of course, is a major policy mistake. Most drugs emerge from a fundamental discovery in the lab. Australia’s own success story is venetoclax, a drug used to treat some forms of leukaemia. In the 1980s, scientists discovered a master cell survival protein, BCL-2, and then went on to develop the blockbuster drug to inhibit it.

Fundamental research is also behind GLP-1 receptor agonists such as Ozempic, whose role in regulating insulin secretion and hunger pathways was first uncovered through research in mice. And the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, which saved countless lives in the pandemic, were only possible because of our fundamental understanding of mRNA.

Sure, wanting to know how something works – in a worm, a sheep, a test tube or a fish – often doesn’t yield anything other than further knowledge. But all this knowledge fuels the discovery pipeline that may eventually result in new treatments and cures.

The chokehold on funding for basic research is having long-term implications for future therapies because it is pushing the next generation of fundamental science researchers to the point of extinction, leaving a knowledge gap that will take generations of training to rectify. All early career researchers (ECRs) are dependent on funding from grants but the success rate in winning one is only 10 to 15 per cent. Most ECRS don’t have permanent positions, and the five-year research fellowships or permanent academic positions that offer greater security are rare.

Unsurprisingly, then, a of early to mid-career academics across Australia last year found that only 17 per cent would advise a new PhD graduate to become an academic.

The ever-increasing competitiveness in the funding landscape can only be mitigated if more funding enters the system but there is little sign of that happening. Even the Medical Research Future Fund is proving a disappointment. Established a decade ago with an endowment of A$20 billion, the vision was to distribute up to A$1 billion a year to medical research, funded out of the interest on that endowment – which is now worth A$24.5 billion. But an annual spending cap of A$650 million was introduced in the 2022-23 budget and there is no sign of it being lifted, despite recent criticism.

The fund’s focus is on “interdisciplinary programs (addressing) critical health issues…that improve patient care…(including) projects that aim to advance health system sustainability and improve the quality of life of Australians.” Admittedly, that remit sounds quite applied. But if the government released the lost A$350 and earmarked at least some of it for basic research, imagine what that could do in the decades to come.

������foundation dean at the Sub-Faculty of Translational Medicine and Public Health at Monash University. is director of the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute.

A poor bargain 

Australia’s basic researchers are currently in limbo.

The country’s existing funding rounds for basic research have now been discontinued but a replacement funding model has not even been formally announced. The ARC’s revised is being following widespread community outcry over an earlier draft’s omission of key components, including career-enabling fellowships (especially for early career researchers) and grants for longer-term research infrastructure.

Gone too are the Industry Fellowships, which provided an innovative pivot towards additional support for applied research.

At the root of the problem, of course, is money. Given the post-Covid economic slump, tremendous levels of national debt, difficult-to-contain inflation and pressures to increase defence spending to respond to global uncertainty, government research funding is struggling to provide a balanced diet of basic and applied research.

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Only last week, up to were announced at the CSIRO, in response to rising costs and ministerial pressure to refocus on areas of national priority, such as critical minerals and iron and steel production. That follows 800 job cuts in the past 18 months.

A recent review of university research funding in Australia has been criticised by the Australian Academy of Science for failing to address the long-term research funding strategy, with basic research at “breaking point” and its funding comprising a miniscule portion of GDP. This shift threatens the research capacity needed for long-term prosperity and problem-solving capability.

The tension between basic and applied scientific research at universities represents one of the most consequential challenges facing global innovation systems. With approximately $2.6 trillion invested annually in R&D worldwide, how societies allocate resources between fundamental inquiry and practical application fundamentally shapes technological progress and economic competitiveness.

The translation problem remains severe. Despite decades of policy intervention, 80 to 95 per cent of research projects fail before reaching practical deployment. The timeline from basic discovery to widespread application typically spans 25 to 40 years. For instance, mRNA vaccines required 30 years from initial demonstration to Covid deployment. CRISPR took 36 years from discovery to approved therapy. And quantum computing concepts from the 1980s are only now approaching commercial viability. These extended timelines create political and institutional pressures that threaten sustained investment in fundamental research.

However, some kinds of basic research translate more readily than others. Computational modelling tools exemplify research that simultaneously advances fundamental understanding while enabling immediate applications. For example, our whole-Earth system models, addressing paleogeography, tectonics, climate and surface processes that have been routinely used in basic science, can also predict the formation and preservation of ore deposits critical for energy transitions and meeting net zero targets by 2050. This demonstrates how foundational science can directly serve urgent societal needs without compromising scientific rigour.

Still, universities face mounting commercialisation pressures that strain traditional academic missions. Significant barriers are created by extremely high workloads, complex IP ownership questions and profit-sharing complications. Universities must proactively establish clear policies and incentives (including bonuses) to signal institutional commitment to commercialisation, while protecting both researchers and institutional interests, so that researchers can maintain credibility in both domains.

The evidence demonstrates that every dollar invested into basic science can deliver returns of up to or even over decades. But breakthrough innovations require patient, sustained investment in fundamental research combined with deliberate bridging mechanisms – technology transfer infrastructure, translational programmes, industry partnerships and patient capital. That requires embracing long-term thinking in a political environment that most often runs on a 24-hour news cycle.

Success also demands accepting high failure rates and decade-long timelines as inherent features, while maintaining institutional structures that protect academic freedom, enable risk-taking and facilitate translation when opportunities emerge.

These ongoing tensions between basic and applied research are only being amplified by the rise of AI in both research and teaching at universities, fundamentally dislocating both and making it even more difficult to chart a clear forward trajectory. 

But the fundamental point of which no politicians should be in any doubt is that hollowing out basic research capacity sacrifices future innovation potential for short-term budget savings. And that is not a good bargain.

 is a Robinson Fellow in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.

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