Nature 436, 884-885 (August 2005) | doi:10.1038/nj7052-884a
David Cyranoski
Malaysia's research system is closed and isolated. What are scientists with a yen for rigorous research to do? David Cyranoski finds out.
In March 2005, neuroscientist Ishwar Parhar had coffee with the king of Malaysia at a Tokyo hotel. "He asked me why I don't come back to Malaysia," Parhar remembers. A desire to do more research than the infrastructure would allow had driven him away years before, and he had had no indication that the government was serious about plans to strengthen science. Months later, officials from Malaysia's science and health ministries negotiated to let Parhar, currently at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo, build a new brain-science research institute in the capital, Kuala Lumpur. "The meeting with the king was good," he says. "I think it got the ministries to talk to me."
But not everyone can meet the king, or have a new institute set up to back a recruitment drive. Outsiders in Malaysia have difficulty finding attractive research positions. Cronyism is rife. Foreigners aren't the only ones to miss out: policies designed to promote development of the ethnic Malay majority put the affluent, educated Chinese and Indian minorities at a disadvantage in education and employment — and in the forefront of the brain drain from Malaysia.
Pay is unattractive, and a dearth of colleagues and postgraduates to collaborate or discuss research with makes this an isolated world. There is little pressure on researchers to publish in international journals. Doing little to attract researchers and much to drive them away, Malaysia has a serious human-resource problem. Efforts to create a bioindustrial hub flopped mainly for that reason (see Nature 436, 620–621; 2005 ).
But the government is trying to encourage change. In 2003, for example, it partially reversed a 30-year-old policy, created to strengthen the ethnic Malay majority, of having all courses taught in Malay; mathematics and science are now taught in English. This has removed an extra impediment to Chinese and Indian scholars and is helping to promote Malaysian scientists' ability to interact internationally.
Private enterprises
The government's decision in 1996 to allow private universities is shaking things up even more. The institutions that are now emerging could form a much-needed bridge to the international research community.
"It was a bold initiative to make Malaysia a centre of excellence," says inorganic chemist Kumar Das, vice-chancellor of the science department at the private Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology (AIMST).
The new private institutions — including AIMST, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Monash University Malaysia, Penang Medical College and the International Medical University — are expanding. UTAR's science and technology faculty, established only a year and a half ago, has 65 staff and 1,500 students; plans are to boost these numbers to 400 and 7,000, respectively, over the next four years. Mostly with private support, all are constructing large campuses.
The private universities and colleges were formed to fill a gap in the Malaysian education system created by a 'Malays first' policy. The policy guarantees places for ethnic Malays, reducing the options for the Chinese and Indian minorities. To offer more opportunities to home-grown talent, Chinese Malaysians with political power established UTAR and their Indian counterparts set up AIMST. Admission is open to students of all ethnic groups through a purely merit-based selection process. All classes are taught in English.
But the effect of these institutions is likely to reach well beyond offering places to minorities. They have scientific ambitions and internationalism on the brain. A quarter of the staff at Monash are foreign, mostly recruited from the region: these universities actively seek staff from abroad or with training overseas. And the administration is creating collaborations with overseas universities.
Furthermore, the new institutes put an emphasis on cutting-edge research, such as brain science at Monash and organometallic chemistry at UTAR. They send staff to international academic conferences and encourage publication in international journals.
"Right now the emphasis on research is not high," says Tham Choy-Yoong, dean of the faculty of science and engineering at UTAR. An astrophysicist formerly at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, UK, Tham says he wants to introduce what he learned there. "In Britain, research is everything. It's more important than stressing how many students you can train."
A Malaysian developmental biologist who recently moved from a national university, and asked not to be named, says the independent institutes have a different philosophy. "The problem with the national universities is that there is too much central control, so the area of innovation is very limited. Universities should be a place to experiment."
Cash flow
That road will not be easy, as funding and human resources will continue to be a problem. The private universities only achieved the right to get grants from the main funding source, Intensification of Research in Priority Areas grants, two months ago. But even these have their problems, says Merilyn Liddell, vice-chancellor of Monash Malaysia. She is particularly concerned that grants do not provide for major infrastructure or salary. "From the university's perspective, it costs money to get the grant," she says.
Moreover, the grants specify priority areas, focusing on applied science over basic research, says Liddell. Many researchers in Malaysia echo her concern, saying that R&D investment seems focused on schemes to turn a quick profit rather than on long-term development. Much of the country's national research is on rubber, forestry and palm oil.
The grant system still causes concern, because the peer-review ideal is often replaced by patronage. "In Malaysia, the pool of people reading the grants is so small, they will clearly know who has written them," says Parhar. In a place where cronyism from the top down is rife, and ethnic lines clearly demarcated, the toll on merit-based assessment can be high.
This February, Monash Malaysia provided a report for the government advising it to put millions of dollars into basic-research activities at foreign-branch universities. "By training people in research, we could contribute to the human capital of the country," says Liddell.
The new universities are struggling to provide competitive salaries so that established scientists can be recruited to form a research core. One foreign scientist working in Malaysia says she couldn't even pay rent on her salary.
A shortage of colleagues and staff is also a lingering concern. There's a dire need for postgraduate students, says Das, "but Malaysian postdocs get only a small stipend, and foreigners get none". Parhar is bringing six of his own postdocs — four Japanese and two Chinese — to help set his institute up. But wholesale importing won't be an option for many.
Malaysia's famed biodiversity could be a great draw for researchers. But even that has been tainted by bad policies, say researchers. One foreign ecologist says that environmental-protection laws are not enforced, and considerable red tape must be hacked through before researchers can get out to the rainforests.
Meanwhile, the pool of scientists who could collaborate on biodiversity projects has shrunk. "Taxonomists are an endangered species," says Abdul Razak Mohd Ali, head of the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia, which is heading a national project on a biodiversity inventory. Many blame late-1990s policies designed to cultivate biotechnologists while supplanting taxonomists, but attitudes seem to be changing (see Nature 436, 313; 2005).
If the new institutes manage to attract top researchers, the Malaysian research community could develop basic and applied research capacity in line with international trends, as neighbouring Singapore has done (see Nature 425, 746–747; 2003).
Parhar is hopeful. He plans, among other things, to establish an active neuroscience and endocrinology society that could host the International Brain Research Organization's annual meeting.
"I want this to become a regional centre of excellence in neuroscience," says Parhar. "Once we show good-quality research, we will become attractive to scientists in the region and even to some in the United States and Europe."
No comments:
Post a Comment