IRELAND

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‘The essence of basic frontier
research is that you don’t know
what way it is going to go. But if we
don’t fund it, where are the
breakthroughs going to come from?
There’s a huge unmet need in
cancers and pathologies like
Alzheimer’s and the only way to
make progress is to understand the
disease at a fundamental level. That
involves basic research … Let’s say
we do make a fundamental
discovery and we don’t
commercialise and someone else
does, that would be terrible. It’s like
in football – you would be stupid
to have a whole load of backs on
your team, you need wingers and
forwards as well.’
Professor Luke O’Neill, School of Biochemistry
& Immunology, Trinity College, Dublin, 2012
Discovering
a key piece of
the jigsaw -
the power of
fundamental
science
discovery Ireland 74,75