Showing posts with label industry. Show all posts

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Industry Interest in Science or Science Interest in Industry?

Birute Miskiniene from the Lithuanian Ministry of Education and Research spoke to me and a group of university heads and education coordinators of the Baltic States yesterday (BOVA University). We were there to comment on the future strategy of collaboration of higher education between the Baltic States.
Miskiniene spoke about the future and the policy of education in Lithuania. She highlighted in bold and repeated over and over again was that universities and scientists had to be find a connection to the industry in every way (teaching, research, Ph.D.-students...)! The retorics was no longer a polite encouragement, but for once a specific political finger on the sore spot.

We see that everywhere now - it is being forced down on the education. But when listening to this (there was no oppotunity of asking questions) the feeling of dispair turned to optimism when I turned things on their head. I will explain.

The case in a nutshell:
Politicians and industry point of view.
They want bangs for their bucks! They thus think the best strategy is to combine academic work with industry in a total makeover of the academic world. The responsebility is put on the academic world as an obligation to feed the industry with useful products and tailored students for positions in the industry. I would say the logic makes sense practically a long way, if the academic world only produced engineers (and engineers are very useful people I think).

Academics point of view
Academics want to do science! Science is not product engineering! It is discovery! It is partly intuitive and spring from the freedom of pursuing ideas and understanding in depth! Bold risky ideas - test - fail/succeed. At best, science is a discipline guided by moral and ethics - and this often does not harmonize with dancing to the pipe of industry. The forced model makes it more difficult to pursue basic understanding of say the intestinal system of an animal, because they can only get money for drug design and testing by collaboration with the industry. The intellectual property rights is another tragedy of this shotgun marriage that further paralyze important information from benefiting people on a wider scale.

But why is it scientists and the university has to chase industrial collaborators and funds? Why not the other way around?

The more I thought about this the crazier this seemed. I will here boldly claim that:

It is the industry and politicians lack of imagination and will to seek opportunities that stops them from taking advantage of basic research already being done - and there for the taking!

What am I talking about? Example:
Let us say I make a basic study of the most basic form of epidemiology: estimating how common a virus is in a population. Let us say I find it in 20% of the population where it cause illness in a modest 0.2% of the population. Especially children and immunocompromised people would be in danger. What could industry and politicians do with that knowledge if the really wished to make use of it?

Diagnostic Laboratories - development of accurate methods to detect the disease and sell the diagnostics
Doctors - Possibility to detect disease, avoid some deaths and reduce the days people have to be sick
Population - More people diagnosed, treated, surviving, and prevented from infections = more working people.
Politics - Showing awareness to health of the population. Meeting future international demands before they arrive (lowering costs for fast implementation).
Food industry - If the food is transmitted by food, and they connect to voluntary control programs, or see the need to begin them (with government perhaps) to be able to safely export products that can transmit the disease.
Medical industry - higher sale of products for treatment of disease. New markets.
Tourism - Documentation of a disease decline or raise is important to what people will eat or trust in the country. Avoiding getting a bad reputation for being a disease hub on the map by being proactive and giving accurate advice.
Journalism - Misinterpretation of scientific information and misguiding the public (sorry, I really think these people do a lot of harm) - or perhaps in the future it may be possible: to educate the public soberly about relevant preventive measures.
Insurance companies - Who are in the risk group? Does it influence work performance, death, personal risks?
Schools and nurseries - how to prevent spread and detect symptoms before an outbreak.
Lawyers - well they are basically everywhere from rights, safety regulations, politics regulations, contracts etc.
and so on...

Any of these examples of groups that could and would benefit from just looking into what universities are actually doing already in the name of science only requires a phone call from the group to the scientist saying: "Hey, we can use what you wrote in your article what would it cost to explore/present/write on aspect X?"

In my head, industry is there to know how ideas are sell-able and have to be pro-active. Scientists should (continue) to test ideas and concentrate on expanding their insight in depth in areas that would otherwise remain uncharted. Not the other way around.

Friday, January 21, 2011

In vitro meat - is it progress or optimization?

Lots have been written about in vitro meat (meat cells artificially grown for the purpose of food consumption). Mostly the debate orbit the same topics as other new technologies entering our home: Is it safe? Would I use it? Do we need it? Will it be the answer to our problems (growing population, disease, global warming)? If it is good business, is there any way it is humanly possible to avoid it if you do not want it?

I would like to review this new technology from the standpoint of veterinary science and my personal opinion.

I think everyone can understand that we have gone through many steps in livestock production through the previous hundreds of years. And with the industrial revolution the intensity of the production has increased. And it keeps increasing, though problems increase with higher densities of animals, designed foods for maximal growth, animals outgrowing their environment and their carrying capacity, infertility, more diseases to them and us, and so on. But why would a herd owner take on all those pains if a less industrialized production would lessen the headaches and improve the health (and often quality of the product)?

Jared Diamonds gives a decent explanation to this in his book Collapse: optimize or perish. When in the business, and liking your job, you often have to invest to survive, at the same time increasing your dependence on having to continue. Since meat and milk prices have not followed the rest of the economic development, the farmer gets the same, while expenses increase - roughly said. The popular way of dealing with this is by optimizing in facilities and machinery to reduce the increasing production costs. It actually makes sense if you imagine yourself as the farmer desiring not to see his family investments and life work go down the drain.

But optimization has the dark side of not considering the animals as much more than a simple asset eventually. Output is all that matters when it comes down to regulations, quotas, and expenses. But problems with the animals (infertility, diseases, mortalities or culling due to unsatisfactory production, motoric disorders, behavioural disorders, stress and the list goes on) also lead to expenses either through treatment or losses through poorer performing animals. It is a ugly dilemma that does not seem to be turning around any time in sight.

Some farmers try to break free of this maelstrom. Ecological and organic farming is one example.

But imagine how farming would look like if you want to keep optimizing your meat production! What if you could optimize it so far you could get rid of the animals, the large buildings, manure problems, diseases, army of staff... what would it look like? In vitro meat would not be a bad guess!

But wouldn't we object? I don't think so. Some, off course. There will always be some who have a taste for quality and nutrition. But the average consumer in the supermarket has tasted lower and lower quality meat over the last decades, no. And the skill of knowing what is good meat is long lost in the generation shift.

Thus, the question remains. Do you want to eat substitute meat? Not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is good for the industry. Unless you believe more industrial food needs to "save" a growing population (rather than distribute it fairly - to me a contradiction in terms), then I would call in vitro meat, the next thing in livestock optimization - goodbye animals. That said - it may still have many important roles in the future. Tissue growth will be medically incredibly important. And even food grown in a petri dish may have its purpose if we decide to reach for the stars or mine the depths of the oceans.

I think the final remark to this should be a quote from a dark vision of the future, the movie Judge Dredd: