This is what Nobel Prize winner Prof. Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier said talking about academic freedom at the prestigious Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, in a conversation with seven journalists from four continents.
The French scientist, together with Jennifer Doudna rewarded in 2020 for the development of the method for genome editing known as CRISPR, was one of the few dozen Nobel laureates that shared their knowledge and experiences with young researchers at the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting dedicated to Medicine. The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings are annual scientific conferences that are held in Lindau, Bavaria (Germany), since 1951.
Having said this, “for certain projects the expertise will be found through collaborations outside the local environment”, said Prof. Charpentier. She is head of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin (Germany) and sets the Institute as one of the examples of exquisite structures for research.
The French researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry said that scientists working there have all the means and freedom to do what they want based on their programmes and projects. She noted that usually scientists depend on grants and when they apply, this gives them the opportunity to see how their ideas are perceived by the community of reviewers.
Asked by the European Science-Media Hub if there is a threat to academic freedom in Europe and all over the world, and how it may be protected, Prof. Charpentier said that academic freedom exists for research that is supported by public funds. “You have it in Europe as long as you are successful in getting funds and you have it in the US, for sure. You don’t have it in in countries where you know the infrastructure is not sufficient and where really the scientists struggle to get funds.”
Access to funding
Access to public funding was also a point of the panel discussion on “Diversity and Merits in Science” that opened the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting. Nobel laureates Emmanuelle Charpentier, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (physiology/medicine, 1995, Germany ), Harold E. Varmus (physiology/medicine, 1989, USA) and Martin Chalfie (chemistry, 2008, USA) discussed together with young female scientists Rasha Shraim and Marwa Shumo whether every talented scientist, regardless of their heritage, gender, socio-economic background, or country of origin, has equal access and support.
According to Prof. Charpentier, “people are free, but they feel that they are not free to do specifically what they want to do because they are not given the means to pursue what they want to pursue. I think it would be good to keep emphasising that public funded research is fundamental research, it takes time. That people work for 30 years on the same subtopic, that’s the way it is.”
“I would not be in front of you today if, at the end of the day, I did not at some point have to move from Austria to Sweden in order to find a new environment, a new type of funding and a new interest for my research. I also needed a little bit more time to be able to tackle the project that required more time than what was given to me in terms of time frame that was given to me in Austria.”
Time can be of the essence
According to Charpentier, time can play an essential role in research: “A lot of people will say that the best research sometimes comes after say four or five years when nothing is happening. Then you start to work on other projects and you start to work on everything you learned from other projects that did not work. This is the case for CRISPR. And all of a sudden things start to go very fast. But you need these additional years and sometimes they are critical”.
She added that “academic research has suffered in the past 10 years from the hype and the potential necessity to focus on translational research which for me is something that should be more taken by the private sector. And the politicians are thinking that the basic researchers should do research that is impactful and develop automatically products. I think it’s wrong.”
Prof. Charpentier pointed out that policy-makers and the programmes to support science impose time frames that are “nearly impossible to follow, specifically when grants are provided for three or to five years and then we write a project which is a project for life”. She noted that another problem for researchers comes with the restrictions concerning the team members involved. “You will need three to five people minimum and you’re given one person. So this has impacted a lot also the the development of the research and has increased a lot the frustration”, said Prof. Charpentier.
“It is a bit dangerous that the diversity of research is lost”
“It (academic freedom) may be restricted, not by the fact that you would have pressure, it is more in the way the research has evolved over the past, specifically 10 years, with the publishing”, according to the Nobel laureate. “It has become more commercialised and that is focusing more on phasing certain topics over other topics.”
She said that some leaders of certain fields of research are more advocating their research and more pushing for the research field, so they create a kind of focus on certain research fields and in that way we lose a little bit the diversity of research.
She explained that these peers in the research community are selected based on their ability to publish in high impact factor journals. And her field – bacteriology, is not that popular with publishers. “We have stories which we think are really groundbreaking. The editors don’t think that it’s groundbreaking. So I think it is a little bit dangerous that the diversity of research is lost”.
Academic freedom guardians
The guardians of academic freedom are research funding and the peer-reviewing system, according to the Danish professor Morten Meldal who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2022. “Fundamental research needs funding but it doesn’t need the control for what the funding is used for. And the reason for that is because all the big discoveries more or less serendipitous”, he said while he was interviewed by the European Science-Media Hub in Lindau. “It cannot be politicians who tell us what the next discovery is. It must be the researchers themselves.”
Both Prof. Meldal and Prof. John O’Keefe (who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine in 2014) also shared their views on the future of AI in science and society – another topic of the discussions at the 72nd Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting.
Read more about this in these interviews:
• Prof. Morten Meldal: ‘Science should be done without constraint’
• Prof. John O’Keefe: ‘Politicians and researchers should think about AI regulation’