This opinion by an English scientist is not accurate, mostly if we consider the recent political and administrative movements having being recently evidenced as applied to science in England ³ . The English, answer with Kealy's argument, last year the Office of Science and Technology (OST) was drawn out of the Cabinet to place it under the department of Trade and Industry (DTI). —This way, "the OST which handles the 1,900 million pounds of British science, loses its cabinet post and now tries to board industry for detriment of basic research ⁴ "—

The private sector moves to the market forces, and these would hardly justify the considerable investments demanded by the fundamental research supporting technological development and being nourished by it; this is why it is simply illogical to think that one may substitute Government as a booster of knowledge generation. Robert S. Walker, former chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, in the United States, wrote when he was in office that "the financing of (basic) academic research —by Government— is a vital investment for the future of this nation ⁵ "; Walker, however, expressed also that in order to conciliate this investment with a budget gap reduction, the government should concentrate its effort in basic research, leaving technological development to industry.

This distinction, however, is not all that clear since if Government does not finance "high risk" technological developments with their short-medium term profitableness, the private sector will not do it either, This is why one of the largest technology producing nations, Japan, proposes this year to increase its science budget by 50% —until reaching US $ 150,000 million— for the next five years ⁶ , for research such as the creation of a Bio-science and Human Technologies Institute at the Tsukuba "technopolis". One of the projects is to try "to copy the brain's information processing functions. It is not possible to figure an internal rate of return for such revolutionary and ambitious investments. The same occurs with Defense research (DARMI) in the United States: thanks to it we academicians and businessmen of the world virtual forums as this one being offered to us by Analítica through the Internet ⁷ , just to give an example.

English science, on the contrary, tries to privatize everything, and this quest has led to the consequence, among many other, of emigration to the United States, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, among other countries. The privatizing trend, however, seems to be reaching its end, since a Government Committee pronounced itself against privatizing the following, certainly not very profitable, institutes: British Geological Survey, Centre for Coastal and Marine Sciences in Plymouth, and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, all part of the Natural Environment Research Council ⁸

In the meantime, in the United States, a committee of experts headed by a private sector scientist, William Brinkman, of Bell Laboratories, recommends to the National Science Foundation that it should invest even more, with a good return for the 60 million dollars it spends every year ⁹ .

If we were to accept the dogma that "private financing performs better" —Kealy dixit—, we would have serious ethical problems with society. In the biomedical sector, for instance, well known to Kerdel and this author, if it were not for the National Health Institutes in the United States, it would not be possible to do research in that country on "non profitable" diseases such as those of a parasitic nature affecting tropical countries, such as malaria, chagas' disease, leishmaniasis and schistosomiasis. This research have led to important basic knowledge used as a support to prepare new vaccines and medications ¹⁰ . Now, however, when finding that a substance being released by white cells, lLl2, may have significant therapeutic effect on these diseases, private corporations such as Hoffmann La Roche and Genetics Institute, holding the respective patents on this bio-drug, oppose to clinical tests with these diseases, drawing hope away from eight hundred million patients in the developing countries. ¹¹

The consequences of having a strong basic science, supported by Government, may be seen graphically in the world development of biotechnology ¹² , a somehow familiar sector to me. There is no doubt that the United States have the leadership, if we consider that almost all the biotechnological market's products come from this country; and we are thinking of some thousand biotechnological corporations that made sales of $ 9.6 billion in 1995 ¹³ . This growth is due to the close association between Universities strongly supported by Government (NIF, IVSC) and micro-enterprises formed by the very same researchers and entrepreneurial managers finding financial support in an active risk capital market. If the development of biotechnology had been entirely left to "better performing private financing", this modern and revolutionary technology would not have born yet, since pharmaceutical multinational corporations —today the most interested ones in this business— for many years show scarce interest or none at all.

The difference between the United States' biotechnology and that of Europe is so great that a fully "privatizing" country as the United Kingdom does not even compare with San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Boston or New York. According to a recent report by Ernst & Young ¹⁴ , there are only 26 companies with their shares quoted in the market (NASDQ), while in San Francisco only there are more than 150. With human genome, this are much worse for the UK since there, the technological comparison is not with a whole city but just with a Boston or Maryland laboratory.

United States laboratories or private companies have no paragon in the developed world; there is no other country with a similar amount of Government —Executive, Congress and Judiciary— financed and boosted basic science as the United States ¹⁵ . Besides, there is also an equally important having to do with the flourishing of s strong basic science, it is the redundancy in research being created by high level of competitiveness to publish first and better. This endeavor for publication and dissemination of knowledge is strange to private business for marketing reasons, since no one with a sound mind is willing to disclose in advance its competitive advantages.

For these and many other reasons, that we are forced to leave out under space considerations, to say the least, it is not advisable to leave the financing of science in private hands; it is better to do as the United States and Japan, where synergetic and complementary relationships between Government and the private sector. If we approach the Venezuelan case, an entirely different one, quite different from both these countries, one must remain being creative and think of specific tools considering our specific needs, that allow just to start inserting science into Venezuelan society ¹⁶

What Kerdel points out with regard to the "professionalism" of the scientific researcher in public laboratories is fully true. Equally valid is his concept of "establishing priorities in areas where there is an economic ¹⁷ interest for the national country on fundamental and applied research " The problem lies, however, not only on the restriction established by these priorities on academic freedom, already hindered by labor unions and professional associations, but rather on finding an adequate balance between public financing to basic, competitive research, and government stimuli to the private sector to outline and foster research in priority areas ¹⁸

This —never seen before— step in Venezuela towards government support to basic research and to cooperation in infrastructure and public financing of private technological development, has no precedent either in Latin America, not even in the so-called "tigers" of Southeastern Asia. These countries, far from developing basic and applied research on a parallel course, limited their initial strategy —of the sixties and eighties— to the transfer of U.S. and Japanese knowledge and technologies, to transform them into products with high value added that could be exported ¹⁹ . Now, countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and China, already turned into technological and financial powers, correct their course of the two former decades, with massive Government support towards basic research, and at the same times lay bridges between the latter and private technology. For it, they take advantage of the recent and never ending reverse flow of their scientists who had emigrated to the United States and ^19. , now returning, attracted by the Asiatic economic boom.

The debate on this issue of the financing of science, as well said by Kerdel in his article, is timely and important. Let us hope, then, that there will be other contributions to this controversial issue in order to help the decision makers to find new roads towards the scientific and technological development of Venezuela.