| From the issue dated November 18, 2005 |
Daniel Sarewitz wants researchers to serve society better by looking for beneficial results
Tempe, Ariz.
Daniel R. Sarewitz did not set out to become one of the most provocative voices in the country on the question of how academic scientists pursue their research.
He came from their ranks, after all. While earning a doctorate in geology from Cornell University, he traveled to remote parts of the globe for fieldwork. But he had a growing sense that his work was missing something important.
As he hiked through small villages in the Philippines on the way to study interesting rock formations, he came across people with easily remedied health problems, such as pellagra, caused by poor nutrition. Their problems were "staring you in the face, and there you are, just working on things that don't matter," he recalls.
Those travels were the beginning of his intellectual journey to describe and advocate a more socially responsible way of doing science and technological innovation. He wants to nudge most disciplines of research, even those concerned with fundamental aspects of nature, toward socially beneficial results, like lowering the cost of medicine.
He has spent years developing his critique, first as a Congressional staff member and later as director of Arizona State University's Consortium on Science, Policy and Outcomes.
Now Mr. Sarewitz and his colleagues have the money and a forum to put their controversial ideas to the test, in the young, burgeoning field of nanotechnology, which involves manipulating matter at the atomic scale to develop potentially revolutionary devices.
With the help of a grant awarded last month by the National Science Foundation, social scientists at Arizona State will meet and talk regularly with natural scientists working in nanotechnology. Over the course of the five-year project, the collaborators will try to find new ways to steer nanotechnology research at Arizona State to maximize helpful outcomes and minimize harmful ones.
It is an ambitious, paradigm-breaking idea that Mr. Sarewitz concedes is difficult to explain, let alone validate and spread to scientists at other universities, which is the ultimate goal. His approach challenges core values, long cherished by researchers who conduct fundamental studies of nature. They believe that they should not anticipate, or strive for, beneficial outcomes from their work, because such results are usually serendipitous.
Mr. Sarewitz has spent more than a decade arguing that serendipity is fine but that seeking specific outcomes is better. In the dry desert landscape here at Arizona State, he and his colleagues may have found a fertile patch to show how it can be done.
The university's president, Michael M. Crow, is a strong supporter of the nanotechnology project, which fits in with his broader view about how Arizona State and research universities should be shaken up and restructured. Universities need to pursue more than the next incremental steps in scientific discovery, Mr. Crow says, and ask "deeper questions about where we want science to take us."
Outsiders are interested in Mr. Sarewitz's project as well. The social scientists who have studied technological development "tend to do their work for an audience of other social scientists," says Albert H. Teich, director of science and policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "They're not really speaking to the broader community of policy makers and the engineering community. I have a sense that this will have more of an impact."
Eye-Opening Experiences
Mr. Sarewitz, 50, is neither a social scientist nor a nanotechnology researcher by training. His effort to unite those camps is another step in his unusual journey through the worlds of research, government policy, and the philosophy of science.
In his quest to work on scientific problems relevant to people, Mr. Sarewitz went to work in Washington, in 1989, as a science-policy fellow in the office of U.S. Rep. George E. Brown Jr. The California Democrat had long held a strong interest in making science more responsive to society's needs. In 1991, Mr. Brown became chairman of the House of Representatives Science Committee, and Mr. Sarewitz worked as his speechwriter.
Mr. Sarewitz says he loved that job, and he calls Mr. Brown a mentor. But Mr. Sarewitz left in 1993 to accompany his wife, Erica Rosenberg, on a two-year assignment on Palau, an island in the Pacific Ocean. A Congressional staff member and lawyer, she went there to help the legislature of Palau, then a U.S. trust territory, draft a constitution. A light-hearted going-away photo of Mr. Sarewitz and Mr. Brown shows Mr. Sarewitz holding a whip and wearing a pith helmet, which his colleagues jested he might need in that exotic locale.
The isolation of the South Pacific gave Mr. Sarewitz a perfect opportunity to sum up lessons he learned in Washington by writing a book, Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress (Temple University Press, 1996).
In that work and in articles he has published, Mr. Sarewitz cracked a rhetorical whip, trying to prod scientists toward more socially productive directions. His critiques, together with those of a small band of other, similarly iconoclastic science-policy scholars, have shaped Arizona State's new project on nanotechnology.
Mr. Sarewitz has questioned the logic underlying one of the cardinal beliefs among many basic researchers: that the path from fundamental discovery to practical application is unpredictable, and so it is counterproductive to prod them to work toward particular outcomes. In an oft-cited example, Alexander Fleming discovered the antibiotic penicillin accidentally in 1928, when he noticed that mold on a laboratory dish killed staphylococcus bacteria. Many scientists contend that efforts to steer a line of research toward a desired outcome may ignore such groundbreaking discoveries before they are ever made.
A better approach, according to many basic scientists and their lobbyists in Washington, is for the federal government, which provides most of the money for university research, to allocate the bulk of the dollars to build and nourish basic research across a broad range of disciplines, from which good ideas and new inventions will inevitably bubble up. But Mr. Sarewitz argues that serendipitous findings occur at every stage of innovation, from basic studies to applied research.
As a result, he says, basic researchers have no grounds for thinking that the potential for serendipity gives them a special exemption from considering ways to make their work more relevant to the public's needs.
What's more, he says, for every seemingly serendipitous finding in science, there are plenty of examples where scientists successfully pursued research with a clear goal in mind, like the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and the development of a polio vaccine.
Measuring Results
The Arizona project is meant to help both federal research agencies and laboratory scientists choose research pathways that could benefit society the most.
Nanotechnology researchers, for instance, want to make new kinds of sensors to implant in the human body that would continuously monitor health. It is research that verges on science fiction, but many experts believe such devices may be here in a decade or two.
It would help society, Mr. Sarewitz says, if inventors thought early and often about the security of the data being collected and how to make the tiny gadgets more affordable than other new medical technology that typically drives up the cost of health care.
Arizona State's approach is not explicitly concerned with helping policy makers regulate nanotechnology's potential risks. Mr. Sarewitz says that by the time new devices reach the stage of commercialization and regulation, it is usually too late to alter them to correct problems. He wants his project to influence scientists further "upstream."
Arizona State will also try to develop new tools to help government officials decide how to shift money within the federal research portfolio toward areas most likely to help solve society's problems. Federal research agencies have long provided funds for university research — more than $20-billion this year — without systematically asking for evidence in return about those effects.
That may be starting to change. The NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and the White House Office of Management and Budget have all, in recent years, put more emphasis on results, prodded in part by members of Congress. At best, such analysis is in its infancy, Mr. Sarewitz says, and the efforts so far tend to focus on traditional measures of scholarly productivity, like numbers of papers published. But most of the discussion in Washington about the federal role in promoting good science is still about one thing: increased spending.
Finding Allies
Mr. Sarewitz's route to the nanotechnology project in Arizona from the isolation of Micronesia was not direct.
First he went to work for a scientific society in Denver, trying, unsuccessfully, to interest researchers in his ideas about outcomes of science. One day he had lunch with Mr. Crow, then executive vice provost at Columbia University, whom Mr. Sarewitz had met through the House Science Committee.
Mr. Crow had a reputation as an energetic, relentless advocate for expanding Columbia's scientific base, but he was also interested in how research met social needs. He asked Mr. Sarewitz what his dream job would be, and Mr. Sarewitz said it would be running a science-policy center that focused on outcomes-oriented research.
In 1998 Mr. Crow helped establish what would become Columbia's Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes in Washington, D.C., with Mr. Sarewitz as director.
Mr. Sarewitz believed then that nanotechnology would be a good subject to study, because it was an emerging technology that had not yet resulted in commercial products. But first, Mr. Sarewitz needed to raise more money. As he set about doing that, he quickly discovered how controversial some of his ideas were.
Officials at the Pew Charitable Trusts dismissed his request for funds as the thinking of "central planners," with one telling Mr. Sarewitz, "You must think you're God." When the center applied for a grant from the NSF the first time, it got poor marks, with one reviewer describing Mr. Sarewitz and his colleagues as anti-technology.
Then, in 2002, Mr. Crow moved from Columbia University to Arizona State to become its president, and he invited Mr. Sarewitz to join him there. Raised in the Northeast, Mr. Sarewitz mulled over moving to the Phoenix area, which he calls, with a twinkle in his eye, "this godforsaken city in the middle of the desert." But he liked what he found.
"At Columbia I maybe found three scientists who were willing to even talk about this without laughing me out of the room," he says. "Here, everyone is open to it."
Arizona State had already been developing a reputation as an institution that favored shaking up the way science was done, especially with a focus on interdisciplinary research in biology and environmental studies.
As a relatively young research university, the institution has room to grow and experiment with new ways of doing science that larger, more established institutions are too hidebound to try, Mr. Crow says.
In 2003, the most recent year for which data are available, Arizona State received $71.7-million in federal research funds, placing it 107th in the United States.
Phoenix is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country, and its desert location poses severe and unique growing pains that a marriage of social and natural science could help solve, Mr. Crow says.
For example, the university has an NSF-financed center to study land-use decisions related to water supply, a project on which Mr. Sarewitz and Mr. Crow are participating scholars.
When he came to Arizona State, Mr. Sarewitz renewed his push to find money to study the social implications of nanotechnology. Last month he and his colleagues succeeded, when the NSF awarded the university $6.2-million over five years.
The NSF had been supporting other studies about nanotechnology's possible effects on society. But this award was the largest single award by the agency for this purpose and the first to focus on influencing the development of nanotechnology "in real time." The grant will also support related studies at five other universities that are collaborating with Arizona State.
The university's application had several things going for it this time. In 2003, Congress had explicitly asked the NSF to finance such a center. One of Arizona's senators, John McCain, was one of the supporters who inserted the language in a larger bill. That led some faculty members at Arizona State to privately grouse that the award represented pork-barrel spending.
However, Arizona State, and three other universities, won the NSF grants for the project through an open competition, and Congress did not rig that contest with language directly or indirectly favoring any particular university.
Another plus for Arizona State's bid was that the principal investigator will be David H. Guston, a leading scholar in science-policy studies and a political scientist who specializes in ways to mix democratic values into the setting of research priorities. He was recruited from Rutgers University at New Brunswick last year.
Winning Converts
Mr. Sarewitz has found like-minded, willing collaborators among the natural scientists in the university's new Biodesign Institute, a sleek laboratory building that is a signature piece in Mr. Crow's efforts to expand Arizona State's research base. It is only an eight-minute walk from Mr. Sarewitz's nondescript offices in the social-sciences building, but it offers a striking contrast.
One of Mr. Sarewitz's collaborators on the social-implications project is Neal W. Woodbury, who directs a center within the institute devoted to merging biochemistry and nanotechnology to create new sensors, drugs, and materials.
As he showed a visitor around the building last month, Mr. Woodbury was asked why he consented to have Mr. Sarewitz, Mr. Guston, and their social-scientist colleagues poking around his laboratory, asking him questions, eating into his time. What's in it for him?
Not money. By design, the NSF grant will not directly pay for the research of faculty members who collaborate with Mr. Sarewitz and his colleagues, although it will finance postdoctoral researchers to spend some of their time thinking about the social implications of their work.
Mr. Woodbury explained that he did not need much persuading: He became a fan of Mr. Sarewitz's critique when some of his graduate students studied science policy with Mr. Sarewitz at Columbia's science-policy center in Washington.
Beyond that, Mr. Woodbury says, focusing more on the outcomes of science makes sense at a time when federal spending on research has leveled off, following the spurt that resulted largely from the doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2003. With the large federal budget deficit, growth in research funds may remain slow for years, Mr. Woodbury notes. In that environment, "the scientists should be the first to think about how we can make our science more relevant" to society's needs, he says. "We don't have enough money to throw it around inadvertently."
Plenty of Questions
Other scientists at Arizona State not yet collaborating with the social-implications project express interest but are also asking plenty of questions about practical details.
"I can't yet picture how this is going to work," says Trevor J. Thornton, a professor of electrical engineering who directs a center that wants to use nanotechnology to improve semiconductors. Mr. Sarewitz's idea of guiding research in certain directions is a bit foreign to him. What if researchers come up with new devices whose applications or costs aren't entirely positive for society, Mr. Thornton asks?
"Once you have an idea," he says, "once something has been demonstrated," and papers have been written, patents applied for, "it's out there, isn't it?"
Mr. Sarewitz's approach also faces skepticism from scholars at other institutions in the field of science and technology studies.
They might seem to be natural allies, given their interest in studying how the findings of scientists reflect the social context within which they work.
However, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor at Harvard University, doubts that the extensive participation of natural scientists in Arizona State's study of nanotechnology's social implications will yield special insights on those questions. They may be too close to the research to have a detached view of society's needs, she says.
Mr. Sarewitz concedes that the operational details have yet to be reduced to a blueprint. What is clear is that the project will require many meetings. He falls back on his overarching goals.
"There's no illusion that this is going to suddenly create a perfect system" of innovation "where we know exactly what we're doing," Mr. Sarewitz says. "The idea is to create a system where we're at least thinking about what we're doing as we're doing it.
"So it's not about control, it's not about prediction. It's about awareness and choice."
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