IN SEARCH OF THE PASSIONATE IDEA

John C. Polanyi

Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto

Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories, 80 George St., Toronto, ON M5S 1A1

Ideas are enormously powerful and surprisingly scarce. Scientific ideas change our lives, shape our future and determine humanity's fate. It is ~ "scientists, not governments, who are best equipped to determine which scientific ideas to pursue. Scholarship is an investment in the future. As a result, it is everybody's business, but, as we have noticed, not everybody's priority. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The universities are set apart from society by their special function. They exist for exploration, the drawing of intellectual maps. That is what we, faculty and students, do. We draw our maps not because we can be sure who wit use them, but because they fill us with delight. Who does not want to know where they live? We claim that our maps wit come in handy. Later, we are flabergasted to find that this is true.

Sometimes, happily, governments share our enthusiasm for the power of ideas. The establishment of what will be almost a billion-dollar fund, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, is a case in point. To foster innovation you need a public that is conscious of the power and value of ideas. I am thought once to have had an idea. But now I talk about them. There is an important moral to this, namely that ideas are scarce. Yet, far toot often, our science policy is based on the notion that they abound.

On the face of it, the organization of the nation's " science seems- to acknowledge the centrality of ideas. Both federally and provincially, we set out to foster the very best we have through Centres of Excellence. But too often we deny the premise on which these centres were formed by reshaping them into "Centres of Relevance"—as if it was excellence that was plentiful, and relevance that was scarce.

This shift in emphasis from excellence to relevance will fail to deliver value for money, for two reasons. First of all, because excellence is, of its nature, rare. We cannot take our federal or provincial shopping cart and select the excellence we prefer. What we can do, and are driven to do, is to compromise excellence in the interest of supposed relevance.

That brings me to the second reason that this policy will fait It is, most of the time, a very bad bargain to barter excellence for relevance since both the discovery that one wishes to see made and its application lie well in the future. Of all things, the future is the hardest to predict. Historians, who struggle even to even to make sense of the past, will have to explain some day how it comes about that governments, having failed spectacularly to pick winners in the marketplace for goods, have persuaded us that they can be trusted to select winners in the marketplace for ideas.

Just consider for a moment, how complex it is. Even if we knew what future technologies would be winners, we would still find ourselves at a loss to pick he fundamental science that will nourish those technologies. For this added link in the chain is complicated, too. The new technologies spawned by science at first merely rebound to produce more science. Streams of scientific thought, invigorated in this way, then flow down their valleys to some unexpected confluence. There, for the first time, the engineer finds navigable waters. But even at this late stage, surprises confound the planner as technologies range here and there in search of optimal applications.

Recently, X-ray technology, to give an example, has broadened its scope from the health industry to the manufacture of microchips. X-rays cut silicon chips as if they were cheese. But there is a serious problem. The X-ray scalpel must be focused on its target by mirrors, since we lack X-ray lenses. Happily, the burgeoning field of lobster physiology (of all things) is coming to the rescue. The eye of the lobster, it turns out, is based not on lenses, as is ours, but on myriad tiny mirrors—the very thing for steering X-rays. But where among today's overseers of science do we find the master-chef to link lobsters to chips?

If, then, one cannot reliably select fundamental science on the basis of its down-stream benefits, how should governments go about it? Recently, a British scientist, Terence Kealey of Cambridge University, in a splendidly wrong-headed book entitled the Ecocomic Laws of Scientific Research, advised governments to get out of the business of research funding. The same suggestion, as he notes, was made in teal by Sir George Airy, Astronomer Royal of England. The selection of research, Sir George pointed out, is best made by the scientific entrepreneur himself, free of "the dangers attending conjunction with the State."

The extremely risky decision as to what science to pursue is best made by the scientific risk-taker, who gambles his career in choosing the right research topic. The most understanding sponsors of intellectual adventure, in Sir George's England, were often country gentlemen. However, modern governments, having quite properly (though insufficiently) taxed the privileged, are obliged to take on those of their functions that filled a social need, including the support of venturesome scientists where they are in short supply.

But when, I shall be asked, would I ever admit to there being a sufficiency of scientists—let alone too many? Again the test must centre on quality. When we in Canada have individual scientists (totalling one-tenth in number those in the U.S.) who can attract the very best students in North America, competitively with their counterparts at Harvard and Berkeley, then we shall indeed have achieved our goal of scientific sufficiency. It should be clear that we have some way to go.

But why would we want to have (in an amount proportionate to our population) science that is competitive with the very best? We know that we are never going to do more than a tiny fraction of the world's science. What we are going to do instead, as every nation does, is to view the wide world of science through the eyes of our scientists, thereby giving our students a global perspective, our government and industry sage advice, and our countrymen a view of the world they inhabit.

The point to remember here is that the landscape of science is vast, with some 10 million technical papers being published each year. What our scientists select from this sea of data will depend strongly on what they know. They must have eyes as sharp as, and on occasion, sharper than, their competitors. Our scientists' usefulness depends upon their ability to pick out what matters, and to do so before it is evident to all. As for relevance, we will never find a better guarantee of that than is inherent in excellence. For whenever we make a discovery that changes people's thinking, we shall, to the same extent, change their doing. The only irrelevant science is mediocre science.

There remains a nagging question, even for those on the side of the angels. Can excellence be judged? Does basic science have a bottom line? Could it be for example, that when the stock market for ideas opens tomorrow, we shall discover that our scientists have nothing of value to say? I think it unlikely, and I will explain why. The procedures that we used in selecting them have long since shown themselves to be grounded in reality. The guiding principle for assessing value in basic science, now as in the past, has been excellence as perceived by the scientific community. We see the consequences of this around us.

For an annual investment of a fraction of one per cent of the world's wealth in the generation of new knowledge, we have been rewarded in this century by insight into the nature of matter, of energy, of space, of time, of life and of the cosmos, beyond anything that history has known.

And has this, you are entitled to ask, proved to be relevant? I would say, "rather too much." Modern science has totally transformed our world. Our problem is not a lack of relevance, but a surfeit of it. As a consequence of these changes, we can no longer wall ourselves off from one another, nor therefore have nations as we used to, nor make war as we did, nor squander resources, nor litter the globe or neglect the oppressed, as has so long been our custom.

By far the greater part of this transformation has been for the good. All of it represents a challenge unique in history. This challenge testifies to the "power of ideas." Indeed, they will over-power us unless we continue to value them, rejecting mindless materialism and fanaticism.

There should be a grim humour for the all-seeing deity in our attempts to convince ourselves of the power of ideas. We shall shortly emerge from a century in which 50 million people died in the contest between the ideas of autocracy and democracy Twice that number were in danger of being sacrificed on the altar of another idea; the pursuit of security through nuclear armament. We should take comfort from the fact that the more civilized notions of democracy and disarmament are in the ascendancy.

I began by speaking of the fear we have in Canada that ideas may prove irrelevant. I end by claiming that to have an idea is to be in the embrace of a tiger. In pursuit of an~abstraction, Einstein, a devoted pacifist, gave the world nuclear weapons. In pursuit of a vision of shared concern for human suffering, three outstanding individuals—Canadian Generals Maurice Baril and Romeo Dallaire, and Secretary General Kofi Annan of the UN—incurred some of the responsibility for the deaths of a multitude of Rwandan civilians. This was, in fact, the tragedy of an idea half-conceived; the three whom I mentioned were empowered to go to the scene of the crime, but not to deal with the criminals.

The heavier burden of responsibility rests with us. We who failed to insist on the power of the idea that goes by the name of the United Nations—the idea that we owe an inescapable obligation to humanity. It is, I believe, on that simple but immensely powerful idea that all our futures rest.