My phone is filling up with blue sky photos – the autumn weather has been so perfect lately. A distant kākā, flying high and screeching into the treetops. A reef heron, flapping off too fast for my butterfingers. I kept the photograph, even though it has nothing in it except for cobalt blue sky.
‘Blue sky research’ implies the same freedom to explore, to follow one’s beak, to acquire knowledge for its own sake. This is so important to science that ‘basic research’, ‘fundamental research’ and ‘blue skies research’ are interchangeable terms.
While researching this column, I learned to my joy that the phrase ‘blue skies research’ derives from a scientist in the 1860s literally trying to figure out why the sky is blue! In looking for the answer, he found more than he expected and inspired an enduring metaphor for basic science.
When the researcher, John Tyndall, shone a beam of light through a tube in a dark room, a sky-blue cloud appeared – the sky in a bottle, in effect. While mucking about with sealed glass containers, he shed light on the way disease-causing microbes spread through the air.
Without years of ‘blue skies’ research under his belt, Alexander Fleming would have thrown away a mouldy Petri dish he found in his lab. Instead, he noticed the effect of contamination on the staphylococci he was culturing, and said (true story), “that’s funny”. The mould turned out to be penicillin, the first known antibiotic.
It is easy to make fun of science that sounds dumb or random. A publicly funded study of lizard saliva? Lol. Who could have thought that a study of Gila lizard spit would lead to a revolutionary therapy for diabetes, and blockbuster drugs like Wegovy?
You probably won’t have come across it in the news, but our government is axing its grant dedicated to blue sky research – the 31-year-old Marsden Fund. That’s because it has gone largely unreported, except for a piece in Newsroom: ‘Vale, Marsden Fund: a 30-year ‘safe harbour’ for discovery closes its doors’.
It had to compete, I suppose, with a lot of other socially significant bad news, including massive public service job cuts. It hasn’t helped that so many science journalists have lost their jobs.
The Marsden Fund was already underfunded, representing just 7.5 percent of the government’s truly pathetic research and development (R&D) budget. But even that tiny sliver of blue sky was too much. In December 2024, Minister for Research, Science and Innovation Judith Collins cut grants for humanities and social sciences from the fund. More cuts came, each presented as nothing-to-worry-about, before the final coup de grâce.
A new ‘Transition Research Fund’ mashes the Marsden Grant (around $76 million each year) into the “mission-led” Endeavour Fund; a $300million pot to be dispersed over five years (that is less money per year, non-maths heads) to “projects with potential impact in line with government priorities”.
Headlines focused on an 88percent increase in funding for ‘advanced technology’ (artificial intelligence, quantum computing and agritech). But there was never more money for science. The funds were pillaged from the Marsden Fund and research into the primary industries, environmental sciences and human health.
Our science budget has long been a joke compared to the countries we like to compare ourselves to. New Zealand’s R&D spending sits at 1.54 percent of GDP, far below the OECD average of 2.7 percent. We might be proud if our children study science to tertiary level, but the reality is that our own government makes it difficult for them to contribute once they are trained – a colossal waste of talent.
The National government has long hated ‘blue skies’ research. Back in 2017, I wrote about a strange 47-page government paper called ‘The Impact of Science’ which alarmed researchers. They were right to worry. With no named author, it came from MBIE, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (the monolith which ate the former Ministry of Science and Innovation) under the fifth National Government.
‘Impact’, in the language of the report, was measured in how fast research translated into products in the market. A trajectory followed by a crater, with no room for basic research. “If we knew the outcomes,” spluttered MacDiarmid Institute director Nicola Gaston, “it wouldn’t be research, and any knowledge produced would not be new.”
The term cropped up again in Newsroom’s story about the death of the Marsden Fund. “The Government’s term du jour for the science sector is ‘impact’: “impact-driven research, science with global impact.”
And yet Marsden’s blue-sky grants helped the cream of New Zealand scientists find ‘global impact’. As the geoscientist Chris Hollis says: “Without the Marsden Fund, my research career would have been short-lived. The grants not only kept the lights on but leveraged significant amounts of co-funding from international collaborators that fed into our applied research projects, adding huge value to New Zealand for the small amount invested.”
Samuel Mehr, winner of the Prime Minister’s Science Prize, said it was “tough to overstate how quickly science funding in New Zealand has been blown to pieces.”
• Jenny Nicholls
