Sure, we’ve reared more Nobel Prize Laureates in Science than any other nation on the planet. But ask your average shopper in New York, Beijing or Helsinki to name an Australian product and you might find yourself waiting a long time for an answer.

So, is Australia a nation of innovators? For a country of our size and natural assets, are we punching above or below our weight?

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It’s been…

• 26 months since Kevin ‘07 was handed the Prime Ministerial baton;
• 25 months since Senator Kim Carr announced his Review of the National Innovation System;
• 21 months since Commercial Ready was ‘axed’;
• 17 months since Terry Cutler handed down the outcomes of Venturous Australia;
• three months since the recommendations of the report found some semblance of form in Commercialisation Australia;
• two months since most of learned that COMET would be wound up by 31 December 2009; and,
• one month since the Australian Treasury released its Exposure Draft to reform the R&D Tax Incentive, seeking feedback by 5 February.

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By Russ Swann - Guest Editor

Unless you've been living on Mars for the last year or two, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that there is something of an economic crisis currently affecting the world's major economies. The
financial sector is suffering badly and spreading its malaise widely: manufacturing, construction, processing - no industry is recession-proof. But how is the laboratory sector faring in these troubled times?

This week in Chicago, the litmus has been applied to the sample. Pittcon (the Pittsburgh Conference, although it is never held in that city) is the biggest of the US events in our industry. It runs all this week in the 'windy city', and serves as a bellwether of the sector's virility. How then does the wind blow?

My correspondent at the exposition, Jezz Leckenby of Netdyalog, reports that it is very much an event that is trying to put on a brave face. The most positive number is the attendee pre-registrations, which are actually up 3 per cent on last year. This may have something to do with the generous discounts made available to students, academics, and unemployed scientists in the run-up, but is at least a bit of good news. There was also a good turn-out, he reports, for the opening plenary lecture from Harvard's Professor George Whitesides, which was on zero cost diagnostics. He was rather upstaged by the founder of Aldrich (Sigma Aldrich), Dr Alfred Bader. An Austrian refugee jew from WWII, Bader gave a thrilling account of his life and received the
Pittcon Heritage award.

This, though, is where the good news runs dry. Comparing more numbers, we see find total conferees down by about 300 to 7100. Exhibiting companies are about 10 per cent fewer at just over 1000, and the space
they occupy is down by about 20 per cent, counting the number of actual stands. This is reflected in a 22 per cent drop in exhibition personnel, and a similar fall in the number of media delegates.

These numbers have turned the litmus red, but it has to be said that it isn't a very deep red. I have written before about how the laboratory sector is better placed than many industries to ride out the economic storm, and the news from Chicago really supports this: if the numbers are holding up so well in these conditions, perhaps the outlook is not so bleak after all.

Laboratory Equipment Australia

Guest editorial: Russ Swann - LaboratoryTalk

Governments of all persuasions will routinely trot out the mantra that education is their number-one priority, and that of all their number-one priorities science and engineering education comes right at the top. The investment in learning and knowledge, they assure us, is the only way to secure the prosperity of future generations. They usually tell us this just before announcing another round of cuts to their education budget, with the axe falling hardest on the less popular subject areas such as, well, science and engineering.

I think we can all expect to hear more of this blather in the months ahead, as governments look at all areas of expenditure with a level of scrutiny that could easily be thought of as panic. All those countless currency units used to support the corrupt and inept banking system mean that those areas of the economy that create wealth by actually doing things, instead of shuffling bits of paper, are going to find it ever harder to secure funds. Bet on education being one of them, despite its avowed priority-one status.

But there are a couple of reasons to be optimistic about the relative importance of technical learning among the wider educational programme. One of those, ironically, is the economy. We have seen in past recessions that students have a rather different perspective on their choice of courses than they do in times of prosperity. Suddenly an undergraduate might look at a degree in media studies or basketball as something of a luxury, and opt instead for a course offering at least a glimmer of employability. Here the sciences will benefit.

There's also the element of fashion. We have long suffered the stigma of nerdiness and dullness, while the flibbertygibbets of the arts world preened about. But no more: science is once again cool. The reason owes a lot to high-profile Big Science projects in the news, such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project. Even when, as is the case with the LHC, things don't quite go according to plan, the coverage makes our subject areas more sexy.


Possibly goes to show the old maxim - "There's no such thing as bad publicity" holds true in this case.

Whilst the rest of the developed world are planning long-term, considered responses aimed at turning around their economic fortunes by investing wisely in wealth generation and ideas we're blithely throwing money into the wind with nary a care where it lands.
Whilst the US for example has earmarked over US$600M for laboratory instrumentation purchases all we're planning - long term - in the realm of science funding is to build more  classrooms for secondary school science classes.

Whilst the rest of the world marches on in the full understanding that long-term economic health and wealth generation comes from nurturing innovation and enterprise level R&D initiatives all I'm seeing are adverts from travel agents exhorting us "To have a holiday on Kevin" as their way of extracting the $900 per head available from March 9
Why.........................?????????????