Management Of Scientific Research In Developing Countries

Author(s): Ram Prasad
Publisher: Ram Prasad

Page 4

80 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ACTION
previous paragraph. These measures are, however, inadequate to over. come the deep rooted aberrations of science organizations. Kenneth Mellanby' has quoted Forrester's Law-in complicated situations efforts to improve things often tend to make them worse, sometimes much worse, on occasion calamitous-to indicate the futility of the remedial steps taken by the Government of the U.K.
The trends in the Western Capitalist countries are to direct the management of research from institutional orientation to strategy orientation, as pointed out by Weinberg and Smith Bruce. In the U.K, Research Councils have been scrambled and reassembled with new names and different terms of reference laboratories and research organizations have been moved from Ministry to Ministry. Here also strategy orientated policy is being adopted. Because it was felt that much research financed by government was irrelevant to the interest of the community, attempts have now been made to improve the situation through financial pressure. Part of the money voted directly to research councils is now given to executive government departments. According to Mellanby much research is trivial and directed to wrong objectives and as such most research workers would be only too delighted to be asked to tackle worthwhile problems of which they were unaware. But this too will not redeem the situation because the real ills lie elsewhere.
One of the negative aspects of the regulated funding system according to Mellanby is that grant giving bodies try to avoid giving a grant for work on a subject already being tackled by some other laboratory. As a result of this many subjects have become reserves of particular scientists, who may not all be actively working on them but who may be able to prevent anyone else from doing so. Many grants have been well spent, but getting grants may not always be correlated with the merits of the applicant or his subject. Further grant seeking is a full time and specialized job and it is not always the case that a devoted original research worker is also good at this job. The very presence of many other people in laboratories ostensibly devoted to original research is an important cause of their lack of productivity. There have been a few who have recognized that to pour more and more money into research might not be an answer. The most important heresy, which is unfortunately supported by many people, particularly administrators in senior positions, is that research today must be done by teams rigidly organized in a hierarchical system. According to Prof. Mellanby, such an arrangement has the virtue of administrative tidiness and it may fit into a scheme which permits good career prospects for at least some of the workers. It is also much easier for a man to obtain promotion, if he can claim that he directs the work of others, than for the most productive lone-wolf. What has gone wrong with much research is that teams of potential developers. have tackled problems needing the genius of the excellent individual and we have produced a situation which keeps the scientific elite away from the laboratory. The community thus got the worst of two worlds and wasted a great deal