|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Books | Articles | Reports | Conferences | Lectures | Working Papers
|
In: Science, Technology, and Democracy , edited by Daniel L. Kleinman, (Albany: SUNY Press), 2000, pp. 87-102. This brief essay considers how the organizational roots of federally funded science influence the capacity of the nation's research enterprise to contribute to human well-being. I take well-being (individual and collective) to have several components, including: 1) the fulfillment of all elemental needs necessary for survival; 2) the preservation of human dignity; and 3) the capacity to act on a more or less level civic and moral playing field. [ 1 ] The essence of my argument is that the Cold War origins of the federal research enterprise, and the philosophical foundations upon which this enterprise rests, are implicated in a range of tensions and challenges to human well-being that are beyond the capacity of the enterprise -- as currently organized -- to address coherently. These tensions arise in large part from the fact that science aims at delivering benefits to society through the achievement of predictive certainty and technological control, while the vitality of both nature and democracy derive from a lack of predictability and controllability. My discussion starts with the organization of federal (U.S.) science, but considers human well-being in a global context. This connection is reasonable because the U.S. is by far the most scientifically productive nation, and because the impacts of science on society are global in character.
Cold War Roots
The role of the military in organizing the nation's current science and technology enterprise cannot be overstated. From the end of World War II until the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, 80 percent or more of all federally funded research was justified in terms of national security needs. The creation of the American research university and the explosion of technology-intensive industries that lay at the core of the nation's economic growth were strongly and directly catalyzed by funding from the Department of Defense. Moreover, when Sputnik stimulated a highly politicized call for an increased national commitment to civilian research, the lion's share of resources during the subsequent decade went to the manned space program, which in many ways was simply a technological adjunct to the Cold War defense effort. For example, many of the information management, advanced materials, and navigation and control technologies necessary for space travel were also applicable to -- or borrowed from--for the nation's high technology defense system. [ 2 ] In the early 1950s, as the scale and complexity of America's Cold War geopolitical commitments became clear, research and development came increasingly to be viewed in the Defense Department and among leading science administrators not simply as the provider of particular weapons systems, but as a continual source of new knowledge, innovation, and technical expertise that would preserve American military preeminence across a diverse range of potential national defense applications. The scientific-military nexus entrained -- and sustained--all sectors of the post-War research enterprise. From the perspective of those who designed and built this enterprise, the important ontological distinction in science was not between basic and applied, but between classified and unclassified. The knowledge-production process was viewed not in terms of particular disciplines of basic science, but specified outcomes for military needs. The university was viewed not as an ivory tower, but as a vital cog in the national defense machine that included private industry and a range of government agencies. The role of the scientist was not as maverick roaming the frontier of knowledge, but as an interactive member of a multitalented research group that often included theorists, experimentalists, and engineers. While research tools such as particle accelerators were used to carry out what might be termed "pure" research on fundamental physics, they were paid for by the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission in large part because they were valuable test beds for technologies with military applications, and because they were the training ground for scientists who would help to create the coming generation of Cold War weaponry. [ 3 ] The research organization that flowered from these Cold War roots was thus dominated by physical science, justified in terms of its role in technology development, and characterized by a dependency relationship between scientists, be they governmental or not, and their sponsoring federal agencies. The persistence of this organization can be seen in the continued dominance of three agencies -- the Department of Defense, NASA, and the various energy research sponsors -- which peaked at nearly 90 percent of the federal R&D budget at the height of the Apollo program in 1965, and today still constitutes 70 percent of all federal research and development spending. [ 4 ] Even in academia, many important fields, such as electrical engineering, computer science, and materials science, are today strongly supported by Defense Department funds, while physics continues to derive much of its support from the Department of Energy, which is a direct descendent of the Atomic Energy Commision. [ 5 ] One consequence of this organizational heritage is that the tools at hand are applied to emerging issues and problems, even if they are arguably inappropriate. For example, the massive U.S. Global Climate Change Research Program (USGCRP), which was established in law in 1990, the year after the Berlin Wall fell, is dominated by NASA space technology programs for data acquisition, and physical science approaches to modeling and interpreting atmospheric (and, to a lesser extent, oceanic) processes and evolution. [ 6 ] One could easily imagine an alternative (and less expensive) program that placed a considerably greater emphasis on the life and social sciences -- indeed, a growing sentiment for such a reprioritization is now beginning to emerge in some quarters -- aimed at understanding the dynamics of ecosystems and social systems in a changing global and policy environment. [ 7 ] The organizational and political basis for such an effort, however, was not in place at the time the USGCRP was being planned. Our national approach to climate change thus strongly reflects the organization of Cold War science. While the Cold War justified a top down approach to setting science priorities, the ideology of basic research called for a bottom-up arrangement where scientists themselves would determine the most fruitful directions for fundamental investigation, based on their expert judgment as exercised through peer review and other mechanisms. This ideology has been most successfully implemented through research funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. To a very great extent, of course, the ideal of an autonomous scientist exploring the frontiers of nature is strongly buffered by bureaucratic and policy decisions about how and where to allocate money, by the organization of research institutions such as universities and federal laboratories, and by the disciplinary organization of science itself, but within these constraints there is no question that the state of fundamental knowledge about nature has been spectacularly advanced by federally funded scientists acting with individual autonomy. All the same, individual autonomy can be exercised -- and science advanced--in settings that are severely bounded. For example, during the Cold War, the conduct of classified military research on universities campuses was commonly justified by the argument that scientists and engineers had to be free to pursue whatever research they chose, regardless of whether or not it was subject to the strictures of military secrecy. [ 8 ] An even more extreme case is illustrated by the Soviet Union under Stalin, where scientists somehow managed to conduct fruitful and sometimes world class fundamental research programs, even as they were subjected to severe political persecution that often included prison and torture. [ 9 ]
The Enlightenment Program
Given this combination of top-down organization motivated by the Cold War, and bottom-up research trajectories determined in part by individual scientists, how is human well-being introduced into the equation? After all, the promise of science to fulfill human needs is perhaps the principal political justification for public funding of civilian research. Over much of the past fifty years, this question has often been sidestepped by the assumption and assertion that the benefits of science flow automatically to society, deriving spontaneously from the progressive increase in the reservoir of fundamental knowledge, the development of innovative and beneficial new technologies, and the operation of the market economy that introduces the products of science and technology into society. In furthering this view, one can reasonably argue that the "program" for science (to use a term favored by social scientists) that was articulated and embraced by great Enlightenment thinkers from Bacon and Descartes to Jefferson and Voltaire, and reframed in a modern guise by Vannevar Bush's famous report, Science, The Endless Frontier, [ 10 ] has been almost inconceivably successful. This program prescribed the linking of scientific knowledge about the laws of nature to the technological control of nature itself for the benefit and progress of humanity; it was implemented in its most comprehensive and successful form by the Cold War organization of American science; and it is internalized today at every level of the diverse and complex modern research enterprise, and throughout industrialized society as a whole. One can choose one's symbol of the culmination of this program -- the polio vaccine; the hydrogen bomb; the invention of the transistor; the cloning of Dolly the sheep or the defeat of world chess champion Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue the computer -- but the overall point seems unavoidable: human affairs are now mediated at every level and on every scale by science-based technology and the economic activity that it engenders. There are optimists who view this achievement as the salvation of the species (and even of nature [ 11 ] ) and pessimists who portray it as a disaster-in-progress, but few if any would argue with the observation itself. Neither would many suggest that we have arrived at utopia. But the idea that some desirable type of steady-state if metastable condition for humanity may actually be within reach has in fact taken hold of optimists and pessimists alike, as embodied in the environmental and economic concept of sustainability, the political ideal of "the end of history," and the technologist vision of nature as infinite cornucopia and the human life cycle as infinitely extendable. That such perspectives can be taken seriously and exist simultaneously in our jaded and hyper-sophisticated age is strong confirmation that the Enlightenment program for science has fulfilled its ambitions. Yet the reality of both nature and democratic governance reveal crucial tensions embodied in the Enlightenment program for science. In terms of nature, the central paradox is that while the scale of control afforded by science and technology continues to increase, so does the domain of uncertainty and potential risk. "Knowledge of the [natural] system that we deal with is always incomplete," writes the ecologist C. S. Holling. "Surprise is inevitable . . . there is an inherent unknowability, as well as unpredictability . . . . The essential point is that evolving systems require policies and actions that not only satisfy social objectives [i.e., control for human benefit] but, at the same time, also achieve continually modified understanding of the evolving conditions and provide flexibility for adaptation and surprises." [ 12 ] Whereas science-based technological control of nature for human benefit has been the hallmark of the Enlightenment program, this control has aimed at severing the ties between society and nature, of escaping the threats and uncertainties imposed by those ties, of overcoming the natural limits on human endeavor in every activity, from food production to cognition. Holling's insight is that this goal -- freedom from natural caprice, in effect -- is unachievable because the very act of controlling natural systems introduces new variables that increase the unpredictability of the systems' dynamics. This insight has been borne out repeatedly in failed efforts to "manage" ecosystems. Protecting and preserving complex natural systems -- systems upon which human survival depends -- thus requires that the expectation of control be abandoned, and replaced by an awareness that we cannot dictate the consequences of our actions in nature. The completely unanticipated discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985 is a stark example of this problem. In exercising control over the local environment through the use of chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, we also perturbed the component of the stratosphere that protects the earth's surface from ultraviolet radiation. As the scale of human activity increases, surprises such as this should be expected to become more common. Less recognized and appreciated is a similar relation between democracy and the Enlightenment program for science. It is often said that the price of democracy is "eternal vigilance." This means that democratic society must constantly guard against monopoly in the competition among ideas, principles, and morals. The competition itself is crucial to the existence of democracy. In its absence is oligarchy and authoritarianism. Human civilization has been marked by an ongoing discourse about the essential attributes that characterize a "good" society and its citizens -- freedom, justice, equality, wisdom, mercy, tolerance, restraint, sharing -- but there will never be an equilibrium equation describing the perfect, utopian balance among these attributes. Conflicts are inevitable and necessary, trade-offs must constantly be made--justice must be tempered with mercy; freedom with restraint. This struggle proceeds through a succession of social and political consensuses that must be hashed out in a process that is reasoned but not strictly rational, practical but not pretty. In a civil society, "there can be no ultimate closure," writes the social theorist Philip Selznick, "because values reflect existential conditions, which are always subject to change . . . Reason takes into account the temptations and limitations of human conduct; therefore it is self-critical and self-limiting. This moderating outcome is also a source of indeterminacy. . . . Certainty is sacrificed on the alter of reason." [ 13 ] The fact that indeterminacy is not only inevitable but essential to democracy -- something to be embraced rather than overcome--does not comport well with a scientific worldview whose most legitimating measures of success are predictive certainty and control of nature. Having created the material welfare and technological infrastructure on which democracy has now come to depend, the significance of Enlightenment science for the democratic process itself seems murky. The issue here is not only that science and technology constantly transform the structure of society (usually without the consent of the governed), but also that over the past half-century or so, they have become tools that are called upon to assist in the explicit improvement of democratic process -- helping to resolve political dispute, set priorities for action, and manage social change. Through scientific eyes the mechanisms that enable democracy -- politics, laws, bureaucracy -- may look not just messy and irrational but subject to scientific correction. But the quest for scientifically based certainty and control in the political realm can conflict with democratic ideals by demanding, and fueling a demand for, that which is fundamentally incompatible civil society: closure.
Eight Problems
The scientific ideals of precision, determinacy, and control may thus lie in profound tension with society's struggle to comprehend and manage complex and evolving systems, be they natural or democratic. It can be no surprise, then, that while the Enlightenment program for science, catalyzed by an organizational structure that grew out of the Cold War, has helped to create heretofore unimaginable breadth of knowledge, degrees of control and levels of affluence, it has also revealed and provoked new challenges, contradictions and conflicts. Perhaps most prominent among these is that nature has gone global. Issues such as climate variability (El Niño, global warming), disease migration (AIDS, ebola), and invasive species (kudzu, killer bees) reflect the interaction of a global industrialized economy and a closed but infinitely complex earth system. The range of direct if uncertain threats to human well-being is daunting. These threats demonstrate that a science and technology program focused on ceding control over the environment to individuals, yields unanticipated complications at higher organizational levels of nature and society. For example, continued migration of populations to coastal regions increases vulnerability to extreme weather events and rising sea level. This vulnerability arises, in part, from advances in medicine that allow rapid population growth; from advances in transportation technologies that facilitate rapid migration; and from anthropogenic modification of the environment. But fundamental issues of justice and equity further complicate such problems. [ 14 ] Obviously, the adverse impacts of global environmental problems are experienced disproportionately by poor people and poor nations, who have fewer resources and less flexibility in responding to changing environmental conditions. Science is not organized to integrate such considerations of equity into its research priorities. Yet even as these types of disparities grow more severe, a second problem can be recognized. As the affluence of industrialized nations of the world continues to grow, the priorities and capabilities of science and technology (fueled by the market incentives that promote commercial application of science) become increasingly divorced from the basic needs of those people -- in rich nations as well as poor -- who have not proportionately benefited from the products of the Enlightenment program. The clearest example is biomedical research, which in the U.S. focuses its formidable resources on fundamental investigations into molecular function and the search for high technology cures for diseases of affluence and old age. These priorities largely neglect a broad range of low-cost (and low-profit) opportunities in public health, such as nutrition research; they also fail to meaningfully address the debilitating health care problems of the developing world. [ 15 ] Even when a problem is of a global scale, the benefits of science may be disproportionately appropriated by affluent societies. This moral dynamic is strikingly illustrated in the case of AIDS, where high-technology and high-priced drug therapies are having a remarkable measure of success in reducing mortality among AIDS-sufferers who live in developed nations. In the developing world, the story is entirely different, and in many nations where advanced drug therapies are unaffordable, AIDS has become not only an overwhelming public health problem, but a tangible threat to economic and social prospects as well. [ 16 ] Understanding and controlling the HIV virus at the molecular level is the very stuff of the Enlightenment Program: high prestige science that attracts money, peer approval, and Nobel prizes. Again, the organization that encourages and rewards such science includes no provision to change research trajectories in response to a moral imperative. Third, rapid progress in science and technology is transforming the fundamental institutions of civil society -- including the structure of community, and the democratic process itself--in ways that are neither well understood nor easily controlled. Moreover, the speed of scientific and technological progress is such that profound and often wrenching societal transformations appear with greater frequency than ever before in history. In recent years, the erosion of civic community in America has been a subject of much concern to intellectuals, politicians, and pundits of every stripe. While the causes of any such decline must be complex, the proliferation of one transforming technology after another -- telegraph, telephone, automobile, radio, television, air conditioner, home computer, internet -- introduces a pervasive instability into the structure and function of community. Similarly, within the period of a generation or two, the Green Revolution made the idea of the small, family-owned farm both economically and technologically obsolete (in the absence of government subsidy, at least) across much of the globe. The Enlightenment Program supports a social consensus that accepts such change as the unavoidable price of progress. The Program simply does not accommodate the idea that criteria of societal well-being are a legitimate guide for and metric of scientific progress. Fourth, an overlay on this transformation process seems to be that technological progress exacerbates inequitable distribution of wealth, both within and between nations. A nation with many scientists and engineers, many telephones, computers, universities, and high technology-companies will generate more ideas, more opportunities, more productivity and economic growth, than a nation that lacks these assets. This kind of growth is self-perpetuating, and has resulted in, among other things, a considerable increase in concentration of wealth among the world's industrialized nations over the past three decades -- despite the remarkable gains made by a few East Asian nations. [ 17 ] This phenomena contradicts a basic tenet of the Enlightenment Program -- that new knowledge is cosmopolitan in its benefits -- and demonstrates that scientific knowledge and technological control are appropriable commodities. Indeed, the Cold War organization of science was in its essence a quest to generate national advantage through the appropriation of knowledge and innovation. Fifth, scientific uncertainty has become an increasingly common cause of political gridlock, especially in controversies related to the environment and natural resources. Global climate change is the archetypical example of this trend. The technical debate over the scientific validity of global warming has become a surrogate for a value debate about the preservation of the environment and the distribution of the benefits of industrialization. A sixth, possibly related issue is the overwhelming increase in the volume and availability of technical information relevant to human decision making at every level of society, unaccompanied by indications that this trend is in fact leading to greater wisdom or better decisions in the public sphere. These two trends reflect the Enlightenment confidence that more scientific information is in itself sufficient to drive political solutions to a range of societal problems. Scientific debate thus becomes a surrogate for underlying value debate, while "more information" displaces the demand for effective decision-making. Seventh, and partly as a reflection of its own success, the research enterprise is increasingly caught up in vexing and divisive ethical questions, such as those surrounding the cloning of higher organisms, technological erosion of privacy, patenting of genetic material, and clinical testing of new medicines in different cultures. Such questions often reflect a collision of scientific progress, commercial incentive, and ethical norms. For example, personal privacy may be threatened by the availability of genetic information that could be used as a basis for offering or denying medical or life insurance coverage to individuals. [ 18 ] In cases such as this, ethical conflict is an inevitable byproduct of the success of the Enlightenment Program. The proliferation of new knowledge and techniques for the control of both nature and societal activity lie in profound tension with the desire of democratic society to exercise control through political processes. This conflict is exacerbated by the operation of the open market, which seeks to introduce the products of science into the economy, and resists any efforts to restrict its ability to do so. Finally, the research community itself increasingly reports on a break-down in confidence, optimism, and morale, especially in academia. Explanations of this phenomenon include loss of autonomy due to increased demand for scientific accountability to the public; ever-increasing degrees of specialization that alienate scientists from the real world; and the dissolution of community due to competition among peers for recognition and funding. [ 19 ] These explanations suggest an increasing tension between the evolving role of scientists in society, and some key tenets of Enlightenment science, for example, that scientists are accountable to society only through the quality of their science; that the sure path to comprehending nature is reductionism; that individual productivity is the key to scientific progress.
Now it may not be unreasonable to pronounce the foregoing issues to be political, sociological, and economic in nature, and thus largely beyond the capacity of science to address. One might also simply observe that while social progress is often slow, and politics irrational and difficult, more science and technology -- a continuation of the Enlightenment program--cannot help but overcome these hurdles and continue to move things in the right direction, as they have done in the past. But what is crucial here is not simply that the building and shaping of the entire portfolio of federal science and technology activities in the early post-War years took place without regard to any of these problems (many of which, of course, either did not exist or were not recognized), but as well that the organizational structure and knowledge products of today's enterprise are often not suited to addressing them productively. While the explicit question of how best to connect the enterprise to human well-being has raised its head from time to time in political debate over how science and technology should be organized, the idea that such beneficial connections will arise automatically through implementation of the Enlightenment program has always, in the end, prevailed. Thus, recent consideration of how federal science should be connected to human well-being is usually framed in terms of how to enhance the performance of the Enlightenment program, not in terms of questioning the program itself. For example, the science community and its many advocates focus strongly on the need for "better communication" between scientists and the public, in order to ensure continued public support for research funding. The ideal of the "civic scientist" or "citizen scientist" has begun to get some attention from such scientific leaders as the director of the National Science Foundation (and current Presidential Science Advisor). [ 20 ] While this ideal is certainly laudatory, as commonly articulated it is also rooted in the assumption that the feeding tube from the scientific community to the public needs to be widened, and it neglects the perhaps more fundamental issues of what type of nourishment, exactly, is being provided, and what the public might have to offer the research enterprise in terms of wisdom and guidance. "Sound science" is also commonly invoked as a cure for the political battles that often emerge over science- and technology-related issues such as global environmental change, biodiversity preservation, energy policy, and nuclear waste disposal. Technocratic approaches such as risk assessment are often prescribed to help rationalize the political decision making process. [ 21 ] Again, these types of prescriptions, while not without some potential application, accept the received, Cold War organization of the science and technology enterprise as a starting point. I am arguing instead that the fundamental operational realities of democracy and nature, which dictate an essential unpredictability and uncontrollability, render the continued implementation of the Enlightenment Program through the mechanisms of the Cold War inherently problematical. New organizational tenets and models may be necessary to confront these difficulties.
New Links Between Science and Well-Being
If the organization of science is understood to significantly reflect social, political, and economic processes -- especially the very specific if multifaceted priorities dictated by the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union--then the eight problems mentioned above can be seen as defining a reality within which new links between science and human needs can potentially be forged. The shape of some of these new links is gradually becoming apparent. New philosophical approaches now compete with the key insights of the great Enlightenment thinkers. The most conspicuous and controversial of these has arisen from the field of social studies of science. This approach sheds important light on the social and political context within which scientists are working and scientific problems are defined and confronted. But it has been reviled and rejected by most mainstream scientists -- and not a few social scientists--for its assertion that scientific knowledge is socially constructed. In my view, this assertion is simply trivial as a critique of science per se: In the real world, the success and impact of science is argument enough for the validity of its method and philosophical underpinnings--socially and politically constructed as they may be. As David Hull writes: "No amount of debunking can detract from the fact that scientists do precisely what they claim to do." [ 22 ] This success, however, is necessarily and appropriately defined within the context of the Enlightenment program, and especially the application of scientific knowledge to the technological control of nature. A more fruitful question, then, would address the extent to which the Enlightenment program is appropriate for and compatible with the types of challenges facing society today. The social studies of science have helped to position science where it belongs--in the heart of society, rather than as an insular satellite -- and even through the rancor it stimulates, brings attention to this question, and thus raises the possibility of alternative programs for the future. [ 23 ] As a more practical matter, mechanisms to better connect democratic process to the establishment of scientific priorities and practices are fitfully beginning to develop. In Europe, citizens conferences that give communities the opportunity to make decisions about scientific and technological choices are becoming commonplace, while in the U.S., environmental stakeholder groups, often organized at the scale of a local watershed, now increasingly replace, augment, or subsume expert technical debate in the effort to resolve environmental dilemmas. Community-based research is a nascent but highly promising mechanism for linking scientists to local people and problems in a manner that was never envisioned or allowed for in the Cold War organization of science. [ 24 ] Efforts to achieve a more synthetic view of nature by breaching the barriers that separate traditional scientific disciplines are occurring with variable success in such disparate areas as cognitive neuroscience and environmental science. The emerging and well-publicized field of complexity science acknowledges the intrinsic limitations of traditional approaches to understanding and describing nonlinear systems such as consciousness or economies. Throughout the sciences, there is an increasing recognition that nature is simply not comprehensible in terms of narrow, disciplinary, reductionist investigation. [ 25 ] The concept of sustainability is giving birth to new measures of progress and new agendas for research that explicitly link science to a moral framework rooted in the tenet of intergenerational equity. Sustainability has become a guide for research in diverse fields, such as agriculture, economics, ecology, and public policy. The idea of adaptive management of complex systems acknowledges that such systems (natural and social) are not predictable, and that both science and policy are thereby always subject to error and amenable to correction. Adaptive management recognizes that values are usually less contestable than science, and thus prescribes for science the role of assessing and monitoring the impacts of policy decisions that have already been made. Science becomes a tool for correcting and improving the incremental democratic policy process by providing insight, rather than dictating policy by providing predictions. Industrial ecology views manufacturing and energy use as cycles, rather than independent streams of production, consumption, and waste, and thus defines entirely new criteria for judging the viability of technologies. [ 26 ] Sustainability is a goal; adaptive management is a policy process for moving toward the goal; industrial ecology is a technical perspective that supports the policy process. These linked concepts view nature and democracy as models to be emulated and supported, not obstacles to be overcome.
Progress in these and related directions is important and promising, but the relevant scientific activities remain a marginally small proportion of the total federal science enterprise. Typically, it seems, initiatives along these lines are undertaken in isolation, often as a result of the action of individuals with vision and energy. There are few institutional structures within which successful experiments can grow and propagate. Funding sources and reward systems still militate against those who would seek to define stronger connections between science and human well-being. One problem, of course, is that the organizational inertia of the Cold War is difficult to displace. Doing so will take time and persistence. Another problem is that the mental model of the Enlightenment program is so simple and elegant -- more science and more control always yield more well-being, in essence -- that it resists being replaced by something more nuanced. But a few things can be said about the components of an alternative organization for science that seeks to relieve the tensions created by the Enlightenment program. This new organization will certainly direct us toward new types of institutions that promote, as a foundation for determining research priorities, meaningful interaction between scientists and the people who scientists are serving. It will portray complex, real-world problems, rather than scientific disciplines, as organizing foci for research programs. Artificial taxonomies, such as basic versus applied research, will be abandoned as meaningless, and the boundaries between social and natural science will become increasingly permeable Metrics of scientific excellence will focus as much on social outcomes as on scientific ones. Scientists and science administrators will internalize the idea that complex and indeterminate structures of nature and democracy must be a basis for such new organizational approaches to research as adaptive management and industrial ecology. The transition to an organization of science characterized by these and related attributes is a matter, for the most part, of political vision and will. It is worth emphasizing that whereas the mythologies of the "golden age" of Cold War science tell a story of abundant funds available to individual scientists who freely pursued exciting new knowledge where ever it might lead, the broader reality underlying this Elysium was that the Department of Defense created a huge, integrated knowledge production enterprise aimed at achieving a particular desired outcome -- victory over the Soviet Union. Similarly, the creation of stronger linkages between science and human well-being can be framed as an organizational challenge that requires a clear definition of the outcomes desired, and a mobilization of intellectual activity aimed at achieving these outcomes. If the resources and institutional structures are put in place, the science will happily follow.
1. I recognize that the precise meaning of the second and -- especially -- the third components have been and will remain infinitely contestable, yet this contesting is usually a matter of balance among agreed upon variables, rather than competition between mutually exclusive concepts. 2. For information on science budgets from the early Cold War years, see Office of Management and Budget, The Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 1999, Historical Table 9.7 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1998); and National Science Foundation, Federal Funds for Research and Development: Detailed Historical Tables, Fiscal Years 1951-1998, at: www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf98328/start.htm. There are many accounts of the political history of Cold War science and technology. Some of the better one's include: Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York: The Free Press, 1997); Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Rebecca S. Lowen, Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Harvey M. Sapolsky, Science and the Navy: The History of the Office of Naval Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). 4. Biomedical and health-related research is the second largest component of the research portfolio, making up 18 percent of federal expenditures in FY 1997 ( and 34 percent of non-defense research). For post-1960 research and development data, see National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation), published biennially; and Intersociety Working Group, Resarch and Development (American Association for the Advancement of Science), published annually. 5. William A. Wulf, "Balancing the Research Portfolio," Science 281 (September, 1998): 1803. 6. For example, see Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Our Changing Planet: The FY 1998 U.S. Global Change Research Program (Washington, DC: Office of Science and Technology Policy, 1997). 7. For example, see Andrew Lawler, "Global Change Fights Off a Chill," Science 280 (June 12, 1998): 1683-1685. 8. For example, see Lowen, Creating the Cold War University, p. 144. 9. See Loren R. Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 10. Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C.: Office of Scientific Research and Development, 1945; reprint, Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation, 1960). 11. Jesse H. Ausubel, "The Liberation of the Environment," Daedalus 125 (Summer 1996): 1-17. 12. C.S. Holling, "What Barriers? What Bridges?" in Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions, ed. L.H. Gunderson, C.S. Holling, and S.S. Light (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 13-14. 13. Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth: Social Theory and the Promise of Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 61-62. 14. For example, see Aron Sachs, 1996, "Upholding Human Rights and Environmental Justice," in State of the World 1996, ed. Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), pp. 133-151. 15. For example, see World Health Report 1996 (Washington, DC: World Health Organization, 1996). 16. For a particularly grisly recent example, see Joby Warrick, "AID's Long Shadow Cools Global Population Forecast," Washington Post (October 28, 1998): A2. 17. For example, see United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 18. For example, see K. L. Hudson, K.H. Rothenberg, L.B. Andrews, M. J. Ellis Kahn, F.S. Collins, "Genetic Discrimination and Health Insurance: An Urgent Need for Reform," Science 270 (October 20, 1995): 391-393. 19. For example, see Robert Pollack, "Hard Days on the Endless Frontier," The FASEB Journal 11 (August 1997): 725-731. 20. Neal Lane, "Science and the American Dream: Healthy or History," speech presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Baltimore, MD February 9, 1996 (text available on world wide web at: www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/forum/lane/slaaa.htm. 21. For example, see House Committee on Science, Unlocking Our Future: Toward a New National Science Policy. A Report to Congress. (Washington, DC: House Committee on Science, September 24, 1998). 22. David L. Hull, Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 31. 23. For an introduction to some of these ideas, see S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J. Petersen, T. Pinch, eds., Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (London: Sage Publications, 1995). 24. For example, see Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995); and Richard E. Sclove, Madeleine L. Scammell, and Breena Holland, Community-Based Research in the United States: An Introductory Reconnaissance, Including Twelve Organizational Case Studies and Comparison with the Dutch Science Shops and the Mainstream American Research System (Amherst, MA: The Loka Institute, 1998). 25. For example, see essays in John Cornwell, ed., Nature's Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 26. For example, see Kai N. Lee, Compass and Gyroscope: Integrating Science and Politics for the Environment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993); T. E. Graedel and B.R. Allenby, Industrial Ecology (New York: Prentice Hall, 1995).
|