Governments and funders accused of doing a ‘very poor job’ of talking to each other
State and philanthropic research funders are failing to coordinate R&D efforts on Covid-19, and this is creating “the overriding problem” in resolving the pandemic, in the view of former European Research Council president Helga Nowotny.
“Governments and foundations are doing all right in finding the money for Covid-19 research. They are doing a very poor job in talking to one another about it, in understanding the problem, in sharing knowledge,” Nowotny, who is now professor emeritus of science and technology studies at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, wrote in an opinion article for the news website Science Business, published on 2 April.
Coordination is made more difficult by the varied progress of the pandemic in different countries, she conceded, but suggested that it is also being hampered by “the tendency of many governments to go it alone”. She said: “who actually has the power to coordinate, and on what, is completely unclear”.
Despite the World Health Organization having produced an R&D roadmap for researchers to align around, in Nowotny’s view “as the torrent of individual Covid-19 research announcements from public agencies and charitable foundations since then indicates, there is little sign of this” alignment.
“One result of this spontaneity is that nobody really has an overview of what is happening where, and on what…in public sector research—and especially in fundamental science,” she said. “We have no clear view of what are the most glaring gaps in our knowledge, in the short, medium and long-term.”
The former leader of the EU’s most prestigious researcher-led R&D funder stressed she was not calling for a centralised, top-down approach, but for “a way to better share knowledge, identify research gaps and draw the attention of global leaders to hard scientific fact requiring hard political action”.
She added: “It should be possible to find a group of persons who fit the needed profile for carrying out such a task, individuals who have the necessary expertise, the experience and the capability of putting their personal, professional and national interests behind and work together for a shared goal.”