I think it was in the
spring of 1988 that I visited Washington, D.C., to explore the potential for
moving from academic science into public policy. I had set up an informational interview at
AAAS and was sitting in their library waiting for my meeting to begin. After browsing the shelves for a few seconds,
and guided only by karmic randomness, I pulled down a book called Lost at the Frontier, by Deborah Shapley
and Rustum Roy. Within ten minutes, the intellectual
world I had been inhabiting for the last decade looked suddenly
different—actually, it made sense, for the first time. I was introduced to Vannevar Bush, engineer
of post-World-War II science policy, to the politics of academic science, to
the role of technology in driving scientific change, to a new perspective on
science and society based on real experience rather than ivy-covered myth.
Throughout graduate
school and post-doctoral work, I had always felt like the underlying rationale
that permeated academic science, about basic research and progress and
serendipity, the core elements of our cultural indoctrination, was logically
incoherent, a load of self-serving crap, but I had no idea that people actually
thought and wrote about such things. Shapley
and Roy laid out with clarity, brevity, and irony a new way of looking at my
world that actually made sense.
Two years later, I was
working in Congress and I began to interact with Rusty Roy on a regular
basis. An accomplished material
scientist at Penn State, he was also a fearless and relentless critic of the
scientific status quo, a practitioner of tough love for science, insisting that
society was being ripped off by a system that was aimed at advancing the egos
and careers of individual scientists instead of the needs of society. What a difference from the legions of alpha-dog
researchers that came through Congress with outstretched palms insisting that
if only taxpayers would give them more money, they’d cure all the world’s ills.
Over the years, we
corresponded and talked irregularly, and I came away from every encounter
feeling like I had just gotten a brain tune-up.
Whether it was the meaning of interdisciplinarity, the absurdities of
peer review, the sources of serendipity in applied research, the social responsibilities
of the scientist, or the power of Qi Gong (Google it!), every conversation went
in an unexpected direction, accompanied by a mischievous twinkle in Rusty’s
wise eyes.
I last saw him about
three years ago; we enjoyed a leisurely lunch in the warm winter Arizona
sun. He proselytized relentlessly about some
variety or other of alternative medicine, deflecting my skeptical questions
with good-humored self-assurance; he was as young, vigorous, and intellectually
adventurous as ever.
Rusty died last Thursday. To find out more about him, go to: http://www.rustumroy.com/
