http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/press/for-journalists/copy_of_25th-anniversary-of-dna-fingerprinting/interview-with-professor-sir-alec-jeffreys-1/the-value-of-blue-skies-research
He admits that this seems a far cry from the clear, real-world applications of DNA fingerprinting. “This is absolutely unashamed blue skies research, which I love,” he says. “And I have never lost sight of that all through that monstrous inversion of my life – fun but monstrous – of charging off into the frenzied world and then coming back out of it again. In the background I’ve always kept this fundamental research going.”
While the research councils seem to be doing their best to keep blue skies research going, “I’m not sure the Government have full got that message”, he says. And he can’t stress enough how important the message is. From Fleming’s discovery of penicillin after a Petri dish was accidentally left next to a window, to Jeffreys’ own entirely unexpected discovery of DNA fingerprinting at five past nine on that September morning when at five to nine he hadn’t a single thought of DNA fingerprinting in his head, “unfettered, fundamental, curiosity-driven research is the ultimate engine of all scientific and technological evolution,” he says. “You lose that at your peril.”
He is critical of trying to set too many priorities and strategies in research because it tends to direct research to “known unknowns” — establishing and solving the obvious problems. While he acknowledges that this is important, so is solving problems you didn’t even know existed. And these are the kinds of problems far less likely to be solved by industry.
Focusing on known unknowns has become increasingly tempting for science anyway because it has become so specialised, argues Jeffreys. Gone is the Victorian gentleman scientist who was an expert botanist, paleantologist, geologist, physician, mathematician. Instead, biology, like particle physics before it, is evolving towards larger and larger teams of scientists, each specialising in a particular aspect of any experiment. The average number of authors on a paper has ballooned to film credit lengths, he says. “What they are doing is delivering research which is to some extent predictable because otherwise you would never set up this gigantic organisation in the first place.”
Typical of the new science is the Human Genome Project, which, he argues, while clearly being very valuable is “basically factory science”. “I’m saying you have to have a mixed economy. You don’t put all your eggs into this great common basket that will deliver answers to questions that you can define because the far more exciting thing is that it delivers questions that you never knew existed, and that to me is infinitely more valuable because that sets the future agenda.”
