Investment for Naught? On The Relevance of Motives in Promoting Research and Science in the Muslim World

During the recent decades, the volume of scientific publications from developing nations has been dramatically increased, and Iran was among those with rising rate [1]. Nonetheless, the policies which are employed to direct scientific endeavors should be highly regarded in order to facilitate the process; unless wrong or inconsistent policies have the potential to simply burn the achievements and divert
the direction to a final collapse.

Recently in the media, you can overwhelmingly hear that they talk about making wealth from science as incentive to promote scientific productions as a business. Although there are some positive prospects in this approach, we believe that this won’t work perfect for long. The problem with this approach is that those who come into research through this motive are highly likely to end in either of this results: To try to find some safe markets to make easy money for a unique or a limited number of products which will be an end to innovations and dedication of the nation’s resources for luxuries; or to leave the country to fulfill their purpose more perfectly in another country after making some initial advancements. Scientific promotion is a process that necessitates constant and never ending efforts. A scientific product (e.g. a medical agent) which is now the best, will highly probable to loss its value just within less than a decade. The speed of promotion needed to stay in competition is such high which will not be served unless a high level of self-sacrifice is made. Scientific institutions should make large amounts of investments in a way that doesn’t warrant a success. And all this will not be prepared by those whose major motive in this regard was financial matters... (Read more...)