As Australia cuts funding for science, award winning chemist works for free

Dr. San Thang, an award winning chemist, is working for free at Australia's CSIRO after funding cuts saw researchers lose their positions.

According to IFLScience, Thang was subject to speculation that he might share a Nobel Prize in Chemistry when he got the news that his position was one of those cut.

Thang has continued to supervise students in an honorary capacity.

"In Australia, the doors opened [for me] and I still want to be part of CSIRO and elsewhere to make use of my knowledge, I want to inspire people," Thang said.

Thang fled Vietnam at 24, and completed his Ph.D at Griffith University and joined the CSIRO.

While there he, along with Dr. Graeme Moad and Dr. Ezio Rizzardo, helped invent  Reversible Addition-Fragmentation Chain Transfer (RAFT), a way to make plastics more adaptable.

He shared the ATSE Clunies Ross Award with the other inventors earlier this year. He was one of  Thomas Reuters' top three favourites for the Nobel prize earlier this year.

The economic cost of stupid

After Australia cut $111 million from the CSIRO's budget, it created a funding hole that even the invention of Wi-Fi couldn't fill.

According to the Australia's edition of the International Business Times, funding cuts to science in Australia are already having an effect.

A report titled "Benchmarking Australian Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics" found that Australia was the only country surveyed to have seen a decrease in the number of patents in the past ten years.

"The federal government is taking anti-science to new heights. Its scorched earth approach discards virtually everything not in line with narrow, free-market ideology, centred on sustaining Australia’s 20 century dig-it-up and ship-it-out economic growth model," Ian Dunlop, former chair of the Australian Coal Association wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year.

"Free-markets create prosperity, but their full costs have only become apparent in recent years. Over the past two decades, those costs have negated the benefits – we are actually getting poorer not wealthier," Dunlop wrote.