Science shaping the future

All mankind should enjoy the fruits of science

Sanna Jäppinen

 

The theme of the Science Shaping the Future seminar, arranged in conjunc-tion with the 360th anniversary festi-vities of the University of Helsinki, was the status of science and univer-sities in the third millennium.

Scientists must have visions which carry them beyond today’s demands,” was the message of the seminar’s main speaker, Professor Federico Mayor. The former Director-General of UNESCO emphasised the role of universities as a watchdog of academia. Somebody also has to keep paying attention to those research objects which are not particularly up-beat or directly beneficial for business.

Mayor’s reminder of the importance of basic research alongside narrowly focused applied research, often privately financed, is particularly appropriate in modern Finland which, after having recovered from the depression of the early 1990s, is a firm believer in the triumph of information technology. It is worth bearing in mind that success stories such as Nokia, today a global giant in the mobile phone business, are made possible only by scientific discoveries based on comprehensive basic research. There will be no applied science where there is no science to begin with.

“The modern world in which multinational mega-companies dictate even the business life needs as a counterweight a multinational scientific community. Only a global university network will carry the authority to effect the priorisation of research objects,” says Mayor.

“Executives draw up the policy for a whole business conglomerate; similarly universities need some kind of global co-ordination which will guarantee that they focus on specific themes.”

Education creates harmony

Like research, in Federico Mayor’s opinion education should also be viewed from a global perspective, and not simply based on national interests. This is not a question of altruism but of guaranteeing harmony.

“If the division into rich and poor countries, haves and have-nots, is not halted we will obviously have more problems. Increased violence, endless lines of refugees and terrorism are signs of this global inequality. Education is the surest guarantee of democracy.”

In the current situation Mayor is mainly worried about the decision-making power becoming concentrated in just a few select countries. As an example of threats already realised he cites NATO’s involvement in Kosovo last spring. “Albeit the countries participating in the action may have been morally right; they still took justice into their own hands. That is heading down a slippery slope.”

“In addition to safeguarding borders it is about time that we paid attention to what really goes on within those borders. I hope that nations in the future will commit themselves not only to military organisations but, for example, to environment-keeping forces which would be sent in immediately in the event of natural disasters,” Mayor projects his visions.

To him, the environmental issue is one of the major themes which the global scientific community should now promote. “Scientists mustn’t think, ‘let’s make use of our knowledge tomorrow,’ because tomorrow it may be too late.”

Finnish elite research in the limelight

In addition to the broad outlines presented by Federico Mayor, the seminar included scientists’ talks on the present state and the future of Finnish top-level research.

Leena Peltonen-Palotie, Professor at the University of Helsinki, National Public Health Institute and UCLA, told of the dazzling progress within genetic research. The first version of mapping the human genome is expected to be completed this year. Nevertheless, she noted that these are early days yet, as true comprehension of the genetic research data requires a completely new discipline, bioinformatics.

Pioneering brain researcher Professor Risto Näätänen presented a significant scientific discovery made at the University of Helsinki in the 1970s, which has subsequently won global recognition and opened up a whole new field of applications in, for instance, the analysis of auditory disturbances. Mismatch negativity (MMN) is a reaction in the brain’s electrical activity to any changes in a repeated sound. It is also used in basic brain research, such as locating the memory patterns of phonemes in the brain.

Professor Jorma Routti from the European Commission pointed out that scientific results are not enough as such; they need to be marketed and disseminated outside the scientific community. The EU countries do not grant sufficient funding to scientific research which, according to Professor Routti, results in the Europeans being outdone by the Americans and the Japanese. Nevertheless, Finland is deemed better than average: its allocation of more than three per cent of the GDP to research is one of the best in the world.