Still following the 2016 Sarewitz essay in
the link above its rather interesting to see the recent position of the
Government of Japan saying strange things like:
"Japan’s basic
research is “wonderful” but is “neither quickly applied nor capable of solving
our fundamental problems,”
I do hope that Japan looks to what happened with the 1 billion European moonshot brain
project before it rushes to
embrace "multiple mission-oriented ‘moonshot’ research
programmes". Also Japan
(and even Europe) must not forget that hubris addicted scientists are very bad at one thing, recognizing when a research
line met a dead end. They prefer to say, there´s no problem with the research
line we just need more money !
Not to mention that Japan has problems like this one https://www.nature.com/news/open-countries-have-strong-science-1.22754 or that one https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2019/12/exoskeletons-for-older-workerswhen.html that this narrow approach will not address.
Furthermore, these moonshot research fever like this one https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eu-research-moonshots-focus-on-climate-crisis/ creates in the citizen's minds the idea that they need not to do their own part in reducing their own (high carbon) confort levels and that is a serious mistake as Jean-Pierre Bourguignon ERC President has reminded us:
"One of the most important messages we must give is to not let people think that we can quickly and reliably solve all the problems society faces with some kind of magic. This is a doubly dangerous idea. Because firstly we would be deceiving ourselves. And secondly, if people think we can, then it will make them less likely to take the hard decisions needed to really solve the problems of society" https://erc.europa.eu/news/enhanced-role-scientists-social-actors
