GOVERNMENT & POLICY
R&D
FUNDING
CREATING AN IRISH SCIENCE IDENTITY NSF veteran William Harris reveals blueprint for Ireland's new science foundation
T
O FURTHER INVEST IN ITS GROW-
ing economy, Ireland, in 2000, created Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). Last year, the foundation hired its first director general, William C. Harris, a chemist and U.S. citizen. Harris has been an assistant director at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), where he worked for 18 years; most recently, he was vice president for research at the University of South Carolina. With a budget of approximately $603 million (635 million euros) overfiveyears, the Irish foundation focuses on funding basic research that underpins two key areas: information and communications technology (ICI) and biology and biotechnology SFI provides grants to individual investigators; research groups; centers for science, engineering, and technology that are campus-industry partnerships; visiting scientists; and workshops and conferences. Harris is joined at SFI by Alastair M. Glass, a former Bell Laboratories vice president who is director of SFI's ITC Division. Also on board is John F. Atkins, director of the Biology & Biotechnology Division. He was most recently a research professor of human genetics at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City Harris says he will consider his work sucHTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
cessful if he can get SFI to adopt some of the best practices ofNSF and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He wants to attract the best scientific minds to Ireland—women in particular—and he hopes to create a nimble scientific enterprise there, as free of government bureaucracy as possible. On a recent a visit to Washington, D C , Harris stopped by C&EN headquarters, where he was interviewed by Senior Editor William G. Schulz and Editor-in-Chief Madeleine Jacobs. His remarks provide a clearer understanding of SFI and what its R&D investments could mean for the future of Ireland. C&EN: What is the purpose of SFI? HARRIS: In Ireland, they have never really had something like the science foundation. It's a relatively new country Ireland was a product of a revolution from the U.K., and it established independence in 1921. Anytime you have a new government, you have to build systems of democratic governance and management that are adapted to modern times. That didn't happen in Ireland until after World War II. Then, 30 years ago, Ireland became part of the European Union (EU). It has strong connections to the US. system, which it has built on as well.
All of this began to pay off in the 1990s. The population today is almost 4 million people, up from about 2 million in the 1960s. It's ayoung country that's very similar to what the U.S. was like in the 1950s. There is a sense of a desire to build things and to create new opportunities. There is a recognition, much the same as occurred in the U.S. after Sputnik, that there is a national and economic securityriskbecause Ireland has established a relatively successful economy Ireland is no longer a lowwage kind of a place. So, the question is, how do you sustain a modern economy and a competitive economy to have a good society? The conclusion was that you do it through knowledge—through a research enterprise, and that it is wise to borrow some ideas from the U.S., which has become such an entrepreneurial economy C&EN: Do you think Ireland is the only country in Europe to have flexibility in its university system? HARRIS: Ireland doesn't have an established research university system now Its universities could be likened to U.S. universities in the 1950s when they had great minds but not a whole lot of research. They were mostly teaching institutions. In Ireland, the idea now is to take these institutions that have been terrific undergraduate institutions with some research and to have a more balanced research-driven kind of academic program. That's what Ireland wants to create. C&EN: Is your focus more on recruiting individual scientists or research groups to come to Ireland or on strengthening and building existing research groups?
HARRIS: I say it's both. There is a lot of talent in Ireland, as you have in the US. So Ireland wants to invest in that talent and enable it, particularly young people. The idea is to begin to get undergraduates involved in research the way you do in the U.S., for example, and to also bring in talent—just like the U.S. was enriched in the early part of the past century by German immigration. %u don't need a lot of people. Ifou need a few people who will set the standards. Ireland has recruited a few of these people already from the U.S. and from the U.K. We're in the process of recruiting a few scientists from other countries as well. But in reality, what we want to do is focus on first-rate people. That is absolutely the key C&EN: Back up just a little bit. Before there was a Science Foundation Ireland, C & E N / J U N E 2 4 , 2002
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GOVERNMENT & POLICY how was funding of research conducted ? Was it like the U.K., where the money comes from a central council? HARRIS: No. I would say that it is very different from the U.K. In essence, before about the mid-1990s, Ireland didn't have a lot of discretionary money for research because it was building other parts of its economy And so, the way a number of faculty members did research in Ireland during the period of, say, the 1980s was through the EU. Much of Ireland's infrastructure has been built by the E U The role that the EU has played cannot be underestimated. And I would say the role that multinational companies from the US. played in building up both the I C T and biotechnology sectors of the Irish economy cannot be underestimated as a major factor in shaping the so-called Celtic Tiger. C&EN: Can you elaborate on how industry fits into the R&D framework Ireland wants to build? HARRIS: Ireland has a well-educated workforce with a good work ethic. There are people in Ireland who are determined to be successful. But all of those elements come together as you're building this new
science foundation ireland country, this modern country, in this new economy With the creation of the EU, there was some concern in the business community that ifyou didn't have a business operation in the EU, you might have a hard time doing business there because you didn't know what the rules were going to be. Ireland offered a unique platform to be in the E U It has a highly educated workforce of people who speak English. Probably when the first companies came to Ireland—companies like Intel and Dell Computer—it was a big risk. But it's been one of Intel's most successful ventures in terms of the quality of the work and the profit. C&EN: You like to draw a parallel between the U.S. and Ireland. Why? HARRIS: Look at the history In the 1950s, the U.S. started up NSF. We weren't quite sure how to start it. We knew we needed universities, but we weren't sure what we 28
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needed them for. Wè knew we had to keep smart people because of the Cold War. T h e n we had Sputnik. Sputnik sort of scared the hell out of everybody, and after that we began building laboratories across the country Wè didn't want to concentrate in one area; we wanted talent spread around. And we knew that this was important not only to national security but also to economic security For 30 or so years in the U.S., the universities were built largely on the basis of national security—the Cold War. We had a lot of money in nuclear physics, high-energy physics, and things like this, and we augmented those with investments in chemistry, mathematics, and so on. Ireland in 1990 wanted to start to build a university system driven by research and add world standards to that. It wanted to build laboratories. And so about a year or two ago, Ireland started to build laboratories across the country It's going to take them three or four years to develop. C&EN: What kind of laboratories are we talking about—university labs or national labs? HARRIS: University laboratories for modern biology and modern chemistry "vvfe are going to build the university base first. C&EN: When did the Irish government actually establish SFI? HARRIS: At the end of 2000. Then they began to recruit for a director general, and they had a small group ofpeople who were running the thing. They wanted to plant the flag and say, "We're serious. We're going to hire somebody to run the place and then have that person set up a wholly competitive system." W h e n I went to Ireland, I had pretty much a blank page to start this with and to hire more people to build the programs. The first thing I did after arriving was to think about how to build support for the basic science that underpins the I C T and Biology & Biotechnology Divisions. The three divisions NSF started with were for physics, chemistry, and mathematics. In starting SFI, the idea was to focus on interdisciplinary kinds of activities—the umbrella themes of I C T and biotechnology C&EN: The idea was to build on industries that exist in Ireland? HARRIS: % u have in Ireland huge investments by Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and major software producers as well. I took an inventory ofwhat industry is in Ireland, and I learned that eight of the world's top 10 biopharmaceutical com-
panies are there. Ifou can go down a similar list for I C T It was clear that I needed to attract talented people who knew something about those areas because I certainly didn't claim an expertise. What I bring is some idea of how to set up a competitive foundation. I know how to work with the universities. So I recruited Alastair Glass to run the ICTprogram, for example. Alastair spent 30 years at Bell Laboratories, he is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and he has probably a couple of hundred publications plus patents; he also served for a year as the chief technical officer for Lucent Technologies. And then there is John Atkins. He is a geneticist who grew up in Cork, Ireland. W h e n he got his degrees in the 1980s, there were not a lot of research opportunities in Ireland, so he went to the UK. for a while and did research. He came to the U.S., where he worked with people like James Watson; then he went to the University of Utah, where he is a research geneticist with on the order of $ 1 million per year of funding for a laboratory I am borrowing ideas from NSF and DARPA in that I would like people like Alastair andJohn to serve for maybe three years and then go back and do other things. C&EN: What is the SFI budget? HARRIS: The budget is about $603 million (635 million euros) for about a five-year period. That's a lot of money per capita for a small country (about $ 150 per person), particularly for focus on two areas—ICT and biology and biotechnology C&EN: And all of this money is from Irish tax dollars? HARRIS: Yes. It's like an NSF kind of a thing. What I have to do is an inventory and see how much talent there is in the university system and then, with our 20member board of directors, try to set the priorities. It's a technically sophisticated board, but we're running to catch up. We are not putting hard budget categories together until we hold competitions to see what talent exists. We're in the process now of having our first competition for investigator grants—either small groups or individuals—and we're having a Centers for Science, Engineering & Technology competition. We're going to have these things reviewed on an international basis. There is an awful lot of talent in Ireland. And a huge talent pool that was exported from Ireland is now anxious to come back to Ireland to see if there's a chance to do science. HTTP://PUBS.ACS.ORG/CEN
ment of the EU. Most of the research, though, was still done in the U.S. Ireland has reached a state now where it does need to train its own people in higher levels of education—the Ph.D.—and give them re search experience. And so, SFI—again, kind of like NSF—is the seed or the cata lyst for developing the new talent pool. When I first went to Ireland to talk about SFI, I met over dinner with some of the leaders of the civil service. I thought I would have to explain to them what re search is and that it is not a short-term fix—that when you use research, you of ten put labels on it like chemistry, physics, ICT, or biotechnology, but it's really about human capital. It's about investing in peo cist. You know-the interface of biology and mathematics—bioinformatics. That's ple. The thing that people often misun going to be a very rich area. Those are derstand about the U.S. system is that the research grants are primarily investments brand-new fields. in the next generation of scientists. I had C&EN: You have industry right there. Will thought about this, and I thought I had a people who train in science at Irish uni very sophisticated way of explaining this versities be able to get jobs in industry? to these people, and about five minutes HARRIS: %u said it well. It's a chicken- into the conversation they said, "We and-egg kind of problem. Manufacturing know. This is about human capital." So it started to arrive in Ireland during the 1970s ruined my dinner talk, and we just had fun and '80s, in part because of the establish instead.
C&EN: So for now, SFI grants will be made according to these two multidisciplinary categories—ICT and biology and biotechnology? HARRIS: ^Yes,forindividual investigators and for campus/industry centers. The broad theme of ICT includes mathemat ics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. It's not a narrow thing. But it's a question ofhow to encourage and support research when modern problems are partly inter disciplinary without going down a list and saying we have a chemistry division, a physics division, and so on. For biotechnology, we are going to have biologists, chemists, and even some physi
C&EN: What kind of effort do you need to put into public understanding?
HARRIS: I have to put a lot of effort into public understanding. I am developing a way to approach it, but I am going to need some help there because one person can't do all of this. I have to work with the uni versities and get them to take some own ership of the issue. In the past, they have dealt with the EU, and EU-funded activities have primarily been those that encouraged cooperation among people in different countries. The Irish universities would get grant support, but they would be working with places in France or the U.K., not with each other. They were competing with each other instead of working together. I am hopeful over time that, as we get the public funding, the faculty at universi ties will begin to learn "civics 101," if you like. They have a civic responsibility to ex plain their work. They will have to become engaged in informing the elected mem bers of Parliament about their work, for example. They have to have members meet students the way U.S. physicists, as tronomers, and biologists do. I wish I could tell you that I have some
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GOVERNMENT & POLICY marvelous new discovery for how you do this. It's hard work, it takes time, and you have to find people who are articulate and committed and recognize that they have a responsibility for leadership—not only in theirfieldsbut also in the public policy ar eas. People like Dick Zare at Stanford and Ahmed Zewail at Caltech do this so well in the chemistry community; they are great spokespersons for science. Ireland needs to have that kind of leadership. I have a simple strategy: I hope that we can have what I would call campus/uni versity partnerships in research that will involve U.S. universities. That way, we will have some of these kinds of faculty mem bers engaged. We will have the Zares and the Zewails working with people in Ire land and with Irish students so that you have not only an exchange of science knowhow, entrepreneurial zest, and creativity, but also the recognition of public respon sibility and leadership. C&EN: What have you learned from your career, particularly at NSF, that you don't want to take into SFI? What prac tices do you want to avoid?
HARRIS: I have a strong bias and respect for NSF and the quality of the people there. It's possible that, as NSF has grown, it's become more bureaucratic and more cumbersome. Ifwe at SFI cannot do things a little more easily, with fewer rules and requirements, then we should be criti cized. I was going to borrow some NSF ideas for academic science centers, in par ticular. Some of our board members, par ticularly our U.S. board members, said, "Make your centers program more flexible. Don't be so prescriptive. Allow the true creativity of the scientists to appear, and judge that." C&EN: Have you made your first round of grants?
will be of that size. The typical grant size will be $237,500 (250,000 euros) per year up to $950,000 (1 million euros) per year, so they are big grants. But the $950,000 grants will be more rare. We also have Walton Awards. Ε. Τ S. Walton was a 1951 Nobel Laureate in Physics from Galway who helped split the atom. There will be 15 Wilton Awards. Peo ple will come to Ireland for a year to do re search or to have a sabbatical. And then we have our Centers for Science, Engi neering & Technology Those we will fund with up to $4.75 million (5 million euros) per year for up tofiveyears and a chance at rotation into another five years based on performance. Together, these are all some of the largest awards in Europe.
HARRIS: They were done last year. C&EN: What's the size and duration of your grants?
HARRIS: Those grants are a total of ap proximately $57 million (60 million euros) over five years, and they go to about 10 people. They started between August and December of2001. Another lOgrantswill be announced soon, but only one or two
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C&EN: Why should U.S. scientists be in terested in SFI?
H ARRIS : We want to recruit them. I would like to hire more women. I would like to find some women engineers, for example, who want to move to Ireland and who want first-rate academic careers with good-sized grants. I think that we can offer really good opportunities. •
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