On being a scientist in one's home country

Caesar Saloma, PhD

(Delivered during the second Convention of Future Scientists last Feb. 27 at De La Salle
University Manila)

On Feb. 20, 2001 I gave a lecture entitled “My Expectations of the Filipino Scientist” after
receiving the first Concepcion Dadufalza Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Faculty
Center of the University of the Philippines Diliman. The Dadufalza Award was established by the
University of the Philippines System to keep alive the ideals of Professor Concepcion Dadufalza,
a teacher of English who influenced several generations of UP Diliman students during her long
and memorable career as a public servant. Fortunately, she was able to attend the first awarding
program. Unfortunately, I did not become one of her students. Professor Dadufalza passed away
in December 2004.

My talk appeared in the newsletter DOST SignPost, Volume 20, Number 8 (August 2002 issue)
and the Diliman Review, a journal that is jointly published by the College of Arts and Languages,
College of Social Sciences and Philosophy and College of Science of UP Diliman. An electronic
copy could also be downloaded from the website, bahaykuboresearch.net.

In my 2001 Dadufalza lecture, I mentioned a number of deliverables that I expected (and continue
to expect) Filipino scientists and researchers to deliver in the course of pursuing scientific research
in our own country.

I expect every Filipino scientist to work toward building a culture of science in our society. He or
she would help establish a rich scientific tradition that all Filipinos can be proud of. Excellence in
the basic and applied science and mathematics is about performing well and consistently.
Excellence does not become a way of life in a society that does not possess a sense of history
regarding the past contributions of its scientists, researchers and technologists. Scientific tradition
is forged by generations of individuals ceaselessly pushing the limits of scientific knowledge.

Scientific tradition does not emerge simply by chance. It results from conscious, coordinated and
sustained effort by many sectors of society — from the private and non-governmental
organizations to the government. Among these sectors, the academe plays the most crucial role in
the task of tradition building. Academics are in a unique position since they are not beholden to
short-term interests nor encumbered by the profit motive. They form the frontline in the training
of future generations of scientists and intellectuals of society.

Scientific research is not easy to perform in our country since it requires a support infrastructure
that allows effective recruitment of young talent as well as efficient procurement and delivery of
research equipment and materials. Our society is still in the process of building the foundations of
such an infrastructure. Doing research here is still like wading through shallow muddy waters —
one small step forward already requires huge amounts of energy and momentum.

A great institution of higher learning is characterized by the excellence of its graduate programs.
It is the quality of the Ph.D. degree program, not B.S. nor M.S., that sets the reputation of a science
or engineering department. This is because a Ph.D. degree is a research degree that is awarded to
a graduate student after he has contributed something new to the body of scientific knowledge.
The said requirement is consistent with the goal of science, which is to improve the accuracy of
our understanding of how Nature works.

According to the highly respected university ranking system that was developed by Shanghai Jiao
Tung University, the strength of a university is measured by the number of Nobel prize and Fields
medal winners among its alumni and in its faculty and staff, the number of highly cited researchers
and the publications produced by its staff in the high-impact journals Science and Nature and other
peer-reviewed journals that are abstracted in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science
Citation Index.

It is evident that publication in a peer-reviewed journal is the single most important measure of
scientific productivity — the fundamental building block of one’s scientific career. No one has
ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry or Medicine without publishing at least
one original scientific paper. Not even the quintessential scientist Albert Einstein who received the
Prize in 1921 for his work on the photoelectric effect and quantum theory.

I expect faculty members to supervise Ph.D. students. Hence, faculty members who teach in
graduate programs must have the desired Ph.D. degrees. Many Philippine universities have
difficulty offering competitive graduate programs in the sciences and engineering due to the lack
of qualified Ph.D. degree holders in their faculty roster — not more than 10 percent of faculty
members in our higher education system today are Ph.D. degree holders.

Moreover, only a small fraction of Ph.D. faculty members in leading Philippine universities,
including the University of the Philippines, have successfully mentored Ph.D. students. The lack
of competent Ph.D. supervisors continues to be the most glaring weakness of our higher education
system today.

Great mentors are the most effective recruiters of young scientific talents. They play a key role in
containing the diaspora of young Filipino scientific talents to the G-7 countries. The brain drain
is not caused by lack of patriotism but by the narrowness of the spectrum of viable graduate
programs that are available locally.

That our best B.S. graduates continue to prefer studying abroad and that they could easily find
assistantship positions or scholarships in US, European or Japanese universities is a cause of
concern. It means that their science or engineering departments have failed to convince them to
pursue graduate studies locally and help build a scientific tradition in the home country.

I expect every scientist to understand that no area in science and technology is more important
than others. In the same token, no scientific discipline is more difficult than others. A scientist
should not blame his field for his poor research performance. Doing so is like a ship captain
complaining about the sea.
The skill and confidence of a Ph.D. student are acquired through long hours of experimentation
and analysis, and regular interactions with his supervisor and fellow students in research meetings
and seminars. His training is a shared experience that is enriching to both his supervisor and fellow
graduate students. The life of a scientist, no matter how accomplished he might be, is always
marked by daily attempts to understand Nature more clearly and accurately.

It has been eight years and seven days since I wrote my Dadufalza lecture. In that span of time, I
authored or co-authored more than 50 papers in SCI-indexed journals in the US and Europe and
successfully graduated 12 Ph.D. students at the National Institute of Physics. I also received two
international awards, the Galileo Galilei Award from the International Commission for Optics in
2004 and the triennial ASEAN Outstanding Scientist and Technologist Award from the ASEAN
Committee on Science and Technology in 2008. I am particularly pleased with these awards since
they were won based on scientific accomplishments that were achieved with colleagues and
students at the National Institute of Physics. In our own little way, we have shown that Filipinos
could perform good science in their own country.

(To be concluded)

In the wider front, however, the situation has not improved much. The College of Science in UP
Diliman employs between 140 and 150 Ph.D. faculty members during an academic year yet it
produces only an annual average of 12.92 Ph.D. and 46.16 M.S. graduates. A desirable annual
yield is 40 to 50 Ph.D. graduates since a diligent and productive Ph.D. faculty member should be
able to graduate one Ph.D. student for every three academic years. It takes about three years for a
bright graduate student to earn his Ph.D. degree after M.S. following the standard Ph.D.
curriculum.

The ISI publication of the domestic science community is growing but at a very slow rate when
compared to the performance of its ASEAN neighbors. The ISI output of the Philippines crossed
the 700-publication mark in 2006. Singapore, on the other hand, did it a long time ago in 1993 and
Malaysia and Thailand achieved it in 1999.

In recent years, the Philippine government has substantially increased its budget for scientific
research and development as well graduate scholarships in science and engineering. The
Department of Science and Technology has more financial resources at its disposal today to fund
worthy projects in interdisciplinary research ranging from nanotechnology and photonics to
ecology and the environment. Current DOST Ph.D. and M.S. scholarships also offer more realistic
stipends.

On Dec. 8, 2006, President Arroyo issued Eexcutive Order 583 establishing the National Science
Complex in a 21.9-hectare area of UP Diliman. The amount of P1.7 billion has been allotted within
a period of three fiscal years to complete the infrastructure requirement of the National Science
Complex and to build a number of technology incubation centers.

The National Science Complex is operated by the College of Science, UP Diliman. It is built to
provide a nurturing and enabling environment for Filipino scientists and researchers as they
perform their twin tasks of generating new scientific knowledge and training the next generations
of scientists and researchers of the country. The technology incubation centers are set up to enable
the private sector, particularly the small and medium scale enterprises, as well as other government
agencies and institutions, to improve the quality of their products and services by availing
themselves of the technical expertise that is available at the National Science Complex. The
management skill and experience that are gained from operating the National Science Complex
could be used as a future guide in establishing similar such hubs in other parts of the country.

Indeed, these are auspicious times for science in our society. Our youth must take advantage of the
situation.

Perhaps you would ask how was I able to overcome the unfavorable socio-economic conditions of
doing science here in our homeland. My relative success is a product of several factors — the right
skill set, luck, goodwill to peers and colleagues, imagination and foresight, and an enduring belief
that Filipino scientists working in the Philippines could compete with the best in the world if they
work hard, play by the rules and learn from their mistakes.

Louis Pasteur once said that luck favors the prepared mind. And he was correct.

When I was a graduate student in the 1980s, there were no research laboratories at the National
Institute of Physics and I was sent to Osaka University to pursue my dissertation research under a
kind and generous Japanese professor. Professor Minami was an optics person and that was how I
began my career. It was serendipity that started me in optics and photonics and signal processing.
I could have been easily assigned to do thin film deposition research in another school.

Learn to recognize and appreciate the potential of the resources that are already within your reach.

It was during my graduate school days that the computer became personal and reduced to table-
top dimensions — developments that permitted many to experiment with computer interfacing,
automation and data processing at much less cost. I was able to benefit from that exciting
technological development.

Expectedly, the circumstances that I encountered as a struggling graduate student and then later as
a new Ph.D. graduate are not the same as those that are prevailing today. In the early days, I used
to mail five hard copies of every manuscript submitted for possible publication in a peer-reviewed
journal in the US. At present manuscript submission is done fast and reliably via the Internet —
free from the debilitating fear of losing a manuscript during sort-out in the post office. Information
now travels much more quickly. On the other hand, the mind is now deluged with so much data
and classifying their relative value is non-trivial.

But the core recipe toward success remains the same — it is timeless and universal. Success has
much to do with being able to recognize as quickly as possible that fine line that distinguishes
imagination from phantasm, focus from narrow-mindedness, steadfastness from stubbornness,
dedication from fanaticism. The line that separates virtue from vice keeps moving and is difficult
to pin down.
You do not need to be a genius in order to excel. A wise man once explained that he has never met
a genius because to him a genius is someone who does well at something he hates. He argued that
anybody can do well at something he loves — it’s just a question of finding the right subject. That
sage was Clint Eastwood.

Success is a measure of how well we are able to bridge the gap between elegant rhetoric and
effective action, between vision and execution, between theory and experimental validation.

As it was eight years ago and as it is today, I expect the Filipino scientist to overcome adversities
and become successful. While succeeding is by no means easy or guaranteed, it is not also
impossible and the fruits of a hard-earned victory are much sweeter because these fruits are shared
with people who are not merely our students or collaborators but more significantly, our blood
brothers who share with us the same set of aspirations and dreams for our nation.

Thank you.