Professor Alan Mackay-Sim urges officials to take the politics out of research and support science
Proper funding research and an apolitical science field is what Mackay-Sim pledges for for Australians.
“Researchers need a long view, much longer than the political horizon. I think that, historically, governments go up and down in their funding. I would like to see an agreed policy position. You know we agree, for example, that Australia needs a defence force and we agree that we need a fantastic health system so let’s agree that we also need a fantastic science base on which to build our economy and improve the health of Australians and make it a major issue for Australia,” he recently declared for the media.
As according to a report issued by The Australian Society for Medical Research, despite funding and efforts invested in the medical field, “five years of static investment into the National Health and Medical Research Council has resulted in falling grant funding rates and a decline in the NHMRC-funded research”, the scientific community agrees that the government and politics should stay out of any medical research project in order for it to achieve its long term objectives.
“And not just thinking of funding from the federal government, but thinking about other parts of the community – insurance companies who might have an outcome depended on biomedical research maybe [will] save money in the future because of breakthroughs in biomedical research – and try and get science out of the daily political life and into agreed values and agreed strengths that need to be funded”, Professor Mackay-Sim added.
In order to open new doors in the medical research field, the Australian science minister, Arthur Sinodinos, has publicly declared his support for the Professor’s call.
