SASKATOON – Canadian universities might be jeopardizing their long-term research value if they concentrate on short-term commercial gains at the expense of purer academic research.
“For long-term, basic research the only institution left is the university,” Wayne Clifton, head of a specialized engineering firm, told agricultural industry leaders and researchers at a recent University of Saskatchewan seminar here.
“Universities need the ability to sustain a research effort and research must be conducted in advance of need.”
Speakers outlined a number of areas in which university research has created huge economic gains.
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Dennis Johnson, vice-president in charge of research at the University of Saskatchewan, said $3.5 million spent on developing Harrington barley produced economic gains of between $32 million and $99 million a year in 1984 and 1985 – a return of 10 to 30 times the investment.
And from $2.5 million spent on wheat research, $185.5 million was added to wheat production between 1990 and 1994, he estimated.
Johnson said the university tries to squeeze value out of its academic research by surveying what researchers are doing, finding innovations that could be commercially exploited, helping get patents for the innovations and then trying to spin off companies to actually use the research.
One of these companies is Biostar, which takes research from the Veterinary Infectious Diseases Organization and turns it into products and services for sale. The company makes and sells vaccines, and is working on “off the wall vaccines” that can immunosterilize animals or make chickens and turkeys less broody.
Clifton, whose engineering firm specializes in projects in arid zones that are affected by ground water movements, said university spin-offs are important because intellectual property is increasingly the source of wealth in the global economy.
“It’s not land and labor, but capital and technology,” said Clifton. “Our costs are 100 percent overhead, and the inventory goes home at 5 p.m.”
But while his company has prospered from concrete commercial applications of university research, he said he is worried so much academic research is becoming tied to short-term commercial projects and less to longer-term, less specifically commercial research.
He said years of research in the Canadian Arctic provided the basis of much tricky road-building in northern Saskatchewan, an application that had not been foreseen when the research was conducted.
Many people at the seminar said they were worried by possible cuts to fundamental, non-commercial research at universities.
This cheered Johnson.
“Quite often we get industry spokespeople saying that we … don’t do anything of value. They don’t realize the value of fundamental research,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have biotechnology today if people hadn’t done the fundamental research to allow it.”
And he said provincial and federal governments have to understand how dangerous short-changing basic university research will be.
“It’s a real worry for us and it should be for everybody because if you don’t do the fundamental research there’s nothing to apply,” Johnson said.
