CERN Accelerating science

Big Science: What's it Worth?

The report "BIG SCIENCE: What's it Worth?" was published last week by Science/Business Publishing (www.sciencebusiness.net). It offers a useful read both for scientists but also for those involved in outreach activities or actively involved in policy-making in fundamental research.

In his foreword to the report CERN’s Director General states: “In today’s global scientific enterprise, such projects are magnets for smart people, leading to cutting-edge technologies and world-changing innovations. In the political debates over these projects, however, it’s often forgotten that such ideas do not happen in a vacuum. They are born of collaboration between basic research and applied science, between idea and innovation. Yet people often speak of basic and applied as if we have a choice. We do not. Basic and applied science form a virtuous circle, and we break it at our peril.” and continues “At CERN, we are striving to keep the virtuous circle turning, and we do that by combining basic and applied, science and industry, ideas and capital.”

The report addresses some of the hot topics concerning Big Science and provides readers with evidence on how it can pay its way into the future. Moreover, the report offers multiple perspectives: starting with the benefits of basic research—presented in a more general fashion—followed by an overview of the role that specific big science projects offer to innovation as they concentrate expertise and effort. It argues for the need of enlarging the contact between research infrastructures and laboratories and society. This becomes more urgent given that the importance of big science is often not fully understood by politicians, for whom Big Science often represents high costs and complex funding, difficulties in managing intellectual property rights. Scientific goals are hard to understand and benefits are hard to trace.

It is argued that: “If society is to get real value from its investment in research, it must encourage basic and applied research to work together. A comprehensive accounting of inputs and outputs from research infrastructure suggests that they do have broad economic and social spin-outs—and concerted, well-organised efforts to amplify these spin-outs (for instance through special investment funds, training schemes, or public-private partnerships) can make the bet more certain”.

Big science projects—such as CERN, the Human Genome Project and the International Space Station—provide vivid demonstrations that mankind is able to do the most complex of things and produce enormous achievements. Thinking of science one should not only concentrate on current projects but also think of it as an investment in the future generations. These capabilities are important for the survival of humanity as whole, not just because of the new knowledge they generate but because they show us how to work together, no matter what our differences may be. This is summarized nicely in the conclusion of this report: “big science might look expensive but ignorance will cost a lot more.”

The full report can be found here:  https://ep-news.web.cern.ch/sites/ep-news.web.cern.ch/files/issues/BigSc...