Science funding reforms put 'cart before horse'

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says he wants to “brutally commercialise” New Zealand science, and his Government wants the sector to generate high-tech exports and more economic returns from research.

I agree the second part is important; all scientists want to return value to New Zealand from their research, and yes, an increasing number of scientists are keen to turn their research into companies, jobs and exports.

But the ‘brutal’ part is a problem. While the Government’s new Science Investment Plan puts commercialisation front and centre, it’s also cutting (or has already cut) the foundations that make such successes possible in the first place. As history clearly demonstrates, again and again, good science takes time – often decades – before it can be translated into financial returns.

Science funding shakeup to shift millions from farms to advanced tech
There is a profound distinction – and also an interdependency – between science and the innovation it enables. Conflating the two does not help.

The Government says the new Science Investment Plan does not cut science funding. Confoundingly, however, in the plan it’s stated that “core science and research funding is projected to decline in future years”.

The trick here is that, while the Government says the plan itself doesn’t cut science funding, that is only because those cuts to science funding have already been announced. In the last two years, Marsden funding has been reduced and narrowed (with arts and humanities excluded), National Science Challenge funding has disappeared, the Endeavour Fund has been disrupted, and research money has been redirected into restructuring the science system and commercialisation initiatives.

The last few months have seen what most of us in the sector view as the death-by-stealth of the Marsden Fund, as the money has been wrapped into a ‘transition’ fund to be managed by MBIE.

The cumulative result is significantly less funding for the long-term, curiosity-driven research that seeds future breakthroughs. Curiosity-driven research (also called basic research, discovery-led research, or investigator-led research) is research undertaken primarily to increase knowledge and understanding. It’s driven by questions such as “what can we learn about this phenomenon?” rather than “how can we commercialise this discovery?”

What amounts to ‘discovery’ is field dependent, of course. Medical research depends on knowledge that might be thought of as relatively applied biology – but also on a fair amount of social science. Yet all research disciplines must include exploration of knowledge gaps, as well as targeted application, and in the best systems there is connectivity between the two: if you want to build a machine that no one has built before, you want to involve people who can answer the questions that explain why no one has ever done it.

People who can identify the missing pieces.

I am often asked to give examples of the outcomes of discovery-led research – a nice anecdote to illustrate this point. The work of Jeff Tallon and Bob Buckley in Lower Hutt, from the late 1980s onwards, not only identified high-temperature superconductors, but led the international charge to understand why and how these materials manage to conduct electricity with no energy loss. In doing so, they created inter-generational expertise in these materials in New Zealand.

Decades later, we have internationally-competitive work going on in New Zealand to use these materials to develop components for electric aircraft, maglev trains, and efficient space satellites. Not to mention OpenStar, the Kiwi startup in the international competition to deliver clean, abundant, and available fusion energy to the world.

So there is a timescale to the translation of research into technology. Maybe it can be sped up by bringing the research and commercialisation parts of the scientific ecosystem closer together – and perhaps it can be made more effective by bringing disciplines, including research in the social sciences and humanities, into that ecosystem.

But replacing one part of the ecosystem by another – swapping out basic science funding for applied science funding, as this government is doing – leads us nowhere good.

There is another point to all this that I think people miss, in looking for a direct line from discovery science to result. Before Tallon became a world expert in superconductivity, he worked on the fundamental physics of melting – and because of my own research interests, I’ve actually read his paper on ‘Dislocations and melting in two and three dimensions’.

It has only nine citations – in contrast to 1238 for his most cited superconductivity paper in 1991 – and was published in 1980.

My point is that often, in science, the same researchers are doing more than one thing. They are working on different topics; they are working on fundamental questions and at the same time, may be interested in the application of their expertise to more applied problems. Moving our funding system to prioritise commercial outcomes does not necessarily just mean favouring a group of more commercially savvy researchers over others; it means a narrowing of the intellectual environment in which we all work. Even as individuals.

Cuts across the sector over the last couple of years have been massive. While cuts to expenditure have been the bread and butter of this government, these cuts to research funding need to be seen against a background of long-term underfunding of the sector, as apparent in the Science System Advisory Group report commissioned by this government to set the reform process in place.

As director of the MacDiarmid Institute, I have something of a stake in this. I can also point to evidence of the fundamental science behind commercial success. Over the 24 years since the institute was founded by Sir Paul Callaghan, it has spun out an ever-increasing number of startup companies every year.

Zethos – founded in 2019 (formerly Zincovery) to address critical minerals challenges through recycling industrial waste. They had support from MBIE through a Smart Ideas grant; won the Callaghan Innovation C-Prize; had Pre-Seed Accelerator Funding from Kiwinet; three of their 15 employees came through the MacDiarmid Institute, including the company’s CEO.

Advemto – founded in 2022 – is building tech for life-science applications. It started with the work of a MacDiarmid Institute-funded PhD student in 2010; the science was supported by Marsden grants in 2010, 2016, and 2019; one of the founders was additionally supported as a postdoctoral research fellow by the MacDiarmid Institute from 2015. Eight of their 12 employees came through the MacDiarmid Institute.

Ternary – founded in 2023 – built its initial expertise off a Marsden grant in 2011 on carbon dioxide reduction. The company is building a liquid electricity solution that uses existing fossil fuel infrastructure, but is emissions free.

Commercialisation seed funding from the MacDiarmid Institute helped them to launch, and they now have 28 employees, six of whom came through the MacDiarmid Institute.Dot Ingredients – founded 2024 – off the back of National Science Challenge funding in 2019 that led to their first patent. It was a Catalyst research grant in 2017 working on gold nanoparticles that unexpectedly provided them with the knowledge of how to create exceptionally stable emulsions – which they are now using to replace fossil fuels with biodegradable cellulose, for the surfactants industry – we are talking cosmetics, cleaning products, and a range of others.

They also had support from MacDiarmid commercialisation funding, Kiwinet and Callaghan Innovation.There are 38 of these startups affiliated with the MacDiarmid Institute, and more every year. But the point is simple. Those decades of research funding cannot be replaced by funding the commercialisation of that science. It’s the research that underpins the commercialisation.

The idiom about putting the cart before the horse springs to mind.