Basic sciences for sustainable development

 “From generation to generation, basic sciences build the pool of knowledge that the next generations can use to address problems we may not have any idea about today.”

However, for an effective contribution of science to a sustainable world, scientific progress must be quickly and widely shared, which requires a serious commitment to open science, a cause that Revista Historia Ciencias Saúde strongly supports.

In this interview to our blog, Luc Allemand explained the crucial importance of basic sciences to society, the aims of an International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development, and the relevance of Open Science to this goal.

Could you please describe the efforts and aims of an International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development 2022?

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This policy roadmap came after the Millenium Development Goals, but with a big difference: these SDGs apply to all countries and not only to “developing countries”.

As Gro Harlem Brundtland, former director-general of WHO, wrote in her Prologue to the 2019 Global Sustainable Report: “Every Head of State, every Government and every citizen has a responsibility to ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals are met”. That means that every scientist has also the responsibility to work so that we collectively move toward the SDGs.

Such a commitment is all the more necessary that a strong contribution of science is needed to meet most SDGs, if not all. The international scientific unions and research organizations that promote the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD) think that the role of basic sciences in this process must be recognized: from generation to generation, basic sciences build the pool of knowledge that the next generations can use to address problems we may not have any idea about today.

The idea behind the IYBSSD is that a strong contribution of science is needed to meet most of the sustainable development goals, if not all.  Click here to see the 17 goals.

The IYBSSD will also build upon the advances made by the many scientific International Years that have been held during the past 25 years: International years of the Ocean (1998), of Freshwater (2003), of Physics (2005), of Planet Earth (2008), of Astronomy (2009), of Chemistry (2011), of Crystallography (2014), of Light and Light-based technologies (2015), and of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (2019). So, the main aims of IYBSSD will be to mobilize scientists in every field of science toward the SDGs, based on what they already do; and to mobilize policy makers and citizens for the continuous support and development of basic sciences, for the benefit of sustainable development.

The Commission in charge of these efforts has been discussing the crucial relevance of basic sciences; could you please explain briefly their importance in the context of science denialism that exists in many countries?

Basic sciences are curiosity-driven sciences: we want to understand how nature works, first of all for the sake of understanding. Of course, we also know that every application and every technological development is based on basic science knowledge, sometimes provided a long time ago by scholars who could not have any idea of the problem we try to solve today. Let’s take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example.

Adenovirus based vaccines are produced by the introduction of a small part of the virus DNA in a weakened version of another virus, a mechanism called transduction. And transduction has been discovered in the 1950’s by biologists who wanted to understand how bacteria, and bacteria’s viruses, worked. Messenger RNA, which is at the base of mRNA vaccines, has been discovered in the 1960’s by biologists who wanted to understand basic mechanisms of living cells (there is mRNA in every living cell.

The world dissemination of information about the pandemic, all the online meetings we had instead of in-person conferences since the beginning of 2020, have been possible because in the early 1990 computer scientists and physicists at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, invented the World Wide Web to be able to share their data. Every day, we use very basic sciences results, without even knowing it. Your smartphone alone contains a battery, that wouldn’t exist without a basic understanding of electrochemistry; a touchscreen and a lot of transistors that rely on our understanding of the moves of electrons in solid materials; applications that are powered by mathematical algorithms, etc.

And where clean water is guaranteed at the tap, you can thank chemists and microbiologists. It is important that policy makers and citizens are aware of this, so that governments continue to fund basic research. Regarding science denialism, I would add that it is certainly a social phenomenon, with several expressions and causes, that are worth to be studied by social sciences, with the help of their specific basic knowledge.

What is the relevance of Open Science to this goal?

As Newton famously wrote in 1675: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. Today, we could say that to see further, scientists also need to “stand on the shoulders” of each other (alternatively, to be practical): scientific progress must be quickly and widely shared, without any barrier. This is possible today, with the help of the ongoing digital revolution of recent decades. Provided they have Internet access, scientists can:

access, manipulate and communicate data, metadata, information, and preliminary knowledge, and to hypothesize, debate, reproduce, replicate, validate and refute. It has greatly facilitated globally networked research, efficient data-sharing, and immediate access to the record of science, including by automatic techniques of knowledge discovery, in principle by all, thereby enhancing the rate and dimensions of knowledge creation.” (Statement from the International Science Council delegation to the UNESCO Special Committee meeting on Open Science, 6-12 May 2021).

This is also of high interest, as a strong interdisciplinarity is needed to invent the science that will lead us toward the SGDs. Moreover, citizens, whose taxes finance public research, have the right to know what is produced with these funds. It is then important to facilitate access to the Internet to every scientist, and even to every citizen on the planet. And mechanisms are to be found so that the infrastructures and work costs for the dissemination of scientific data and results are covered without impeding access.

How to cite this interview:

Allemand, L.; Mannheimer, V. Basic sciences for sustainable development.
In: Revista História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos (Blog). Published on September, 20th, 2021. Accessed  in [date].

See related articles in HCS-Manguinhos:

Giants and dwarves in science, technology, and medicine The main international congress in the field of History of Science and Technology begins this Sunday, July 25th.

The future of the scientific article in the human sciences In this issue, we present a new set of guidelines for authors, which are now more related to the open science movement. See the interview with Scientific Editor Marcos Cueto.

Open access, internationalization, funding and social media The symposium “21st century challenges for history of science and history of medicine journals” was held during the 25th ICHST.