YOU report that Julian Sturdy MP has been urging “commercialisation of research” in university funding, so that the “output” of the University of York and others “can rapidly find its way to the factory floor” and be “promptly translated into marketable products” (MP pushes for uni research to be utilised, October 18).
I’m astounded that Mr Sturdy, representing many staff and students of the University of York, has such a blinkered view of its function.
Granted, this is his party’s ideology, in which everything is a business, and organisations such as hospitals, schools, universities and local authorities are failed businesses, to be made self-supporting as soon as possible.
Social science and humanities research needs little funding, and is not usually marketed but given to society free of charge. Research in natural science may be pure (“blue skies”) or applied. Mr Sturdy’s exclusive focus on directly profitable applied research is short-sighted.
Many scientific discoveries have come unexpectedly from blue skies research, or tangentially from applied research. Examples: the light bulb, X-rays, penicillin, lasers, teflon, the pacemaker – and Play-Doh.
By the way: last year 16 per cent of the University of York’s research funding came from the EU, which explicitly supports blue skies research. This will be lost if Mr Sturdy’s Brexit dream comes true.
John Heawood,
Eastward Avenue, Fulford, York
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