Research has a unique role when people have to find new and better ways of being in the world. Whether the burning platform is a pandemic or global warming, research gives us the crucial starting point for finding solutions to what threatens us.
It is an inherent characteristic of research that you sometimes come across something that you do not understand. This may be a phenomenon or a mechanism that we have not encountered before. Perhaps we also cannot determine whether it is of great importance or whether it can be applied. But perhaps it is worth examining further?
It is important that—as a society—we have places where there is some room to pursue new ideas, even when it is not a given that we can benefit from them. You can say that research is an investment in knowledge and solutions that we do not yet know that we need. The reason why it was possible to create one of the best vaccines against COVID-19 in a very short time was precisely that the researchers did not have to start from scratch, but could work at full speed with a vaccine technology that someone had spent time and money examining without being sure whether it would be used some day.
In this magazine, you can read about pyrolysis as a method for capture and storage of carbon from biomass. That was not the purpose of this technology at all when it was first developed more than four decades ago. At the time, the focus was on extracting gas from biomass. We were not at all aware that we would need pyrolysis as a climate solution.
Finding new solutions or new applications for existing solutions requires freedom and creativity. That is why we are fighting to preserve the universities’ room for manoeuvre, our freedom of research. We are not fighting for the right to pursue all sorts of crazy ideas, but for the importance of having enough space and scope to dare take a detour and explore something new— something we may not know that we will need one day.