One of the great strengths of psychological science is its natural fit within Pasteur's quadrant — research motivated simultaneously by a quest for fundamental understanding and by a practical need to know. It puts psychology at the forefront in bringing science to bear on the nation's pressing policy needs, including health, safety, transportation, violence, workplace productivity, education and crime.
It also places psychological science squarely in the center of translational research, especially of the sort currently emphasized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Moving the advances of neuroscience and genomics to disease-related interventions is all about human behavior. Psychology offers more insight into human behavior than any other field of contemporary science.
Yet, translational and applied research requires that we start with basic knowledge on which to build. It is basic science that provides the substance for translation and application. In contrast to Pasteur, this is what Donald Stokes identified as Bohr's quadrant:
… basic research that is guided solely by the quest for understanding without thought of practical use. It might be called Bohr's quadrant in view of how clearly Niels Bohr's quest of a model atomic structure was a pure voyage of discovery, however much his ideas later remade the world. This category represents the research ideal of the natural philosophers, institutionalized in the pure science of the Germans in the nineteenth century and of the Americans in the twentieth …. (Stokes, 1997, p. 73).
We sometimes call this curiosity-driven research. It is the pursuit of new knowledge itself, and it is the essential base on which other kinds of research (including translational research) is built. We cannot abandon the quest for fundamental understanding because future translations and applications depend on it.
Yet we face a major challenge when it comes to the support of basic research. Most of the federal funding agencies are mission driven, which pushes much of the research they support into Pasteur's quadrant. Among such agencies are NIH, the Department of Defense, the Department of Education and NASA. Even the National Science Foundation — the federal agency most closely identified as supporting basic scientific discovery — places a large emphasis on research with broader impacts (defined as the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes).
Where, then, do we find institutional support for basic research? One answer is the place where most basic research is actually conducted — our colleges and universities. Even without specific research grants to support it, basic research finds a home in the laboratories and classrooms and among the faculty and students of thousands of colleges and universities across the country.
From this perspective, colleges and universities bear the largest responsibility for nurturing basic science. By providing the space, facilities, time, environment and support for human capital, it is our institutions of higher education that really feed Bohr's quadrant.
Indeed, this has been the role of colleges and universities for most of the past century. Now, more than ever, we depend on these institutions to fulfill that role. Federal sources of support appear to be shrinking. Colleges and universities remain the one great benefactor of basic science.
The great news is that advances in information technology also facilitate basic science, complementing the contributions of colleges and universities. A growing infrastructure and evolving scientific culture centered on data sharing, open access to scientific publications and "virtual" gathering places nurture basic science at relatively low cost. Digital technology is the new great benefactor of basic science.
Direct federal support for basic science may be waning, but federal investments continue to support the true benefactors of basic science — colleges, universities and a fabulous digital infrastructure. We have every reason to be hopeful that basic science will continue to generate the fundamental discoveries on which future societal needs depend.
