Really, something happens in the Kingdom of England if an obedient product of this Dark Ages place provided comparison between modern (roughly speaking contemporary) Australian science–related issues and Stalin-era institutions. Brave enough, an author is near airing a very right clue: no significant difference as mostly any context in Kennett-Howard-Costello-akas Australia is.

Annihilating the intelligence of both biologically inferior that is non-native-Brits and natives of lower castes ascendance is seen as a vigorous practice of inherited "the top knowledge" as a birthright.

Debate of “gifted children” in the media is a poor reflection on astonishing degree of an intellectual genocide in this appendix of the UK, where stupidity and intentionally imposed elementary illiteracy in math and natural science but some English only, suppose to fit lackey status of the lower beings and serve the privileged feudals and their clans.

That is what Lysenko did with regard to “working class interests” in the Stalin’s USSR.

Col Rouge - I understand what you are saying and commend your dedication and persistence. Good luck - I am all for entrepreneuralism. However am I right in thinking you did not need access to a multi-million dollar laboratory and government licenses in order to pursue your goals?

It is difficult to come up with new ideas in medical science for instance without access to very expensive resources. Therefore it is necessary to sell your idea to an investor first which of course will require a business proposal based on a bit more than something you have scribbled on a piece of paper - some preliminary experiments and/or trials would be required. A bit of a catch 22 situation unless you are already a billionaire.

The system of using Universities and government research institutes is a far more efficient way of sharing ideas and resources that can then be developed into a commercial product. At least it should be. There is probably scope for government to be making more money from commercialising funded research which could be reinvested in basic research. That is where we need the 'bean counters' - just please can we have some with a bit more long term vision than we currently have.

Sajo, definitely government-funded science creates more stable environment to researchers but need one innovations in a place already described above?

MichaelK - actually private research is far more stable - at least if you are any good. You can get a reasonably well paid permanent position in a private company - particularly if you go overseas. Public research basically involves going from one 6-12 month contract to another, hopefully without too long a break between projects and with any luck you won't have to move house each time. The days of secure tenured positions are disappearing fast.

It is rare to find a private organisation that will take on the basic research and there would be a great deal of bias. If people have problems with bias in the CSIRO just imagine what would happen if a company like Monsanto pulled ALL the strings. Having worked in both public and private research I can say without any doubt that private research organisations are far preferable to work for. I even had to clean the windows myself at the University laboratory where I was a postgraduate student - they hadn't been done for at least five years due to lack of funding. At the private lab we got free tea and coffee!

Discovery, innovation and commercial success have a thousand parents. Bafflement, imitation and commercial failure have none.

Should basic research be better funded in Australia? Perhaps.

An obscure, unfunded patent examiner in the Swiss patent office wrote three papers in 1905: on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and on special relativity. Oddly, the second of these won a Nobel Prize.

At the other extreme, let's visit Silicon Valley near Stanford University in 1998. Millions a week were being poured into innovation.

Geeks wanted to sell dog food over the internet. Pets.com is no longer with us. Other geeks built an internet seach engine called Backrub in their dorm rooms - now worth $50 billion.

Was it Mao who said, "let a thousand flowers bloom", before stamping on most of them?

Good strategy, lamentable implementation.

In The Australian newspaper on Saturday, Thomas Barlow gave a precis of his new book in, "Hail, the clever country", which claims to explain where Australia's scientific strengths lie and to debunk the notion that our research is inadequate and poorly funded, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,18814700,00.html

Space forbids even the main points to be summarised. (The original article is available, I think, for 2 weeks, before it vanishes behind a paywall. Catch it while you can.)

Barlow is complimentary about Australian quality, commitment to and results of research, but he puts his finger on an interesting problem:

QUOTE
... where Australia is positioned closer towards the bottom of developed nations is not in the extent of overseas ownership of Australian inventions but in the level of Australian ownership of foreign inventions. Australia has one of the lowest rates of ownership of foreign-sourced inventions in the developed world. Only about one in 10 inventions owned by Australian residents was sourced abroad. In other words, Australia's biggest problem is probably not that a disproportionate number of inventions end up overseas but that not enough foreign inventions end up in Australia.
END QUOTE

If it is not the funding bodies or researchers who are letting Australia down, who is it? Lazy senior executives with stunted imaginations and flaccid ambitions?

So, “At the private lab we [sajo] got free tea and coffee!” - for how long?

“In The Australian newspaper on Saturday, Thomas Barlow gave a precis of his new book in, "Hail, the clever country", which claims to explain where Australia's scientific strengths lie and to debunk the notion that our research is inadequate and poorly funded, http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,18814700,00.html “ –who know of Australia’s scientific strengths (and science in general) outside a circle of local higher education business enterprises – “Australian universities” ? Oh, yes, there is recently at least one world-recognised specialist, a professor to a male fertility, by who medicine was proven by independent foreign researchers to be poisonous rather than helpful on broad terms (read Australian media).

And more from MikeM: “If it is not the funding bodies or researchers who are letting Australia down, who is it? Lazy senior executives with stunted imaginations and flaccid ambitions?” Who? - The system, where everything has been inherited and not personal merits but a generational thoroughbred-ness is the most.