Ground-breaking advances through discovery research

Art McDonald, Nobel Prize winner and professor emeritus of Queen’s University:

Discovery research, I think, is very important because it turns out that if you attempt to only do direct commercializable research, then you find that you run out of ideas fairly quickly.

You have to be in a situation where your researchers are at the cutting edge of a given field.  Discovery research gives you the opportunity to do that even if your objective is eventually commercialization.

There has to be a mix of the ability to be at the frontier of the field from a basic science point of view as well as the capability of eventually commercializing that.

But in addition to that, there’s a certain amount of what we do in science which is simply understanding our universe better.