We Need Professors in the Labs as Well as in Classes
Stop. Back away from the test tube, slowly. Turn off the DNA sequencer and come out of the lab with your hands up. Get back in the classroom, where you belong.
Public enthusiasm for university professors conducting research in addition to teaching undergraduates seems to have hit a new low. Articles appear every week assailing “pork” projects, spendthrift boondoggles that are generally defined as such because a writer thinks the research topic sounds ridiculous. The implication is that if university faculty members stopped doing research, and particularly if we stopped asking for tax-supported funding for it, we could focus on what really counts: the education of America’s children.
As a professor of biology, I am all for educating children. My question is this: What would you like me to teach them, and where shall I get the material?
Most people never stop to think about where the information in textbooks and lectures comes from. It comes from someone, somewhere, finding things out, doing experiments, putting the results together with the work of others, and eventually developing a body of knowledge. What we teach is always changing as new research reveals new discoveries and leads to new conclusions.
But let’s go back to my question of what to teach if research is halted. No research means no new discoveries. That in turn means we can just keep teaching the same facts over and over. I could rely on the research of the last few centuries, at least. I wouldn’t have to teach that everything in the universe is made of earth, air, water and fire, or that a wandering uterus makes women mentally unstable, or that gastric ulcers are caused by stress rather than bacterial infections -- all ideas that new research eventually overturned.
Wait, you say -- no one is arguing for a cessation of research, just for a rebalancing of who does it. University professors should, well, profess, and other people would make discoveries. Parents and taxpayers are paying good money to get children educated, not to allow ivory tower dilettantes to indulge their pet ideas.
But who are those other people? Certainly research is done in privately or publicly funded institutes where no undergraduates can be found. But such research is likely to be product-driven, with a goal of curing a disease or sequencing a set of genes. Basic research, sometimes called “discovery science,” largely takes place in the labs of academe, between appointments with students and meetings of the curriculum committee. Its practical outcome is not always clear-cut, but it forms the foundation of every type of knowledge application.
In the days before universities were widespread, people had to fund such research through their own fortunes or by acquiring wealthy patrons who paid for research at the whim of their interest. Charles Darwin was able to pursue his interest in the origin of biological diversity at least in part because he married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, part of the Wedgwood china dynasty.
Returning to this system would automatically make research less democratic, and far less diverse, as few people have access to personal fortunes or well-to-do friends. And the sheer reduction in numbers of people able to make discoveries would impede progress in finding the answers to, as Garrison Keillor’s character Guy Noir puts it, “life’s persistent questions.”
But what about the pork? It is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. Imagine you are a member of Congress asked to recommend funding for a project that will use very detailed X-rays to determine whether a certain type of acid molecule has a shape that curves, with two halves made up of four components that always occur in two types of pairs with each other. Do the two parts of the molecule run parallel or anti-parallel, in opposite directions?
The researchers claim that “this structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.”
Does it sound ho-hum, trivial, a waste of taxpayers’ money? Congratulations. You just vetoed work on the structure of DNA. James Watson and Francis Crick used that sentence to begin their historic report on the discovery of a lifetime.
