So the Department of Science and Technology wishes to introduce legislation to ensure the time-wasters earning Doctorates and Masters' degrees at this country's many fine academic establishments earn their keep. High time, I say.
We all know how overpaid postgraduate students in particular are. I certainly was - the restaurant kitchen I washed dishes in while I worked on my thesis paid me five pounds an hour. Pounds, nogal. All this in addition to the stipend my university paid me for the teaching duties I was obliged to undertake. And, I got free photocopying.
All money down the drain, clearly, given the dubious value of my work. You see, it's time I came clean and owned up to a grave misdemeanour - not only did I spend slightly more than five years on my doctorate, but I also failed to conduct research that was relevant or of economic benefit to my country.
Indeed, for all my leeching on my poor, tax-paying parents and the country-at-large, I failed to produce even one innovation or patent. In the interests of giving myself a break (because the minister is unlikely to), I should probably point out that my subject area was the eminently useless one of literary history. A truth perhaps worsened by the fact that it focused on the work of two women.
No wonder I had to emigrate, unlike my buddies who variously earned their right to the 'Dr' moniker through such channels as explosive diarrhoea and the incidence of 'ropiness' in the large-scale baking of Irish soda bread (two separate theses, in case you're worrying).
While we all expect those of us in life who waste everyone's time exploring things like the possible Marxist-Feminist undertones of the film "Happy Feet" when considered through the paradigm of Lacan's Mirror Stage, to end up begging at the robots, we've always been led to believe there's no such thing as bad science. Until now, at least.
Patents, patents everywhere
I unreservedly appreciate what (I think) the minister is driving at here, don't get me wrong. He wants the lazy, eternal students in the science, medical and engineering faculties around the country to channel their talents and energies in the pursuit of the type of knowledge and innovation that will benefit this country.
Are the only things of value those that can be patented and sold to the highest bidder?
Pamela Weaver, group senior writer, ITWeb
What I want to know is: how the heck is he - or anyone else for that matter - going to go about deciding what is or is not relevant, useful or beneficial? Are the only things of value those that can be patented and sold to the highest bidder? Who will own these patents - the student who develops the idea or the university that provides the facilities? What about the increasing number of private organisations that sponsor university research, where's their cut? Or did we embark on the project on the understanding that it was all going to end up in the pockets of the sponsor?
Has nobody told the minister that things like maths formulae and equations or physics experiments - the very things propping up our understanding of the universe in which we exist - can't always be patented? Or perhaps he thinks they should be?
Imagine what would have happened if Einstein was taken off the musings that brought him to e=MC2 because there was no patent at the end of it. Worse still, what if his supervisors and colleagues thought his ideas lacked innovation? The great joy of science - of any learning - is that you don't know your destination, or even the route to get there, until you arrive; which is why we have penicillin (the product of mould on a slice of melon), or vulcanised rubber (another accident for which even a patent could not save Charles Goodyear from the debtor's prison).
Welcome to a world where the very reason behind the establishment of universities - the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake - is being reduced to the inanity that is an 'innovation' factory. How this is likely to fit in with the government's stated commitment to the development of open source software remains to be seen.
The concept of technology transfer is a noble one in many ways. But if we strangle projects at birth because we can't see the money, we risk killing off the culture of invention and the knowledge gleaned from seemingly-pointless research that feeds it. Completely.
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