Question
Many people believe that scientific research should be carried out and controlled by the government rather than private companies.
To what extent do you agree or disagree? Give reasons for your opinion and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
Sample answer
As can be argued, government rules can easily become obstacles to scientific achievements. Usually, most of the world's headline-making scientific discoveries do not come through governmental establishments, admitting that fiscal funding is often essential to helping such success to happen in the private sector. It is false to suggest that the government should carry out and control scientific research because the issue is not only about money but also brains.
Just because public funds matter, it does not follow that the government should restrict that kind of freedom of thinking which is vital to imaginative minds. Apart from that, nothing is more naive than for the government to play the role of police and rule research activities. Yes, freedom--that is how scientific breakthroughs are born. It goes without saying that probably billions of government's money may be needed to carry out research projects in various scientific fields, but it must be considered that great scientists tend to ignore, or even go against the rules. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how many scientific discoveries could have been missed as a result of unnecessary regulations. To put it strongly, control is the death of scientific research.
Scientific research should not be forced in any event. It is because a research problem is less likely to be solved by any apparatus which money can buy than to be solved by the brains of a free head that money cannot always buy. Thus, it does not seem proper for official amateurs to "know" what on earth scientists are doing. Otherwise, it would not be called "research" in the real sense of the word. Trying to heavily monitor scientific brains is perhaps a dangerous attitude since the consequence is always too much foliage and too little fruit. That can explain in part why the government ought to shift most of the pledged fiscal spending from the public to the private sector.
All aspects taken into account, scientific research is two things: billions and brains. With little doubt, the success in a country's scientific discoveries relies on both sufficient funding from the government and on creative minds from private companies in which pure research is worth every penny it costs. All the government has to do is grant money and expect that somewhere, something incredible is going to be known.
