The contributions of biological science to national development: Nigerian experience

Abstract

The world is a global village and globalization is a process of interaction and integration among the people, companies, and government of different nations, a process driven by international trade and investment and aided by information technology. This process has effects on the environment, on culture, on political systems, on economic development and prosperity, and on human physical well being in societies around the world. This current wave of globalization has been driven by policies that have opened economies domestically and internationally. Science has been the principal driver of globalization. Advances in information technology, in particular, have dramatically transformed economic life. Information technologies have given all sorts of individual economic actors-consumers, investors, businesses-valuable new tools for identifying and pursuing economic opportunities, including faster and more informed analyses of economic trends around the world, easy transfers of assets, and collaboration with far-flung partners. Therefore, the imperative role of science to national development cannot be neglected and there is a lively debate on the link between biological science and national development. The motivations for science research way from one field to another. Some science questions have immediate goals, clearly directed towards solving specific problems or addressing particular conditions in society. Much medical research, for example, focuses on finding answers to questions such as why cancer cell develop and how to inhibit their growth. Military research is also usually focused, investigating, for instance, the effect of strong bursts of electromagnetic energy on missile guidance systems. Material sciences explore the properties of substances that make them useful in applications such as TV transmission, power distribution, or computer chip manufacture. Other biological sciences pursue questions more distant from current everyday concerns: biochemists seek to understand how complex protein molecules fold into their compact forms; astronomers attempt to discern whether the expanding universe will ever stop and recollapse; and high energy physicists probe the forces and particles at the heart of all matter, at the smallest distance scales imaginable. Biological science generate continuous innovation (technological, organizational, managerial) generated by learning entities that have been shown to be responsible not only for productivity increases, but also for dynamic competitive advantage of firms, industries and nations in the unfolding global economy. This presupposes that science is multidimensional and it is inevitable for any society aspiring for national development. Therefore, this paper argues essentially, that biological science is a sine qua non for national development.