Free Radicals: The Red Queen and the Russian Dolls

摘要

This text is a personal opinion in which the author tried to disclose some of his views about the way academic science and education have been evolving during his own life and scientific career. Evidently, the thrust that allowed our scientific world to bloom stems from the insatiable thirst of humanity for knowledge and art. However, curiosity-driven or open-ended academic research has a cost that our present societies are no more willing to accept as before. The means allocated by our societies to materialize open-ended academic research, as we have known, are deeply intertwined with market and economy privileging short-term finalized goals. Paradigms that shaped our academic world have changed gradually, hence almost imperceptibly but, at least in the author's opinion, not necessarily in the interest of the future of Science.