Doing Science thoughtfully
By: Roberto Chaile
Tags: Technology, Impact, Science, Health, Research

In plenty of countries, research persues prestige and increasing the number of publications, and not for solving people’s problems, improving our way of living, helping nature to heal, or even to save the lives of sick people.

Science and its developments throughout history have been one of the most useful tools for humankind in solving practical problems and challenges that the environment presents to us as a species. Along this road, we developed our basic knowledge into the current theories and models we have today. Nowadays, we separate sciences mainly into two branches, basic and applied sciences. Basic sciences focus on discovering phenomena and trying to elucidate the deepest points behind them and also focus on postulating theories to explain nature. The final goal is to generate novel knowledge. In contrast to basic sciences, applied sciences provide solutions to different problems in nature by applying the knowledge generated from basic sciences. Unfortunately, the basic sciences in several countries are still based only on generating as much as information as possible without considering its usefulness, leading to the waste of human and economic resources in countries that really need efficient solutions to their urgent problems. Although basic sciences are indispensable tools that applied sciences must use in order to provide solutions, sometimes the information generated from basic sciences cannot be used to create solutions.

Essentially, we should say that scientists are involved in describing phenomena and trying to understand it in order to contribute to the improvement of humankind. However, the scientific system of credits and impact index in publications of papers are slowly destroying science’s main aim. Scientists are starting to be like robots that only research “publish secure” topics, and publishing has become the main priority. This way of doing science looking at publication results and not at real improvements, even when the results may not be useful, is dilapidating the major role of science.

Now, we research for prestige and for increasing our amount of publications, and not for solving people’s problems, improving our way of living, helping nature to heal, or even to save the lives of sick people.

Therefore, a drastic change is needed in science. Most importantly, we should highlight pharmaceutical scientists and their fundamental role in eradicating sickness and improving patients’ quality of life. Pharmaceutical scientists are involved directly in finding efficient solutions for health issues. Both pharmacists and pharmaceutical scientists are trained similarly in academia and have a mindset of the patient first before anything else. These professionals are meant to direct all their efforts to innovate, create, and find strategies and resources to improve public health. The tendency in this field for the last 20 or 30 years in pharmaceutical sciences was to provide short-term solutions. The advance of technology provided some very good solutions in some areas, but almost nothing in other areas like chronic diseases. As a consistent example of this, antimicrobial resistance to antibiotics has been a major issue. According to the scientific community, there has been a lack of innovation in antibiotics over the last 25 years.

In fact, “antibiotic discovery — which peaked in the 1950s — has dropped precipitously. Of greater concern is the fact that nearly all antibiotics brought to market over the past 30 years have been variations on existing drugs. Every currently available antibiotic is a derivative of a class discovered between the early 1900s and 1984.” (1)

Keeping this in mind, innovation in pharmaceutical sciences seems to have become focused on finding short-term improvements that are forced into the market, instead of focusing on finding a solution to the real, underlying public health issue. Therefore, we as pharmaceutical scientists, pharmacists, and even students must direct our efforts to a new way of doing science so that we can provide real and long-term solutions to the health problems existing nowadays. We must do science that is attentive to patients concerns, struggles, and barriers.

We must research never as a robot, but as a human deeply conscious about our true goal, which is to save lives. The education and resources we have are provided by nature and from people, so we cannot be scientists without working to give back some of what we have received from others. In the end, science is supposed to be for improving lives and saving our planet. I invite you to raise awareness in this topic, to change the way we do science, and we will have a better future where knowledge, application, and the improvement of humankind can all move forward together.

Resources: (1) ‘Challenges of Antibacterial Discovery’ Lynn L Silver. Clinical Microbiology Review (2011)