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Science Technology and the Economic Future edited by Susan Raymond
Donald E. Stokes
Professor of Politics and Public Affairs
Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
This is a period of extraordinarily rapid change, not least in federal science and technology policy. The changes in S&T policy have their roots in several background factors that are shaping the policy agenda.
Near-Term Factors in Changing S&T Policy
Certainly, one of the most significant forces has been the astonishing end of the Soviet challenge. The collapse of America's deadliest adversary has led government to reconsider the billions of budgetary dollars locked up in R&D accounts for defense. Although the debate over "how much" for defense R&D will continue for some time to come, the overall response, "less," is agreed on.
The cauldron of global competition has been a second factor in changing thinking about R&D policy. As the U.S. economy becomes integrated into a more vibrant global economy, concern has shifted from technological confrontation with an adversary power to broader technological competitiveness in the marketplace. In that marketplace, the competitors are not military giants, but nations that are extremely technologically advanced. Hence, the imperative for federal policy has shifted to supporting innovation for rapid commercial, and hence economic, advance across the entire global stage.
The third factor within which S&T policy change is occurring is the legacy of past budgetary policies pursued by both political parties over decades in Congress and the White House. Budget deficits, and the current emphasis on reducing deficits, have left science and technology policy hostage to the budgetary imperative. The wisdom of existing funding relationships between science and technology and government is routinely measured against deficit-reduction goals.
The Deeper Background: The Bush Report
It would be a mistake to reconsider S&T policy issues merely on the basis of these near-term factors. Current events mask a deeper change in the canvas upon which science and technology policy has long been painted. In sum, there has been a gradual weakening of the conceptual foundations of the vision of basic science and its relationship to technological innovation that underpinned the great compact between science and government in the period after World War II.
Vannevar Bush's great report, Science, the Endless Frontier, 1 set out a conceptual and organizational relationship between science and government that has held sway for over four decades It is important to recognize that, in its conception, the report, and especially the background panel led by Isaiah Bowman, represented a mechanism for achieving the essentially political objectives of the science community in the immediate post-war period. The central objective was to extend the broad scope of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which had managed science funding during the war, through the creation of a peacetime National Research Foundation. Optimally, that foundation would have been self-governing and, if the Bowman panel had its way, even exempt from the federal budget process because it would have had an expendable endowment that would need reprovisioning only at widely spaced intervals. The plan was to ensure long-term funding and remove the science-support process from the vagaries of near-term politics.
The plan, of course, was dead on arrival. The post-war political process was unreceptive to such grand schemes. Hence, when in 1950, five years after the Bush report was issued, the National Science Foundation was created, it enjoyed much less scope and was required to answer to Congress for its budgetary allocations.
As the policy process shattered the original organizational conception those who wanted to keep federal funding flowing and to drastically reduce the control of the federal government on the content of research turned back to the Bush report for inspiration. From that seminal document, they derived a view of basic science and technological innovation that became the conceptual foundation of the post-war compact between science and government.
Canon One: Research for Its Own Merits
That compact was impressed into two aphorisms that would be worthy of Francis Bacon. The first was that basic research, a term that Bush himself coined, is performed without thought of practical end. Although it sounds like a definition, that aphorism was not meant to be a definition. It was meant to express the view that, in basic research, there is a tension between the quest for fundamental understanding, on the one hand, and considerations of use on the other. By extension, there was a radical separation between the categories of basic research and of applied science. A one dimensional graphic with two poles, basic research at one end and applied science at the other, became a popular illustration of this relationship. You cannot get closer to one of those polar opposites without getting farther away from the other. The point of the distinction was to convince the policy community that any attempt to constrain the free creativity of the basic scientist at the "research" end of the spectrum was self-defeating; constraint meant loss.
Canon Two: Basic Research Yields Technological Development
To provide ammunition for ensuring continued federal funding, a second canon was added to the first. Basic research leads technological development. If basic research is insulated from premature considerations of use, it will become a remote but powerful dynamo for technological innovation as the advances of basic science are converted into advances in technology by the process of technological transfer. Again the linear model—the technological prowess is achieved in steps from basic research to applied research to development to production and operations.
A Third Element: Capturing Returns
A third element of the post-World War II case for scientific funding does not have quite the conceptual standing of the previous two parts of the argument, but it was important to the case that Bush and his colleagues were trying to build. The belief was that a country that invests in basic science can expect to capture the technological return for itself. In turn, a country that looks to others for its basic science will be weak in industrial development and laggard in world trade. This articulation of the case soaked deeply into the consciousness of the policy community with the launching of Sputnik in 1957. If such nasty technological surprises were to come from the Soviet system, the argument went, then It must mean t at the roots of the surprises were in the strength of Soviet science. On the heels of that argument came a surge of federal funding for science, scientific advice directly placed in the White House, and the like.
But Is It True? A Change in Concepts
Does the Bush formulation of the science-technology-government relationship fit reality now? As with many simple conceptions, the answer is, not really.
Throughout the history of science, the link between basic research and application has been close and interactive. The rise of microbiology in the late 19th century is an absolutely classic example of the development of a fundamental area of science that was informed at every stage by considerations of use. The mature Pasteur never did a study that was not applied while he laid the foundations of modern microbiology. The Pasteur example is not isolated. Across the English Channel, the physics of Lord Kelvin was deeply industrial in its inspiration. On the Rhine, the organic chemists were achieving scientific wonders in order to lay the basis of the chemical dye industry that later gave birth to the pharmaceutical industry. In the United States, in the great years of the General Electric Laboratory, Irving Langmuir was fascinated by the surfaces of electronics components being produced by industry. In the several billion year history of the world, there had never been any analogues of those surfaces until they were presented by technology. It was technology that opened whole new horizons for basic research.
The linear, one-way flow view of science and technology that emerged from Bush's report, although never actually endorsed by him, clearly does not fit the complicated and unevenly paced reality of the relationships in the S&T innovation process. Science is not exogenous to technological innovation. Modern science deals with phenomena that are often revealed only by advances in technology. What is needed is not a linear model, but two trajectories, scientific understanding on the one hand and technological capacity on the other. These two trajectories are semi-autonomous. Science is advanced at times by pure research without any fresh intervention of technology. Technology is at times advanced by changes in design or tinkering at the bench without any fresh intervention from discoveries in science. But, at times, advances in each of those trajectories has massive impacts on the other, and the impacts can go in either direction. Use inspired research has been enormously important in the experience of science at least since the late 19th century. That importance was concealed by the Bush framework as it was absorbed into the policy debate.
Having taken a more realistic view of the two canons of basic research that underpinned Bush's case, then, it is important also to examine the third element of the argument that a nation investing in basic research can expect to capture technological improvement. Experience both before and after World War II leads to skepticism about that premise. Yankee ingenuity, as Bush himself pointed out, led this country to industrial leadership when its science was still far behind that of Europe. Japan has taught the world that lesson over again, as it established its technological leadership without a strong thrust in scientific research.
A great deal of basic science will be used by those who have the capacity to use it, regardless of where the science is carried out.
A New Conception—A New Compact
The United States needs a new conception of the process of scientific and technological development and, in turn, a new compact that relates S&T to government. There is growing recognition in society and in the policy community that basic science has not led to technological innovations that have met the full spectrum of society's needs. Indeed, some of those unmet needs have been created by technology itself. Many in the policy community are therefore responding: the Vannevar Bush deal is off. Open-ended government support for science has failed the test of producing significant social good.
Yet neither the policy community nor the nation has lost its fundamental interest in enlisting the capacity of science to address the needs of society. Indeed, the degree of public opinion support for science remains remarkably strong. A vision of science that acknowledges it as a resource that can be enlisted in service to needs has a better capacity to renew the compact between science and government than does the vision of science as pure inquiry without thought of practical ends.
With current concerns over budget deficits dominating the policy process, and with widespread concern about global competitiveness in both the legislative and executive branches of policy making, this new vision is essential to maintain government commitment to science. Only if the policy community becomes persuaded that there are real uses for the basic science being funded with public dollars, only if that community sees that science is really inspired by human need and not simply by intellectual curiosity, will leadership recommit itself to deep support for scientific funding.
*: Based on remarks delivered at the New York Academy of Sciences, November 7, 1995. Professor Donald Stokes was a champion of science and technology. With his death in January of 1997, science has lost one of America's most astute observers of the importance of research and development to the nation's prosperity. The Academy and all of science mourn his passing. Back.
Note 1: Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier, National Science Foundation, Washington, DC, reprinted 1990. Bush was Franklin Roosevelt's director of the Office of Scientlfic Research and Development during World War 11. His remarkable achievement was the recruitment of numerous gifted scientists for the wartime research effort, which culminated in the development of the atomic bomb. Late in 1944 Roosevelt asked Bush to look ahead to the role of science in peacetime. Science, the Endless Frontier is Bushs report, although Roosevelt had died before it was filed. Back.
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