> Are you suggesting that public engagement is not part of doing good
> research?
Actually, on an individual basis, yes I am. Surely the most important
output of research is the knowledge it generates, not the public
engagement it produces.
If I am employing someone to find a cure for cancer I want that someone
to find a cure for cancer not just talk about finding a cure for cancer.
The two skill sets are not very correlated (arguably anticorrelated in
some areas), hence I really don't want good researchers not to get
research money because they are bad at talking to the public about their
research.
Think about this in an industrial situation, how many companies do you
know who use the people doing their research to sell their products? They
don't for two reasons, there are other people who are better at selling,
and there are more efficient uses of the researcher's time.
What I am absolutely not saying is that public engagement shouldn't be
done, or that researchers who are good at it shouldn't be doing it or that
they shouldn't be doing more. Just that it isn't research, and there is
little point trying to make a researcher who has the wrong skill, interest
and aptitude set do public engagement. Those that are doing it should get
incentivised to do it in some way, but it should be from a different pot
of resources to the research pot.
Not least because some areas are more suited to public engagement than
others - the public are going to be more interested, and want to have more
input into GM foods or cloning, than research into how to get another 1%
efficiency out of an electric motor. So the PEST resources don't
necessarily want to be distributed in the same directions as the research
resources.
Dave Ansell
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