But it can take 30 years for Tryggvason's brand of basic research to yield something most Canadians can hold in their hands.

Tryggvason, a former researcher and math instructor at the University of Western Ontario, returned to UWO Thursday to deliver the seventh annual Lynda Shaw memorial lecture. The lecture is a tribute to Shaw, a third-year mechanical engineering student at UWO who was murdered in 1990 near Highway 401.

Several Shaw family members attended the lecture, including her mother, Carol Taylor, who said she was gratified her daughter's memory lives on. A greater thrill was the growing number of female engineering students among the 250 people who crammed the lecture hall, she said.

In an interview, Tryggvason said Canadians must adopt "a long view" about science that will ensure basic research survives budget cuts long enough to become the stuff of everyday life.

"We are weak, we are not investing very nearly enough. We are still stuck in this idea we are resource-based - hewers of wood and drawers of water," he said.

"We have to shift our attitude and our support to a technology-based economy."

Blame Canada's pitiful support for science - we spend one-fifth the amount per capita on space science as does the United States, despite higher taxes - for our high unemployment rate, he said.

"We have all these resources and all these opportunities and we have a 10-per-cent unemployment rate. The U.S. has a five-per-cent rate. One of the basic reasons is we don't support high technology activities as well as the U.S. does."

Canadians may be in a mood to downsize government, but it would be a mistake to see basic science as the job of the private sector, he said.

"It is a little naive to look to industry to do this long-term work," said Tryggvason. "Industry doesn't have the ability to invest in stuff that has a 30-year payoff."

Canada was the third country into space and has benefited greatly from that early decision to study the basic material of the upper atmosphere, said Tryggvason. Early work with Alouette satellites during the 1960s "is what has led to all the communication satellites that we now take for granted."

Within two years, an array of 66 satellites will surround Earth and people with cell phones will be able to call anywhere in the world. And Tryggvason says it all began because more than 30 years ago Canadian taxpayers bankrolled basic research about the upper atmosphere - research that had no obvious use at the time.