"The trouble with making effective science and technology policy in this bloody country is that there are too many lawyers and not enough scientists."

My head snapped up, delighted at the prospect of somebody finally having something interesting and candid to say.

It would be nice to report that such pithy comments came from the lips of a Canadian politician or high level policy official, but they did not. They came from Ian Gibson, British MP and chair of the U.K. House of Commons science and technology select committee.

I was attending a recent conference on African development in science and technology held at Canada House in Trafalgar Square, and was spending a disproportionate amount of time staring out the window at the National Gallery and St. Martin in the Fields while being bombarded with earnest- sounding woolly phrases like "capacity building" and "public-private partnerships."

The list of participants, it must be said, was impressive. The event, co-hosted by Canada and the U.K., featured appearances by high-ranking politicians, both Canadian and British national science advisers, journalists, senior academics and top public policy officials from Canada, Britain and throughout the African continent.

Everyone present was loaded with the best of intentions. Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development and a rising star in Britain's Labour Party, gave a pointed and eloquent speech on the fundamental importance of scientific inquiry to society.

Benn went on to describe how all of the British priorities in assisting Africa -- from AIDS to agriculture -- are clearly in the realm of science and thus commended us for having this conference.

In my experience, little has as much effect on the hearts and minds of conference-goers than to be told by some important person that their conference is of vital importance to society. We were stoked, as the saying goes.

And when Arthur Carty, Canada's national science adviser to the prime minister, told us how Paul Martin's government was committed to devoting five per cent of its research and development funds to assist developing countries, the speculation began to turn on Canada's new leadership role: perhaps this five per cent figure would one day become standard across the developed world, resulting in a veritable flood of assistance to African countries.

David King, the U.K.'s chief scientific adviser, said he would definitely look into this five per cent business as well as energetically working with his government to ensure that the global vision so clearly enunciated by Benn would one day become reality.

But on closer examination, a few concerns started to seep in. How was this whole five per cent thing supposed to be defined? Was this the total public sector amount of research dollars or the larger combined pool of public and private sector investment? How was this going to be distributed and what benefit, if any, would this assistance have to Canadian researchers? What were the timelines for implementation? Was this to be five per cent immediately or, has at one point been mentioned, the much more nebulous "up to five per cent?"

Carty acknowledged the difficulty and told us that StatsCan was now looking into the matter. The important thing, he maintained, is that the motivation to make such a substantial pledge to assist the developing world is now clearly part of the Canadian government's priorities.

After all, it was the prime minister himself who launched this initiative by declaring:

"We in Canada are rich in science and research. We have a moral obligation to share our capacity with those in desperate need."

These sentiments of moral urging are clearly heart-felt, and there was no participant at the conference who was immune to them. We all want to help -- after all, that is why we were there. But with all this talk of international aid and moral obligation, the key issue lurking on everyone's minds is the will of the Africans themselves. How much good can international aid be to war-torn countries who hijack supplies to commit further atrocities? How can you have widespread public understanding of AIDS in a country where the president publicly questions scientific research and trivializes the epidemic?

However it is to be precisely calculated, spending roughly five per cent of our research and development budget on foreign aid strikes me as quite appropriate, provided that we continue to fund our domestic research agenda at ever-increasing levels as per this government's self-proclaimed agenda of rebranding Canada as an international science and technology powerhouse.

Directing our foreign aid to a more scientific direction may well turn out to be both more useful to the recipients and helpful to promote Canada's growing research reputation.

But we should ensure that, whatever and however much we donate, we have strict criteria for its acceptance amongst the developing countries. Africa desperately needs role models, and they must be African ones.