This article is in Chemistry in Australia magazine: Issue March 2024
Author: Chennupati Jagadish
Image: Some of the flags representing collaborating nations at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Despite individual national interests and international challenges, collaboration has kept the Antarctic free from military conflict and nuclear proliferation. | National Science Foundation/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain
The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2023 limits international scientific collaboration for security reasons, but its implications for research are much broader.
The global science system is at its most valuable, and its most vulnerable. There are local challenges that each country’s scientists will need to solve, but the global challenges are different: bigger, harder and more complex, and political. They require global solutions, and that will require researchers and people to work together.
We face challenges from technologies born of science that were recently the stuff of dystopian Hollywood imagination – artificial intelligence, advanced robotics and quantum. And while they too demand collaborative science to deliver answers to government and society, they have fast become matters more characterised by strategic national competition than collaboration. But collaboration is a matter of strategic national interest, for everybody.
We in Australia can’t do without international collaboration either. Our size and location make that obvious. We have to be willing and able to contribute to the knowledge bank that will help solve the challenges, and we need our scientists to be there when the big decisions are made that affect us and that affect the living systems in all other countries. We share one planet; we have nowhere else to go.
How do we in Australia navigate the next few months and years? How do we facilitate strategic collaboration? The answers may well be among the most significant decisions we make as a nation. They will dictate our contribution to meeting global challenges. They will determine whether we develop the sovereign capabilities needed to secure our nation and globe.
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