IRELAND

That years of curiosity-driven, basic research should sit
behind a successful spin-out company like OxyMem is hardly
remarkable. In fact, achievements in innovation in all of the
most successful countries of the world are typically built on
a bedrock of excellent basic research. This is the norm, not
the exception – the history of Irish science, for example, is
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‘Scientific progress on a broad front
results from the free play of free
intellects’
discovery Ireland 20,21
adorned by individuals whose achievements are celebrated
not because they yielded any immediate economic benefit,
but because their research discoveries proved far-reaching
and transformative in nature. Consider George Boole, the
first professor of mathematics at what is now University
College Cork, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, famously
wrote An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, included in
which was his system of Boolean Algebra. This system is now
applied in the design and operation of computers and
switching circuits. Consider, too, the Waterford-born Nobel
Prize winner for Physics, Ernest Walton, who, alongside John
Cockcroft, designed and built the first successful particle
accelerator, which enabled them to disintegrate lithium, or
split the atom, in the early 1930s.
Boole and Walton are but two names from a extensive cast
of Irish scientists whose work, ground-breaking and
internationally significant, raises issues that go to the very
heart of the debates around research and its funding that are
now widespread throughout Europe – and beyond. These
debates centre on competing ideas concerning the purpose
Particles colliding in the Large Hydron Collider