The letter, addressed to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, comes after the government announced an overhaul of the Marsden Fund, which is the country’s most prominent contestable science fund.
As of next year, humanities and social sciences will no longer be supported through the Marsden Fund, which awards more than $75 million in research funding each year.
The letter, signed by nine previous winners of the Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize — New Zealand’s highest honour for early-career achievement — criticised the move, but also expressed concern about the fact about 50% of funds will "go towards supporting proposals with economic benefits to New Zealand".
"We believe this decision will have a long-term negative impact on economic growth: A cut to the funding of basic science in New Zealand is a cut to innovation and our global competitiveness in research and development," the letter said.
"Since its inception, the $79-million-per-year Marsden Fund has been 100% dedicated to funding open-ended, basic-science projects across all fields, with applications to society, commercialisation, or indeed, the New Zealand economy that may not be immediately realised."
University of Otago’s Prof Jemma Geoghegan, the 2021 Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist winner, was one of the signatories to the letter.
She said it was vital that the "blue-skies" approach to science research and funding remained.
"The letter was to allow the government to understand that most of the science that becomes beneficial economically doesn’t start out that way.
"It starts out as basic science.
"It might become obvious that it has an economic benefit, but it might take a long time."
Prof Geoghegan said the humanities were undergoing their own crisis, but communicating the need for science for science’s sake was also vital.
"The move away from the blue skies nature of basic research that might not necessarily lead to immediate tangible applications, but the long-term benefit of this is usually realised.
"It can also lead to huge economic benefits, but it’s not the point of doing it."
Prof Geoghegan said the Covid-19 pandemic was a good example of new discoveries being made by "serendipity" through the application of research.
"I personally worked in the pandemic when we were in an elimination strategy and we were trying to eliminate the virus from the community and we had cases that leaked from the border into the community.
"The tools that we were using helped sequence the virus genomes, so we were using genomic sequencing as well as estimating their relationship to the other cases using phylogenetic trees ... and all of this is based on basic research."
Prof Geoghegan said there were several examples of discoveries whose importance was not realised until decades later, such as Wi-Fi and microwaves.
"All these things came from basic science and we didn’t understand the potential benefits until a long time later."
Minister for Science Judith Collins said the Marsden Fund announcement reallocated science funding towards core science.
"The overall funding to science is not changing. In a fiscally constrained environment, it is crucial that we focus our funding on areas that can provide clear benefit to New Zealand. It is also important to note that only 50% of funding needs to show economic benefit.
"The Marsden Fund will continue to support blue-skies research that advances new ideas, innovation and creativity.
"Ultimately, our science funding is looked at in comparison to funding for health and frontline services and I, as the Minister, have a job to ensure our science funding is generating maximum benefit for New Zealanders."
Other signatories were: John Watt, Donna Rose Addis, Rob McKay, Karl Iremonger, Alex Taylor, Carla Meledandri, Jonathan Tonkin, and Samuel Mehr.
