Scientists have made many great discoveries during the past 100 years, but those discoveries have affected society in complex and sometimes paradoxical ways. For example, science and technology helped drive the economic boom of the 1990’s, but they also helped amplify the gap between the haves and have-nots in the United States and around the world. We have already entered the knowledge economy, but our public schools remain unable to prepare our children for the challenges of that economy. Medical research has produced benefits that we could not have imagined a generation ago, while health-care costs spiral out of control and 40 million Americans lack health insurance.
How can we design a science policy that will distribute the benefits of scientific discoveries more equitably, and will foster research that addresses our most critical social needs?
Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, proposed an informal contract between science and society that became the foundation of the federal government’s financial support for research. In exchange for the government’s money, scientists were expected to advance the war against disease, ensure national security, and create jobs. But since the end of the cold war, we have more often rationalized federal spending on science and technology in terms of their contributions to economic growth and, more recently, of their capacity to extend the human life span. Various academic economists have pointed out the high rates of return on investments in research and development; last year, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan repeatedly cited unexpected advances in technology as the primary driver of the nation’s record-breaking economic performance.
Science is certainly a significant contributor to economic growth, but that narrow view ignores much of what research can accomplish. We need to think of ways to link scientific research more closely to the societal results that we want to achieve. Two standard assumptions from the past are far too simple to be productive guides to today’s complex science policy: that socially optimal outcomes will result from the amalgamation of the results of individual scientific projects, and that science always benefits humanity.
Our current science policy focuses on money, and advocates often urge that we double our research budget. Yet, while data from the National Science Foundation show that we rank first in the world -- by far -- in spending on biomedical research, we rank only 24th in health attainment, according to the World Health Organization. If the amalgamation of the results of thousands of high-quality experiments produced the best results for society, Americans would be healthier. One problem is that the benefits of health research are not distributed fairly throughout the population.
It is far too glib to suggest that such problems have nothing to do with science policy. The types of research that we choose to perform strongly influence how the benefits of that research are distributed. In particular, knowledge and innovation that drive up health-care costs can lead to reduced access to health care by poor people.
To the extent that current science policy tries to incorporate considerations of societal outcomes into the national research agenda, it does so through very small and rather marginalized programs like the human-dimensions component of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the part of the Human Genome Project that deals with its ethical, legal, and social implications. Such programs have neither the mandate nor the capability to redesign federal research-and-development priorities so that they are more responsive to social needs.
The problem of distribution is only one of the issues that we need to think about more clearly in designing our R&D policies. Last year, in an issue of Wired magazine, Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, pointed out that likely advances in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and robotics may threaten our well-being. In particular, Joy argued that progress in those areas will, for the first time in history, enable people to unleash technologies of considerable destructive power -- designer pathogens, for example -- without needing a sophisticated technological infrastructure.
While I agree with Joy that we need to acknowledge the potential downside that accompanies the tremendous promise of those and other frontier areas of science, we must also realize that, while negative outcomes are conceivable, they are by no means inevitable. Science is discovery, and discovery opens a range of alternative paths to society.
What we must begin to do -- and what our current science policy fails to even consider -- is to search for and follow the most socially beneficial paths. That means that we must design R&D policies that respond to the complex societal context within which science and technology are applied. Our scientific and technical abilities far outstrip our knowledge of the relationship between research and its outcomes, and the sophistication of the methods we use to make decisions about science policy.
Consider, as an example, the science of crop genetics. Our quest for expanded yields, year-round products, reduced perishability, and other improvements has resulted in the development of genetically modified organisms. Introduction of those products has created a firestorm of controversy, first in Europe and now in North America and Asia. Our science policy failed to consider the outcomes that society desired, and the results were widely perceived as harmful to human health, the environment, and consumers’ ability to make choices. Neither policymakers nor scientists adequately connected the research to outcomes that society wants.
What if, at the beginning, we had linked research on crop genetics with popular goals like reducing the use of fertilizers in polluted areas of California and the upper Midwest, or stabilizing maize yields in southern Africa? The research might have followed different paths. The controversy surely would not have been as damaging.
The social outcomes of science are rarely considered in a science policy that focuses on financial support and the conduct of research. For instance, the first draft of the human genome will have profound effects on medical care, as well as on food production and consumption, health insurance, future research, and possibly even marriage and human evolution. It is fair to say that most of those outcomes have been much less seriously considered and debated than the questions of who should pay, and how much they should pay, for sequencing the genome. If we do not consider the social implications of our science programs, we run the risk of generating knowledge that complicates society’s problems, rather than solves them.
No one should think that I am arguing for a master plan to guide the conduct and output of science. I am simply saying that science policy must broaden its view. It must incorporate the new industries that research could produce; the new skills those industries would require; the social implications of those industries and their products; the new institutions we might need to manage those industries, teach those skills, and respond to those implications; the new partnerships among academe, government, and business to transfer knowledge about the research; and the ways in which each change affects all the others.
To think about science policy in those terms, we will need better ways to assess the social and economic impacts of scientific discoveries. But more importantly, we will need to move beyond our current priority-setting process for research and development -- which is at heart a Darwinian competition among granting agencies, foundations, businesses, and researchers seeking to expand their own slices of the budgetary pie. Simply put, science policy must be supported by the same types of goal setting, analyses, and forecasts that guide other critical areas of national policy, like defense and economics, and that the private sector uses to develop business and investment plans.
Science and its power continue to advance, yet our ability to harness that power for maximum social benefit remains stagnant. That mismatch means that the societal costs of our current approach to science policy are likely to grow in the future. Policies that focus on social outcomes are a key part of the solution.
Michael M. Crow is the executive vice provost and a professor of science policy at Columbia University.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B20
