Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, beyond the edge of a town nobody knows, down a long track in a dark wood, was a cave. Inside this cave lived a hermit who rarely spoke to people and instead preferred the company of animals, the trees, the flowers and insects and birds. By asking them very careful questions and listening very carefully to the answers, she learned a great many wonderful things, like how to cure diseases and keep her body and mind healthy through the years, where memories are stored when we sleep, the relationship between colors and music, and others that are not too numerous to recount but too numerous to recount here.
One day the hermit had a strange notion. She would tell a person about what she had learned, and that person would tell others, until everyone shared her knowledge. So she walked up the long track in the dark wood until she came to the town nobody knows, and she talked to one person and then another, something she almost never did. But nobody believed her, because she was a hermit who lived in a cave. So she walked down the long track in the dark wood, and she didn't come back.
The end.
Here's another story.
Once upon a time there were biomedical scientists who lived in the Centers of the Universe. You would think there could be only one center of anything, but these were biomedical scientists, not mathematicians, and so they called wherever they happened to be the Center of the Universe. These Centers were in what is called the `First World' – so named because the people who lived there got to name it first – in places like the United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland and France (and no place else in Europe), the east and west coasts of the United States (and no place else, except Chicago and maybe St Louis), Japan and Eastern Australia (really just Melbourne). The scientists in these Centers would write to each other and visit each other and sometimes all get together in a place that wasn't a Center (but had nice scenery) and they would talk about how great it was to be in a Center of the Universe.
Now it happened that there were scientists in other places that weren't Centers of the Universe. The First World scientists called these the `Other World,' because they felt these places didn't have the technology, government support, sophisticated commercial interests or even scientists to produce the environment necessary for great Center-of-the-Universe-type science. Nevertheless, the Other World had the statistically expected numbers of individuals possessing the intellectual skill, industrial drive and single-minded (if decidedly odd) desire to immerse themselves in this business/art/trade/pursuit of biomedical science, and so these individuals traveled to the Centers in the First World to learn how to be scientists. This involved working extremely hard for very small amounts of money, producing great scientific advances, all to the credit of the First World scientists. They did this until such time as they had to leave this rarified sphere, and then they pretty much had to do something else, because they were no longer working in a Center of the Universe.
To the First World scientists the system worked. It allowed the complex symbiosis whereby government supports the basic studies that lead to commercially viable progress while protecting the intellectual property to keep it economically sound. Everyone got what they wanted – everyone except those outside this environment who might want to know about or cure diseases or understand problems that affect those outside the First World – surely, if the Other World scientists wanted to study those problems, they could do that in the Other World (without of course rivaling the science of the First World and its Centers).
Then one day some of the First World scientists noticed a change in the wind. It was small but hinted at something big. Some of them considered boarding ships to new and faraway places that the new wind would take them to – places where new advances in manufacturing and agriculture, electronics and literature, design and thought were happening, places where biomedical science, often without the constraints of First World regulations or intellectual property laws, was only emerging. Of course, most of the First World scientists didn't take these Other World discoveries too seriously, because they weren't made in Centers of the Universe. So they ignored them.
The Other World governments, however, supported the Other World scientists with major new research initiatives where they could. Fabulous palaces of research were built, and the scientists who moved into them were those who had worked for the First World scientists. And even in places where there wasn't huge government support, science continued to happen. The scientists in these places were also the same ones who had worked in the First World, and they knew how to work very hard for very little money. But now they were working for themselves.
Then, some time later, the First World scientists stopped paying attention, because they were busy with other things. And when they looked again, their Centers of biomedical science weren't there anymore. Those wonderful basic and technological discoveries that dragged the future to the present were happening elsewhere, the same places that all the new music, new haircuts, new poetry and new cuisine were coming from – not the First World. But the First World scientists had lost the ability to see this happening, and the Other World just let them be.
The end.
There's a moral here. Don't assume that, just because a place is a Center, it will always be. That takes continued effort, money and an open flow of ideas, and frankly most people just don't have the energy to do that for long (there are exceptions). We all know places that used to be great, but just aren't anymore, and this can happen at any level and on any scale. Governments in the `First World' like to assume their science is being done in `Centers' and will continue to say it even when it is no longer true, because it is what people like to hear. But if that isn't fueled with money, drive and creativity, the slide into obscurity won't be a slow one. In the USA, for example, half of all patents currently being filed are from outside the country, up from about one-third only a few years ago. Would it be a bad thing for the First World no longer to dominate science? Bad for who? From the perspective of global progress, loss of dominance isn't a bad thing.
The signs are there for a logarithmic increase in `Other World' science, and those of us who consider ourselves in the First World will be tempted to ignore them. If we do, it may be at our own peril. Ignoring important new findings will always impact on the quality of our own work. But there's more. How long do you think it will be before large pharmaceutical companies outsource basic research to Other World laboratories? And what makes you think that it isn't happening already?
Nighty-night.
