New Straits Times 29 Aug 09;
EYES twinkling, Dr Francis Ng spoke animatedly of his daring scientific expeditions in remote jungles to record the trees of Peninsular Malaysia.
At times, the going was so tough that he was left clinging onto roots for dear life while dangling off a cliff.
"Other times, we had to swim across a flooded river," the consultant botanist reminisced in Kuala Lumpur recently. Those were some of the best times, he said, with nature as his classroom.
"Scientists those days had the global view. Nowadays, young scientists are happy to sit in their air-conditioned office and rely on their research assistants to collect data and specimens."
Ng said taxonomy, the science of identification and classification, was "fundamental to human knowledge and applies to everything".
"Taxonomy is about how we make knowledge of the natural world from the crude understanding we have of it."
He said taxonomy was "fun" then.
"We used to travel widely to study a species. It was arranged on a scientist-by-scientist basis. Now, it must be done via governments," the Academy of Sciences Malaysia fellow said.
But Ng refused to believe that taxonomy was dying as claimed by many scientists worldwide.
"Look at it in a worldwide context. Taxonomy is the basics of science. Perhaps when we talk about taxonomy of plants and animals, there is a decline of expertise.
"It takes up to 20 years for a dedicated scientist to build his expertise in one group and there are many groups in the natural world."
He said there was nothing to worry about lack of taxonomists. Instead, we should overcome our "hang-up" from our colonial past, he added.
"What we have now is still very much the old colonial system. The old empires, such as Britain, aspired to become world powers so they set up centres to collect and store specimens from their colonies."
Over the years, these centres, like the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens in London, became some of the best libraries of the natural world.
"After independence, we should have set up our own natural history museum and our scientists must be world or at least regional experts."
Ng said local scientists seemed to be confined to only Malaysia.
"We're not producing scientists with a global outlook.
"To be a world expert, you must travel and study species in your chosen group. Look at it in totality."
For Universiti Malaysia Sabah's Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation deputy director Dr Bakhtiar Effendi Yahya, "it needs time to really love taxonomy".
"Students nowadays are more attracted to molecular and biotechnology fields. They go to the field, collect samples and return straight to the laboratories.
"They never spend time in the jungles. Comparatively, in classical taxonomy, we spend long hours searching for organisms in their natural habitat, understanding their biological needs in the field and observing their morphological differences under microscopes."
Bakhtiar said they would examine thousands of samples and that could put off new scientists.
However, Ng stressed that classical and molecular taxonomy went hand in hand.
"Taxonomy is undergoing a revolution as it moves towards genetic technology. But both are integrated."
He said taxonomy was about using the information available "to make sense of the world".
"Taxonomy is not old fashioned. It's just that we operate differently now."
