When President Obama called for a $215-million “precision medicine initiative” in his State of the Union speech last month, he was behaving very much like a politician of his times. This was mission-driven research, squarely aimed at solving society’s ills—in this case, by tailoring cures to individuals. This was not science for the sake of discovery—the “endless frontier,” as the architect of U.S. science policy after World War II, Vannevar Bush, termed it. This was utilitarian. There was a promise of applied results.
Over the past decade, these promises have repeatedly been made in the name of “grand challenges.” Often invoking the Apollo program, philanthropies and governments have urged researchers to pursue scientific solutions to specific societal problems. The United States, Canada, India, and Brazil have all embraced grand challenges, and the European Union has made solving “societal challenges” a pillar of its research agenda. Challenges abound.
Even as such mission-driven research has grown in scale and ambition, its ends have become increasingly specific, several science-policy researchers and historians say. Basic science is still supported under the mantle of applied work—see the National Institutes of Health—but it feels like the idea of science for discovery’s sake has lost nearly all its gravity.
“Even the science community knows that basic research, the linear model of progress, is kind of getting tired,” says Diana M. Hicks, a public-policy professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Scientists have realized they can’t go to Congress, talk about the endless frontier, and expect more money, she says. “Grand challenges are somehow of the cultural moment.”
That moment began in 2003, when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced its first round of grants financing grand challenges in public health.
The foundation dreamed big: It would pursue blue-sky opportunities, in the argot of the venture-capitalist model it was imitating. Gates sent millions of dollars toward established scientists, who promised to pursue technocratic projects that would eradicate disease, allow room-temperature vaccines, or create biotech crops reinforced with vitamins. It was looking for home runs.
That was a naïve hope, as Mr. Gates has acknowledged. Despite spending $1-billion, the program has brought no revolutionary success that’s saved millions of lives—though that’s not to say it has been unsuccessful. The challenges have drawn researchers to neglected problems, and shifted the NIH’s budget toward research on infectious diseases in developing countries. But when these scientific innovations met the real world, they were limited: Border conflicts and bad roads impede vaccine distribution. People fear biotech crops.
Still, the foundation’s example caught on: An influential 2008 report from the National Academy of Engineering listed the problems its members could solve. Governments followed suit. Some officials, instead of saying research should be geared toward excellence or relevance, are calling for “challenge oriented” policies. There’s a proliferation of academic papers listing the worldly problems that various scientific disciplines can help solve.
“This whole thing,” Ms. Hicks says, “is science policy via listicle.”
When ‘Applied’ Was a Stigma
While the Gates foundation typically ties its grand challenges to a famous paper in 1902 identifying 23 unsolved mathematical problems, the program’s modern origins stem from the 1980s, Ms. Hicks says.
Back then, Kenneth G. Wilson, a physicist, pushed for the adoption of supercomputers for theoretical work; various prominent scientists opposed him, fearing it would make their work look “applied.” Mr. Wilson rejected that dichotomy, and pressed for computers to solve “grand challenges.” He was relentless: By the early 1990s, the president’s budget listed how high-performance computing could solve grand challenges in weather forecasting, cancer genetics, and ecology.
The challenges arrived to fill a void. By this point, the “endless frontier” as described by Bush—science for exploration’s sake—was in permanent decline, a trend that began in the 1970s, according to Daniel J. Kevles, a science historian at Yale University.
The postwar era is looking more and more like an anomaly, he says, a time when scientists, empowered by the atomic bomb and the cold war, wielded such authority that Bush’s mantra seemed like a cultural imperative. But after Apollo, that appetite waned, and government support turned more utilitarian. It would finance basic research, but it would do so for the sake of the economy, training scientists, and feeding into applied science.
It’s a little ironic that scientists so often turn to the Apollo program as an example of how research can dream big again, says Matthew D. Tribbe, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut and author of No Requiem for the Space Age (Oxford University Press, 2014).
During that era, NASA was seen as a model, especially for liberals, of how government could solve any problem, including poverty, hunger, or urban blight. But after the moon landings, the public grew disenchanted, unsatisfied with the returns from such an enormous investment. It was also very much a product of cold war competition.
Today, “if the Chinese were going on a big vaccination campaign,” Mr. Tribbe says, “then perhaps we’d find the will to make it work.”
The past 15 years have seen a rebirth of scientific optimism, driven by Silicon Valley. Like Mr. Wilson, Mr. Gates was a scientific outsider who changed how the government thought about research. It was fortuitous timing for science, as grand challenges have provided a rhetorical frame that restored some heroism to the type of team-based applied science that has become so common today.
“You need a way to make magnificent and noble this new way of working, and the grand challenge does it,” Ms. Hicks says.
‘Changing Behavior Norms’
The Gates foundation has not been inflexible in its adherence to its original ideas. After five years of muted progress, it began financing small, high-risk $100,000 grants. New challenges it set last year are less specific in their goals, and make room for the social change needed to adopt the tools its scientists may produce, says Steven Buchsbaum, the foundation’s deputy director of discovery and translational sciences.
One is explicitly about putting women at the center of development, he says. “That is really about social innovation, changing behavior norms.”
That could go a bit toward responding to one problem frequently associated with grand challenges: These programs often seek to solve worldly problems without including social scientists in the process, says Amy E. Slaton, a history professor at Drexel University. They’re a perfect companion to globalized neoliberalism, she adds, assuming that what’s been good for Americans should be good for everyone else, too.
“They’re universalizing in tone. They really have this character of ‘all good things to all good people,’” Ms. Slaton says. They all represent noble endeavors, but need more outside criticism. “There’s never a grand challenge that says, ‘And now you must systematically ask questions about the other grand challenges.’”
There’s another irony for the Gates foundation: Its researchers have done great when it comes to basic science. The foundation evaluates success on whether the research produced an intervention moving toward development. By this measure, 57 percent of its original projects failed. But if it instead evaluated by number of citations, half of those failed grants would be successes; at least one “failed” project, supporting the late cell biologist Ralph M. Steinman, led to a Nobel Prize.
Science takes time. Just look at one of the Gates foundation’s potential successes, Jim Collins, a professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Collins helped create the field of synthetic biology, and several years ago, he won a $100,000 Gates grant to engineer a probiotic found in yogurt to detect and treat cholera. That has led to a grant from the Defense Department, and $35-million in investment, including $5-million from the Gates foundation, for a company to develop those treatments.
Right now, Mr. Collins says, the engineered probiotics just work in cell cultures. The next step will be animal tests. People are farther away. And you’d still have to convince them to eat bioengineered yogurt.
The probiotics won’t be the end. But it’ll be a start.
Paul Voosen is a senior reporter covering the sciences. Write him at paul.voosen@chronicle.com; follow him on Twitter @voooos; or see past work at voosen.me.
