Marie Curie
When the radium element No. 88 of the periodic table series was discovered, no one knew what its use was. Marie Curie also said: "When radium was discovered, no one knew it would be sent to the hospital. Useful. This work is a pure science, which proves that scientific work cannot be considered in terms of immediate usefulness, it must be done for its own sake, for the sake of scientific beauty."
It is this scientific research that was considered useless at the time. It laid the foundation of modern radiology and caused great changes in science and philosophy in the 20th century.
Everyone knows what happened later. Marie Curie discovered that stubborn cancer cells can be killed by using the radioactivity of radium. Today, this discovery has developed into a very common radiotherapy in cancer treatment, benefiting thousands of people. of patients.
Different from scientific and technological applications, basic research is more like a public product. It is not who invests who benefits, but who invests and everyone benefits. Investors cannot directly benefit from the results. But who is willing to do something without gain if there is only dedication? Dedication alone is not enough to promote the development of science.
Chen Jingrun
html In the 1980s, Xu Chi's reportage " Goldbach's Conjecture" became very popular. It described the legendary figure Chen Jingrun who was still obsessed with scientific research during the Cultural Revolution and the process of proving "1 + 2". This proof is: "Any even number that is large enough can be expressed as the sum of two numbers, and one of the two numbers is an odd prime number, and the other is the product of no more than two odd prime numbers." This theorem Known as " Chen's theorem " by the international mathematics community, it is the closest proof to Goldbach's conjecture that mankind has ever seen. Even though many people now don't know the practical value of this theorem, Chen Jingrun's image as a generation of dedicated scientific workers is still touching, and it also arouses people's thinking on how to promote the development of science.
We must realize the characteristics of basic research. It is often full of challenges and uncertainties, and it is difficult to see application potential in the short term. This kind of risk cannot be borne entirely by scientific researchers, nor can it be borne entirely by scientific research institutions. The importance of basic research is self-evident, and it is an important manifestation of a country's soft power. It is these breakthrough basic research that can lay the cornerstone of scientific development, open up new areas of cognition, and even drive a country's development. take off. Useless things are sometimes of great use.
How to recognize the useless use of basic research and how to promote the rapid development of basic research. As a government department that specializes in providing public goods, it is to make up for the shortcomings of the market and fill the vacancies that society is unwilling and difficult to do. The most important thing is Its responsibility is to provide conditions for these basic researches. Only in this way can scientists safely follow their personal interests and explore those scientific "no man's lands" without restraint. (the author is a cultural scholar)
