The human mind operates through opposing or complementary elements, establishing dualities, convergences, comparisons and dichotomies. So, in the same manner that we can encounter atomistic or holistic approaches and face the good and the evil, the desired and the refused, so we also have basic science and applied science, science and technology, science and technique, technology and innovation, research and development, academy and industry, those who offer and those who request, pushers and pullers.

The linear schemes that postulated supposedly consecutive causes and effects, such as the scheme in which academic science leads to technological research and the latter to industrial development and the resulting prosperity, have been questioned for almost half a century. The experts have spoken of big or small science, paradigmatic or normal, of old and new modes of knowledge production, or of strategic, co-produced, post-normal or triple helix science.

The truth is that there is knowledge, whose generation and communication has been, is and will be the fundamental role of academia, and there is the utilization of such knowledge, which is what enterprises and governments do. Whoever utilizes knowledge wisely will find benefits and prosperity, both in the economic and the social aspects. But in order to be utilized, it first has to be generated, grasped and/or assimilated.

In the intercommunicated world of our days, dominated by a globalized economy where scientific knowledge flows through networks operating at the speed of light, the question of how and where that knowledge was obtained becomes less relevant and, unfortunately, ethical worries about how it was obtained are relegated to a second place.

More often than otherwise, researchers themselves ignore the reach and possibilities of practical developments from their findings, and it is not their role to find and develop applications for them, although to do so is indeed something positive.

Public policies that regulate the scientific and the productive sectors should be oriented to the utilization of knowledge for the benefit of the society we want. It is society itself, through their leaders, who determines that which it wants to be, what is desirable and what is to be rejected. Such policies should not determine the path of research itself, which should follow the vision of the men and women who do science.

On their side, the role of universities cannot be that of plain trainers of professionals. The true university is that which cultivates the process of generation and assimilation of knowledge at its highest level, others being called to turn into concrete results its utilization. To accomplish its function properly it is unavoidable that academics count on total freedom to develop their thoughts and their actions, with no other hindrance than that established by their own community through the evaluation of the product of their research. The generation of knowledge has no nationality and can take place at any location on our planet, as a result of thought and research, with the only requirement that it be done well.

Science and technology journals have been and continue to be the diffusion medium par excellence of new knowledge, now enormously potentiated by the new information technologies. Furthermore, they serve to support the proof process and verification of published experimental results and theories.

Specialized journals, which constitute the great majority, concentrate in highly defined fields, generally very restricted. Multidisciplinary journals, on the contrary, tend to a large spectrum of areas of knowledge and represent appropriate media for the establishment of bridges between experimentation and theory formulations that constitute the new knowledge and its utilization in the benefit of all mankind.

Miguel Laufer, Interciencia