Reclaiming academia from post-academia.

I s nanoscience the “first full embodiment of post-academic science”? Have many of the traditional core values of publicly funded university science been eroded to the point where they are now “part of a scientific mythology”? And is it “morally bankrupt” to draw a distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ science? These claims, which were all made in a recent commentary in Nature Nanotechnology by Tom Vogt, Davis Baird and Chris Robinson1, certainly capture the funding zeitgeist in the UK. In their eagerness to implement the recommendations of the Treasury’s Science and Innovation Framework2 and the Warry Report3, the research councils that fund the bulk of university research in the UK now insist that economic impact and relevance to “end users” (that is, industry) must play a central role in the peer review process, despite widespread criticism4. Similar post-academic5 commercial drivers are also an integral part of public funding strategies in, for example, the EU (under the Framework programmes), the US and Japan. However, far from heralding exciting new opportunities for university nanoscience, I strongly believe that the post-academic ethos suffers from a number of flaws — it runs counter to core academic principles; it is ethically questionable in many cases; and its supposed beneficial impact on innovation is not at all well established. John Ziman, the physicist turned social scientist, clearly identified the dangers of the post-academic approach to science. In his writings, Ziman distinguishes between instrumental and non-instrumental science and puts forward cogent arguments regarding the necessity of disinterested academic research: “In effect, postacademic science tries to combine, often in the same individual, two modes of knowledge that are ethically incompatible. Disinterested science is essentially a moral enterprise sustained by a tacit ethos of mutual trust. This ethos is being fatally undermined by enforced cohabitation with instrumental research.”