For a thick monograph on which scientists drudge away for several years, they receive 40 points regardless of the work they have put into it and the size of the book. When one researcher capped his seventieth birthday in 2003 and died two years later, his colleague wrote first two congratulations and then four obituaries in various periodicals. For these small articles in which she evaluated her colleague, she collected – even if unwillingly – a total of 69.5 points.
It is one example of how the methodology of assessment which the governmental Research and Development Council pushed through works in practice. The scale which it created tallies apples, pears and cherries, while its authors entirely ignore what kind of work the pickers had to exert to put them in the baskets. Put simply, the system favours quantity at the cost of quality.
According to these criteria, how would the Council assess the work of Antonín Holý, who has examined various substances since 1970, sought their possible medicinal effects – and only after twenty-two years he found in one of them a medicine for the HIV virus, which causes AIDS? It is the best medicine known so far. Besides that, Prof Holý also discovered other revolutionary medicines in the 1990s.
Such an odd methodology does not exist anywhere in the world. It is hard to compare the results of, say, geneticists and historians or physicists and sociologists. Nevertheless, our Council is cleverer than the rest and compares them. It has not taken the requests of the Czech Conference of Rectors, of the Council of the Higher Education Institutions, not to mention of the Academy of Sciences, for modifications of the methodology into consideration at all.
What has emerged from these bizarre criteria has led to the decision that the budget for the Academy of Sciences – as a purportedly insufficiently functioning institution – is to nosedive. Next year, it should lose 1.03 billion out of 5 billion, with further cuts following until in 2012 it should have a budget of something over 2.5 billion. The President of the AS Jiří Drahoš warned at an exceptional general meeting of the Academy of Sciences on 30 June that the entirely distorted interpretation of the reform of research and development by the respective Council just like its way of preparing a budget would ‘mean in a short time the liquidation of not only the Academy of Sciences but consequently also of the quality research at other institutions, thus quite certainly also at higher education institutions.’ The chancellors of Charles University and the Institute of Chemical Technology Prague Václav Hampl and Josef Koubek expressed similar fears.
Is there any reason for creating such an assessment? Even though Minister of Education Miroslava Kopicová does not think so, it is in my opinion a plot against the Academy of Sciences, which however will in its consequences affect the entire basic research including higher educational. Why? It is sufficient to examine the composition of the governmental Research and Development Council, which devised these absurd criteria. Its members are no outstanding scientists with an all-round view but people – albeit garlanded with various titles – without scientific erudition, yet with excessive ambitions. It is a conspiracy of the incompetent against the competent, the unsuccessful against the successful – like it sometimes is in this country.
To begin with, some people who are bothered by the existence of the Academy of Sciences as such sit in the Council. The AS might have hurt them by not having appreciated their qualities; they might have had some scrape, which forced them to leave the Academy.
Secondly, there is an attempt by several university functionaries to obtain greater subsidies, namely from the money snatched from the Academy of Sciences, supposedly for science. Are the higher education institutions however prepared to dive into basic research and develop it to the same extent of that say in the USA? In reality, it is only a chimera. The greatest successes so far have been achieved by maybe 50 joint laboratories of the Academy of Sciences and the higher education institutes – and those should be expanded.
And then, the need to rebuild applied research emerged. At the beginning of the 1990s, the new owners of the freshly privatised large factories disposed of it. They argued with the contention: we do not need it, because we will buy all the licences. In reality, industry cannot get do without it.
Martin Jahn, a representative of the car industry, who had been appointed to a governmental function by the Social Democrats, found a simple recipe: we will create a Technological Grant Agency for the financing of applied research, into which we will pour money of which we will have deprived the Academy of Sciences. These were of course sweet words for the Ministry of Industry and Trade, which already today gets more money because of it.
What does it mean? The state will finance private enterprises for them to establish and operate centres of applied research. Whatever is paid in the West by companies themselves from their profits is to be subsidised by the state, although only partially. (In the West, only military and partially medical-biological research is covered by the government.) At the same time, it is not clear how transparent these flows of money would be with private companies, whether they would always go into applied research and not somewhere else.
If we lack applied research here, why does the all-wise Research and Development Council not propose incentives for firms to establish it again? It would be clearer. And mainly – every company management would ensure that their money invested in research be dealt with thriftily. Of course, it is easier for the industrial lobby to wring directly the state budget.
Sometimes the claim is heard that we have to introduce austerity measures in today’s financial crisis, and therefore also the Academy of Sciences has to give up great means. But this is demagoguery. We know that even this Summer Government proclaimed that it would not touch science and research. So wherein does the truth lie? Furthermore, the amounts invested here in the development of science are still low, we are still below the European average, not to mention the scientific superpowers like the USA, Canada, Japan. At the same time, many Western states, more stricken by the economic crisis than the Czech Republic, are increasing the means for research – they know that it pays off, they are thinking of the future, not only about today.
The leadership of the Academy of Sciences and the chancellors want to negotiate with Prime Minister Jan Fischer for the government to change its decision of Monday and to prepare jointly a truly quality and functional system for financing research and development. Likewise, Minister Kopicová is not opposed to further discussions. Academicians also request the immediate personnel changes in the Research and Development Council so that it is professionally up to the mark. If they fail, they are considering public protests – the final desperate act would be to block the seat of the Government.
We must also ask the question: does this transitional Cabinet without a political mandate have the authority to make fundamental strategic decisions with immense ramifications at all? Of course, its catastrophic plan can be overturned by the government that will emerge from the October elections. Nevertheless, before the new government is able to do so, several months will have passed and the leadership of the Academy of Sciences will have to cut expenditures for next year in a way that might liquidate some research projects in an irreversible manner.
Scientists need calm and perspective for their work. Periodical squabbling over money and an attempt to liquidate half of the Academy of Sciences do not help them. And of course that uncertainty will discourage young people when deciding whether to plunge into science or rather go to a bank. And those scientists who have already acquired a certain renown will begin to seek a quiet place in a laboratory abroad, preferably overseas.
The attempt to reduce significantly the budget of the Academy of Sciences for the next and the following years is nothing less than a stripping of the assets of this prestigious institution of ours and in the final consequences also of the entire basic research to benefit industry. The first blow to Czech science was delivered by the Nazis in 1939, the second by the Communists in 1948 – and now it is to be given the final blow by the Summer Cabinet?
Czech Science Writer
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