Challenges and Opportunities for the Development of Scientific Research in Mexico

Since the dawn of modernity—after the revolutions and military conflicts—science and innovation have been produced by the Western world, chiefly by the United States and some countries in Europe. This hegemony, together with the growing influence of capitalism, has allowed these countries to commercialize their technology and reinvest the wealth generated to produce still more science and technology that helps them maintain their dominance; meanwhile, countries like Mexico remain far behind in the development of science and technology and are at a disadvantage compared with the great powers.

It's enough to compare the GDP per capita generated in Mexico with that of other developed countries to grasp the disparities in productivity and technological development: while in the United States GDP is $50,000, in Mexico it is only a little over $15,000[1]. Likewise, worker productivity reflects an unequal reality: in Germany or France productivity is nearly $70 per hour, whereas in Mexico it is only $17 per hour—a difference of almost 700% [2].

These disparities allow the powers to remain leaders in economic development while developing countries continue to struggle to achieve the economic growth that comes with the development of science and technology.

In this article I will explore Mexico's particular situation to understand why it finds itself in this state of scientific lag and how it might overcome it in order to—perhaps—become a world power. I will take this country as a reference point to find general patterns in societies that help explain what the characteristics of a society with little scientific development are, and how it can rise above them to generate wealth.

Development

Mexico is behind in science. For more than 20 years it has been the second-largest producer of scientific knowledge in Latin America. This is not encouraging for the rest of the region, since Mexico's contribution to world knowledge is only 1% (Nelly Toche, para. 3). Why is the contribution so small? How can we increase it?

The first problem is funding. The General Education Law stipulates that the State must invest a minimum of 8% of GDP in Education, of which 1% must be administered by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) to promote and encourage scientific work in public institutions. Yet investment over the past 10 years has hovered between 0.2% and 0.3% of GDP, and despite receiving less funding than it should, CONACYT also squanders part of it: between 2013 and 2018, it handed out 15 billion pesos to private companies without justification.

This shows that the development of science and technology is not a priority for the State.

And as if that weren't enough, they are developing a new General Law of Humanities, Sciences, Technologies, and Innovation that plans to put research centers at the service of a governmental agenda that seeks to solve all the country's problems through science and technology, and that demands practical relevance in scientific output without considering the limitations this entails.

The science policy being implemented is not one of creativity and innovation, but one of incremental advances.

It is ironic that, in a world where the near-total non-intervention of government in private affairs prevails, the Mexican government devotes itself to controlling science and innovation in the country at its whim. This has been made evident by the closure of multiple research programs, such as the Cátedras program, which funded nearly 1,600 researchers.

It seems the current administration considers scientists to be "hanging off the payroll"—as the director of CONACYT, María Elena Álvarez-Buylla, put it—and that they merely enjoy the money of public institutions without making any significant contribution to national knowledge. What is true is that research systems have researchers who make few contributions and have low productivity, but we must recognize that this is the fault of systemic failures that fail to give scientists the right incentives.

The second problem is incentives. CONACYT implemented the National System of Researchers (SNI) to encourage the creation of new knowledge in Mexico. The program is organized into tiers according to each academic's excellence and grants the researcher a salary supplement on top of the salary paid by the institution that employs them. To belong to this system, researchers are evaluated on their productivity, the quality of their work, and their contributions to Mexico's scientific development.

The implementation of this system, far from encouraging the creation of better research, has turned researchers into mercenaries of science who seek to publish the greatest number of articles per year and prioritize incremental advances—in popular areas—to grow their impact factor.

The incentive problem is so serious that it has produced a replication crisis in which the results of hundreds of studies are impossible to reproduce, ultimately undermining the credibility of the theories built on those results and casting doubt on substantial portions of scientific knowledge.

Researchers are subject to financial and intellectual pressures that push them to carry out research that brings in more money, forcing them to work in well-funded areas, publish an immense number of articles—falling prey to the replication crisis—and to stall the number of transformative discoveries. This comes as a surprise if we consider that the number of researchers in private institutes and universities is on the rise; but the policies implemented so far have strangled research and, far from favoring researchers, have restricted their autonomy to the government's agenda.

CONACYT should realize that important discoveries cannot be ordered on demand. They are not hamburgers or tacos that one can simply conjure up with a few bills. The only thing we can do to bring them about is to enable the freedom that leads to them. If we make sure that the best scientists in our country have the freedom to tackle any problem, we could synthesize an elixir of innovation that would make us an enduring civilization.

The third problem is the institutions dedicated to research. There are very few national institutions devoted to conducting research with a global impact. Those that exist receive public funding and face problems securing funds, stemming from the difficulty of justifying the usefulness of research to Mexican society. Justifying the usefulness of research is another serious problem that has to be solved, and which I'll cover in a later section.

The private sector invests less in science than the government: only 23% of the money for scientific research is contributed by private companies. The causes for this are varied: not all science has a quick or straightforward industrial application; the disconnect between academia and industry keeps academics from discovering areas of research within the private sector; and the costs of carrying out a scientific project with the aim of industrializing it are high. This leaves the private sector feeling alienated and unwilling to invest in scientific research in Mexico.

If we look at where the best research centers on the planet are located, we notice that they are found around major technological and business communities such as Silicon Valley or New York. Often the research centers themselves receive funds from the companies located there, and many times the companies build their own subsidiaries to conduct research.

In Mexico there is a very large technology community, and the number of startups is increasing. According to data from April 2022, there are roughly 500 startups in Mexico, and outside capital investment has increased over recent years. In fact, Mexico is today the second country with the most venture capital investment in Latin America. Yet few of these startups carry out science-related activities or create subsidiaries for the development of research.

This gap between the private sector and scientific research is a problem that must be addressed if we want to conduct research that doesn't obey a government's agenda, that contributes to global knowledge, and that has an impact on society's quality of life.

I'm not saying every company should invest in research, but that private investment in research should be encouraged. Perhaps it doesn't even need to be incentivized: all that's needed is a group of madmen willing to fund scientific institutions in Mexico.

Mexican science needs benevolent patrons willing to create more centers for scientific and technological development in the country. Only then will it be possible to carry out autonomous research that follows no government's agenda and increases innovation and scientific development in the country. An example of how this could work is found in the old tradition of patronage in Renaissance Florence.

The Medici family funded a great many artists now recognized as some of the best in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello—all received funds from the Medici family to create their magnificent works. The money used to sustain these artists was very small compared to what the Medici generated, and that investment resulted in one of the highest returns in history. We must encourage people with such amounts of wealth to invest in forming new research institutions that contribute to the development of scientific knowledge.

The fourth problem is education. To take it as a model of the global situation and of Mexico's, the number of postdoctoral researchers in U.S. universities has increased steadily since 1977 and is now almost four times greater than the number in 1973. This is an indicator that there are many researchers, which perhaps leads governments and their research institutions to believe that such a large group can only be effectively managed with a system of objectives similar to those used in industry.

However, the way institutions manage scientists is not the discussion we should be having here. What we should notice is that increased competition among scientists means that younger ones lose access to opportunities. While youth has its disadvantages, potential and mental capacity are its greatest advantage over older scientists.

Even with those intellectual advantages, the age at which young researchers receive independent support has increased considerably. In the early years of the Nobel Prize, future Nobel laureates were, on average, 37 years old when they made their prize-winning discoveries. In recent years that age has risen to an average of 47—an increase of nearly a quarter of a scientist's career.

This temporal disparity could be attributed to the fact that scientists require more knowledge than before to make important discoveries. As a result, they study for longer and grow older before they can do their most important work. This could be an indicator that great discoveries are simply harder to find, but I want to explore a different hypothesis related to researchers' age and their education.

The fact that the average age for making an important contribution has increased is not the fault of the growing difficulty of knowledge, but of the poor educational practices carried out in most of the world.

In Mexico's case, students receive a well-rounded education from upper-secondary school onward that ensures they know a wide range of areas. When they graduate from higher education, they are nearly 23 years old, and then, in pursuing doctoral and postdoctoral studies, they spend the rest of their productive lives—resulting in this late age at which it is very difficult to make any discovery.

If we want our science to keep producing discoveries, we must find ways to harness scientists' intelligence and creativity at early stages. We have to work to reform our educational system so as to reduce the years of training and increase researchers' useful lifespan. My draft of a solution to this will appear in a later section.

Solutions

The effective creation of knowledge presupposes the existence of adequate institutional infrastructure, funding, and integration into the scientific community. That is why finding a solution to the problems mentioned above will increase the capacity of Mexico and the rest of the world to innovate and confront the challenges that face all of humanity.

There is one action with the potential to solve most of these problems: to inspire. If we look back at the history of humanity and the reasons behind our motivation to create, explore new lands, and improve processes, we can find a vision, a mindset of making the future different and better than it is today.

To cultivate this vision, we have to work to expand people's imagination and inspire them to undertake actions that seem impossible. The simplest way to do this is through science fiction, engagement with the material world, and relationships with industry. For example, imagine what our civilization would look like in the year 2300. Now figure out what kind of technological, theoretical, and practical advances have to be made in the near future to reach that stage. Now write a text or make a drawing; share your vision of the world with others.

We also need more direct celebrations of innovation in popular culture, which means, to begin with, fewer science-fiction films focused on the thousand ways technology can kill us and more focused on invention, exploration, and what the world of the future will look like.

Building an inspiring vision of the future is the first step toward making clear the need for better policies that support science. Films that promote the capacity of young people in science can help hundreds of young scientists—who waste much of their scientific careers climbing the rungs of academic status—be taken seriously.

Another way to inspire is to give science and innovation a face. Today there are few names or living legends present in the imagination of young people or intellectuals. We must give research a face with which society can identify and feel inspired to make changes in its surroundings.

Cultivating this vision of improvement across all of society is the first step toward generating change in the institutions and dynamics of the scientific system. After this, we will be able to enact policies that promote the creation of private or government-independent research institutions; we will be able to create programs that give researchers the freedom and confidence to explore the problems most interesting to them; and we will be able to make improvements to educational institutions that allow for the training of highly qualified scientists.

Discussion

So far, the entire article has been oriented toward one specific theme: scientific research is stagnant and we have to pull it out of this bind. However, there are authors who don't see this as a bad thing, or who believe that focusing on correcting this situation through improvements to social institutions is not the most effective path to solving the problem.

Holden Karnofsky holds that yes, we should expect the number of new ideas to shrink over time, and that the only way to counter this dynamic is to increase the number of people having ideas—through an increase in population or a growth of the "effective population," that is, increasing the number of people who have the opportunity to innovate and have ideas.

I agree that we must make a great effort to increase the number of people in a position to conduct research and have new ideas. Even so, there will be no effective return on that investment if we don't improve the institutions as well. If, with the current number of researchers, institutions are incapable of devising adequate mechanisms, the prospect of dealing with a greater number of people under the current state of the institutions looks like utter chaos.

Another argument I consider important to mention is that of the supposed unimportance of innovation in the face of the world's problems, and of Mexico's today. Some may hold that underdeveloped countries should not invest money or attention in improving their research systems or in having better ideas. Yet this is the precise reason these nations should put their efforts into innovation. In a world governed by economies with large research and technological-development arms, the only opportunity less powerful nations will have to position themselves in the market is by carrying out unique research that lets them become the leaders of new industries.

Counterarguments can also be found against the idea that the educational system is responsible for the decline in scientists' productivity. Perhaps this decline in productivity is indeed because more knowledge is required to make new discoveries, and if changes were made to the educational system they would have a positive impact for only a few years before scientists' productivity stagnated again due to the new amount of knowledge needed to make a discovery.

For this problem there is no immediate solution within social institutions. However, the creation of new tools of thought that reduce the difficulty and the time it takes to grasp new concepts could be a sustainable solution in the future. Throughout history there has been an endless array of tools of thought—like the integral calculus invented by Newton and Leibniz—that have allowed man to simplify complex operations and focus on carrying out ever more difficult activities. As long as the creation of these new tools continues, together with improvements to the educational system, scientific labor will be able to grow steadily, facing few—and, I hope, short—periods of scientific stagnation.

Conclusion

Science in Mexico—and in the world—has many problems that cannot be solved overnight. To increase scientific output in Mexico, a greater amount of public and private funding needs to be invested. Since public investment is limited and conditioned by a political agenda, all that remains is to trust that the private sector will increase its investment in research and development. I see an area of opportunity for this within the technology companies that have emerged over the past 10 years. These should invest in forming research institutions and concern themselves with generating new knowledge that may, in the future, open the door to new business opportunities.

In addition, the incentive problems that the National System of Researchers brings with it must be corrected. We must find a better way to incentivize quality science—one that doesn't depend on arbitrary quantities of published articles or on good social connections. Scientists must be given autonomy to pursue research that, at first glance, has no practical use but may become a relevant contribution to the betterment of human society.

The Mexican people must give greater importance to correcting these problems, and many others, in order to reach a level where their scientific contribution to the world equals or surpasses that of other developed countries. If we want to live in a better Mexico, we must invest in science and technology, but we must also invest in inspiring new generations and in creating greater opportunities for more people to get involved in innovation and science. We must make our scientists visible and create cultural works that motivate citizens to be creative, to imagine a different future, and to seek ways to make it real. Only then will we see significant improvements in our quality of life and existence.

References

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1. Our World in Data, GDP Per Capita
2. Our World in Data, Productivity per hour worked