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ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Publisher: All-Russian public organization "Academy of Engineering Sciences named after A.M. Prokhorov".

CANADA: NRC boss orders scientists to focus on 'market drivers'

31.03.2011

There's radical change at the National Research Council, Canada's biggest science institute, as the new president orders all staff to direct research toward boosting economic development and technology, with less time for pure science.

Starting this spring, 20 per cent of research money, and all the capital funds that buy expensive lab equipment, will be removed from existing budgets and directed where the president and vice-presidents choose.

Eventually, 80 per cent of research funds will be redirected this way.

NRC president John McDougall has announced to all staff that he wants research that is "successfully deployed and used to benefit our customers and partners in industry and government."

His memo, dated March 2, warns that "history is an anchor that ties us to the past rather than a sail that catches the wind to power us forward."

The new system, with most funding awarded by top management, will put existing staff in a position of having to apply to their employer to keep doing their own work. So far, they aren't faring well: McDougall notes that his scientists have suggested more than 70 research areas. But most of these have no clear "market driver" or "purposeful direction," he writes.

As well, he says, too many separate institutes (divisions of the NRC) are duplicating each other's work.

Some NRC scientists fear for their jobs as a result. And their fears echo those of federal scientists in other departments whose work has been politically directed and who are forbidden to discuss their findings by the Harper government.

Since its founding in 1916, the NRC has had to balance "basic" research, or study of the world around us with no fixed goal in mind, against "applied" work of immediate use in hospitals, factories, mines, farms and spaceships.

Full text on the Ottawa Citizen site

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