issue 119 谢谢版主或是哪位同学抽出你宝贵的时间帮忙看看

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TOPIC: ISSUE119 - "When research priorities are being set for science, education, or any other area, the most important question to consider is: How many people's lives will be improved if the results are successful?"

"How many people's lives will be improved if the results are successful?"--Is it the most important question we should consider when we set research priorities for science, education, or any other field? The speaker claimed so, after all, it is, to some extent, reasonable in the view of that the destination of research is to improve the overall living condition of human beings. However, I do not agree that research priorities should be set according this criterion since it is neither operational when take into action, nor helpful to the development of our society in the long-runs perspective.

Looking back the past hundreds years, we could find that our society has changed so much due to the rapid development of science and technology. Many inventions and discoveries have improved human’s living condition significantly. The discovery of penicillin has draw thousands of millions of patients back from the brim of death. The appearance of computer has prodigiously changed majority’s living style and working condition. Such examples are too many to be enumerated. Therefore, someone would naturally content that when research priorities are set, that how many people’s lives would be improved should be the most important question to consider. This seems to be reasonable and helpful for government to deceive which research should be funded first. After all the destination of research in any areas is just to benefit human beings eventually.

However, when this standard above is put in to action, we find that it is totally inoperative and unrealistic. It is too hard for government or any other organizations to assess the potential number of benefited people of research. Scientific research is just to explore unknown world, and its results is, in most conditions, unpredictable. So in order to be funded, every researcher would say that their researches are the most benefit programs and everyone could present seemly convincing evidences. What should government or other funding organization do in this moment? For this matter, the whole researching world might fall into a chaos.

Furthermore, this criterion has overlooked some less popular and have less immediate benefits, but essential for the whole development of research.
First, no one can deny that fact that some disciplines, such as computer science and electronic engineering, which almost have changed everyone's life significantly are base on some fundamental pursuits--disciplines like mathematics and theoretical physics. So when attributing great support to researches about computer, how could we forget those basic disciplines' output? Secondly, there are also some other researches whose results cannot be used immediately, and therefore can not benefit a majority of people in the short-run. Universe exploration, for instance, actually do not benefit most of people right now, but who can guarantee that it is useless in the future? Maybe human beings must migrate to another planet one day since the earth is no longer suitable to live for human, so if we now do not support this research, human beings might doom to extinct in one day.
The two intensely intriguing examples above inspire that it is also unwise to put too much emphasis on researches which have immediate and visible benefit, and ignore these inquiries which have less immediate and short-term advantage.

In final analysis, although assigning research priorities by the number of people that will benefit is a seemly helpful and simple way to make a decision, it's usually not re realistic, and even harmful to the overall development of research. Actually, it's wiser to take a relative balanced development of various disciplines in the long term.