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Are we a
race of suckers? Or are we just a plain happy-go-lucky
kind of people?
I use
the question to bring to the fore what appears to be our
wishy-washy attitude toward science and technology as a
concrete means to propel the country into the developed
world. Not only do we fail to provide the Department of
Science and Technology (DOST) with adequate funds to
pursue research and development, neither are we outraged
by the neglect of our officials to support our inventors
so that their creativeness may benefit the nation.
Concretely, I would like to advert to two things to
which I was a witness where the government failed to
extend the support needed to two inventors. Their
inventions would have helped rid the nation of
overdependence on fossil fuel.
One
event took place soon after Cory Aquino took over the
presidency from Mr. Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986. I was,
then, the minister of local government.
The
other happened 17 years later, to be exact, in 2003. I
was, then, about to end a term as a senator.
Water-run car
In 1986
an Ilonggo by the name of Daniel Dingle came over to see
me at my office as local government minister.
Mr.
Dingle said he had an invention that made it possible
for cars to run on water.
I asked
him why he came over to my office instead of seeing
people who had the power and the authority to do
something about his invention.
Shameless
He told
me that for a long time now, that is, even before the
Cory government came to power, he had been asking the
support of government authorities, but to no avail. Some
officials, he said, first asked shamelessly what was in
there for them before they’d consider helping him.
He said
that the oil industry and its minions made it difficult
for him to get government recognition and support for
his invention.
I
decided to accompany him and present his problem and him
directly to President Aquino.
After
explaining the matter to the President, she agreed to
ride in the “water-run” car of the inventor for a test
drive within the premises of the presidential palace.
Referral
to MOST
After
the short ride, she asked me to refer the invention to
the Ministry of Science and Technology (Most) for
evaluation and possible support.
Immediately after the test drive, I did exactly as she
asked me to do. I referred the matter to the Most.
After
waiting for three weeks, there was still no reply from
the ministry. So I called to find out what they had done
to the referral I made upon instructions of the
President.
No
merit?
A
bureaucrat replied there was no merit to the claim of
Dingle. The car, he said, ran on a mix of gasoline and
water.
When I
asked Dingle about it, he explained that the so-called
mix of gasoline water was only partially true because he
had to use gasoline to start the engine. Once the engine
gets started, water would replace the gasoline to run
the car.
Lackadaisical attitude
The
lackadaisical attitude displayed by the bureaucrat at
the Most toward the Dingle invention, I believe, has
cost us the billions of pesos that we are spending and
have spent through the years that we kept our vehicles
gurgling on gasoline instead of on water.
Losing
to Honda
I say
this because only days ago, Honda engineers formally
announced that the company is now marketing
water-powered cars. Water, as any Chemistry 101 student
would know, has two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
By coming up with an engine that manipulates the
mixture, Honda water-run cars are now ready for the
world market.
In that
respect, we lost the race to come up with our own native
discovery of a water-run vehicle. From 1986 to 2007 is
21 years. For 21 years, we took no note at all of the
invention that had the potential to save millions
dollars worth of gasoline imports -money that could be
used to build roads, schools, hospitals and a thousand
other things and make us less dependent on the Middle
East for our fuel needs and on other super- powers for
our other needs.
Harnessing waves
The
second invention that the government bureaucrats did not
give adequate support to involved a discovery by Isidro
Umali Ursua. I have no idea where Mr. Ursua hails from,
but I know that
Marikina
has adopted him as a son of the city because of the
invention that everybody—but the government
authorities—believes can provide renewable energy to the
country. Like Dingle, Ursua saw me at my office
probably in utter frustration over the fact that the
authorities had not shown any serious interest in the
viability of his invention, despite the positive
endorsement of the-then Department of Trade and Industry
secretary, now senator, Mar Roxas.
Scientific breakthrough
In his
letter to me dated December 16, 2003, Ursua said, “A
group of Filipino inventors, through a scientific
breakthrough in power generation, discovered a way to
produce all [of] our electrical power requirements
without the use of diesel or fossil fuel. The power will
be extracted from the tidal flow [of] our ocean.”
His
letter continued: “We have filed (a) patent application
with the World Intellectual Property Office. This
invention had already been presented to several
government entities, i.e., Napocor, in front of 18 of
their best engineers; DOE, with six of their best
engineers present, and National Electrification
Administration, witnessed by 12 of their best
engineers.”
Lament
He
concluded the paragraph with the lament: “They are
convinced, but no one seems to care or help.”
When I
talked with Mr. Ursua in my office, I was surprised
that:
1. The
Department (formerly Ministry) of Science and Technology
was not among the government entities to which he
presented his invention for evaluation; and,
2. He
had applied for patent protection not with the
Intellectual Property Office (IPO) in Manila but with
the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) in Geneva,
Switzerland, under application number WO 02/38954 A1 for
the invention “Skyla Turbine.” Incidentally, Ursua’s
application for patent protection with WIPO in Geneva
rather than with the IPO in Manila sadly speaks volumes
of the mistrust our own people have of the latter.
In any
event, since I wanted to get the DOST involved in
evaluating Ursua’s invention, I requested the department
in early February 2003 to evaluate Ursua’s invention. On
February 24, the DOST through Undersecretary Rogelio A.
Panlasigui sent me a three-page letter. In essence the
DOST communication listed a number of things explaining
why the evaluation of the invention did not materialize.
Certain “steps” had to be undertaken that apparently had
not been taken. And that was how the DOST cavalierly
disposed of Ursua’s “breakthrough” idea.
By
themselves, the DOST excuses appear valid, but I’d like
to say that with a little creativity, they could have
been more proactive and helped overcome whatever Ursua’s
problems were.
Bureaucratic failings
That
they did not is, I guess, one of the major failings of
the bureaucracy that are correctible and need to be
corrected.
The idea
of harnessing ocean waves for electricity, as Ursua had
suggested to our officials at the turn of the current
century, now appears to be the subject of separate
experimental runs by companies from the United Kingdom,
the United States, Canada and Australia.
Waiting
for government help
What
riles me is the fact that the two inventions that I
mention in this privilege statement were in the hands of
Filipino inventors waiting for the government
authorities to get them off the drawing board into the
government testing field; then, hopefully, into the
national market and eventually into the world market.
At the
very least, had both inventions, or even individually,
been supported by the government, we could already have
looked forward to the:
1.
Reduction of our fossil-fuel import costs which best
estimates place at over $4 billion a year; and
2.
Cleansing of the atmosphere (at least in our country) by
lessening the releases of carbon dioxide and sulphur
oxide into it.
But the
ideas behind the inventions seem to have slipped from
our hands into the hands of foreign entities.
Let me,
then, repeat what I asked at the start of this talk:
What kind of a people are we, Mr. President?
Government acrobats
Are our
people in general just plain suckers in the game of
life? Or are we simply too happy-go-lucky as a people,
we don’t feel the need to plan for our future as a
nation?
In
either case, the masses of our people are not primarily
to blame for the malaise our country is in. We, as
public officials, I submit, are perhaps more “blameable”
for the mess we are in because we appear to be more
concerned with form than with substance in our so-called
commitment to public service. Often we dupe our people
into believing that we are their servants, not their
masters. I hate to say it, but the way it looks, we tend
to comport ourselves as the masters, not the servants,
of the people. Many of us in politics act in the manner
that Maurice Barre, a member of the Academie Francaise
and Member of Parliament some two centuries ago said of
French politicians, “Like acrobats, they keep their
balance by saying the opposite of what they do.”
In
making this statement, Mr. President, I have no wish to
project myself as better than any of our colleagues. But
I am disgusted, distressed and discombobulated by the
sufferings that our people unnecessarily undergo, which
are preventable by government action.
Missing
two boats
We have
missed two boats, so to speak, Mr. President, in
preparing our country for the oil crunch that everybody
foretells will come sooner than later. We did not help
Dingle with his water-car invention. And we did not help
Ursua with his machine to harness the waves for our
energy needs.
In the
meantime, we only shake our heads when monies, even if
officially appropriated, vanish from our people’s sight
and view. Witness the disappearance of some P11 billion
intended for the modernization of the Armed Forces?
Witness the misapplication of the fertilizer fund of
some P723 million that went into the pockets of
political personalities? Witness the misuse of some P1.1
billion for the construction of the six-kilometer road
in the reclamation area in Pasay City that is
inappropriately named Diosdado Macapagal road?
Boost
DOST funds
Anyway,
just so that we do not end this talk on such a
pessimistic note, I suggest that it is not yet too late
in the day for the legislature to support the needs of
the DOST. We are, after all, still doing the bicameral
conference committee meetings on the National
Appropriations Act.
We can,
for instance, commit at least some P200 million
additional funds for the research and development
projects of the DOST and for the training of teachers in
physics and scholarship grants for science education.
Having
gotten that off my chest, I cannot but close this
intervention with a sigh of regret that public
corruption goes on its merry way, and public service
deteriorates by the day in this land so blessed by God,
but so cursed by acrobats masquerading as government
officials. |
