Old Ways Fail to Define New Role for Science

Just as war is too important to be entrusted to the generals, a new report from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences confirms that America’s science and technology policy is too important to be entrusted to the scientists and technologists. While their hearts and minds may be in the right place, their ideas and ingenuity are not. In fewer than 50 pages, this document effectively demonstrates why today’s mainstream research and development community won’t define tomorrow’s high-technology policy agendas.

Boldly positioned as a conceptual framework for post-Cold War science and technology policy, the report, titled “Science, Technology and the Federal Government: National Goals for a New Era,” unintentionally reveals how difficult it will be to devise any kind of national policy that makes sense.

The report reflects its origins: a group of distinguished scientists and engineers who came of age in the era of Cold War science, and who are struggling to redefine their community in the new context of global economic competitiveness. They don’t make it--they don’t even come close. They’re still prisoners of policies past.

To be fair, this NAS committee had the honesty and courage to state that the challenges now facing U.S. science and technology policy have little to do with getting more money. No cliched calls here for massive infusions of federal funds to rescue, consolidate or enhance American leadership in science. Even with a Gargantuan deficit, it’s still considered heresy for a broad-based, multibillion-dollar beneficiary of government largess not to squeal for more. Without question, the research community will somehow be made to pay for this transgression: No good deed goes unpunished.

But when you put the money aside, we have a report whose concept of “National Goals” is fatally flawed, along with a “New Era” defined more by the end of the Cold War than the beginning of anything else. In other words, we have a scientist/engineer version of policy--something that is treated as a problem to be solved rather than as an organizing principle animated by a set of values.

The report’s central policy goal is that the United States should seek to stay “among the world leaders in all major areas of science” and “should maintain clear leadership in some major areas of science” that society deems strategic.

To determine which areas, the report recommends that “comparative performance of U.S. research in a major field would be assessed by independent panels of experts from within and outside the field.”

Now, these are laudable aims, but they ignore the fundamental realities of how science gets done in the 1990s. In practically every major scientific domain, global research networks have transcended and superseded national boundaries. Today, you can’t be a “world leader” without being global.

Consider that more than half the graduate students in science and technology at America’s leading research universities are foreign-born. And more than half of those will return to their native lands when they’re finished here. The U.S. research community is utterly dependent on these people.

Now, are we world-class leaders in science and technology research because of--or in spite of--this dependence? What does “American” science mean in this context?

Similarly, look at the best papers published in the top journals in virology, mathematics, materials science and software engineering. The odds are overwhelming that those papers are co-authored by a mix of researchers from America, Japan, France, India, Israel, Singapore and the United Kingdom.

The simple truth--which this report cavalierly dismisses--is that there can be no such thing as a purely national science policy today. Unless a nation wants to declare its scientific knowledge proprietary--and protect it with a thicket of patents, copyrights and trade secrets--scientific knowledge is global knowledge. You don’t have to have world-class scientists to capitalize on it. Just ask the Japanese or the Koreans.

Consequently, the idea of “benchmarking” the U.S. research community against other nations doesn’t really buy you much. It’s happening anyway as scientists see who gets globally published and who doesn’t. Vannevar Bush, the great architect of America’s science and technology establishment, would spin in his grave at the idea of his vision of “Science: The Endless Frontier” transformed into “Science: The Endless Benchmarking.” What kind of organizing principle is that?

The central problem isn’t relative performance. It’s values. You can’t meaningfully articulate goals for a new era until you articulate the values this new era should embody.

Does the end of the Cold War mean that America’s science and technology establishment should be re-engineered around issues of economic competitiveness? Should that mean America needs to become more or less generous in the scientific access it provides to foreign economic rivals? Should taxpayer-funded government scientists enjoy the fruits of intellectual property protection? Or does their work properly belong to the government? Do we want to use science and technology funding as a direct or indirect way to subsidize economic competitiveness?

Most importantly, how can anyone talk meaningfully about changing the goals of the scientific establishment without explicitly acknowledging that the very culture of American science has got to change along with them?

Declaring the death of the old era does not inherently create the new. Perhaps the best way to trigger cultural change in American science would be to completely redefine the mission of the National Academy of Sciences. That report would be more important than this one.