How can science and technology most effectively contribute to an improved quality of life for the greatest number of people?

This is the organizing question for Columbia University’s Center for Science, Policy, & Outcomes (CSPO). The Center is devoted to enhancing the capacity of public policy to link scientific research to beneficial societal outcomes.

The Center will create knowledge, cultivate public discourse, and foster policies to help decision makers and institutions grapple with the immense power and importance of science and technology as society charts a course for the future.

Introduction

Man's power to achieve good or to inflict evil surpasses the brightest hopes and the sharpest fears of all ages. We can turn rivers in their courses, level mountains to the plains. Oceans and land and sky are avenues for our colossal commerce. Disease diminishes and life lengthens. Yet the promise of this life is imperiled by the very genius that has made it possible. Nations amass wealth. Labor sweats to create, and turns out devices to level not only mountains but also cities. Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet. --President Dwight D. Eisenhower1

Science and technology (S&T) have become the most powerful transforming forces in society, allowing people to escape fundamental need; fostering innovation and economic growth; fighting scourges like smallpox, polio, and AIDS; and joining billions of people together in information and communication networks that serve democracy as well as commerce. But the profound changes brought about by S&T have led as well to negative impacts—often unanticipated. From the industrial revolution to the information revolution, the march of scientific and technological progress has left in its wake unemployment, cultural dislocation, economic inequity, environmental destruction, even war and disease.

Just as science and technology affect our world, they are affected by public policy decisions about how research funds are allocated, priorities established, the research enterprise organized, knowledge communicated and applied, and accountability maintained. Policy decisions influence the societal consequences—the outcomes—of scientific research in realms as diverse as the economy, the environment, health, governance, national security, and social structure.

While it is clear that S&T contribute to large scale societal transformations, our current understanding of how they do so is inadequate, and this leaves us unprepared for the task of planning for the future. Today, decision makers lack the tools necessary to plan for, respond to, and integrate into public policy the dynamo of S&T progress that continually reshapes our world.

Our incomplete understanding of the impacts and effects of S&T leads to such paradoxical outcomes as AIDS drugs that work in post-industrial cultures but are thus far largely irrelevant to the developing world due to challenges of cost and distribution, and genetically modified crops that have the potential to boost nutrition and agricultural productivity but are fiercely opposed on cultural and environmental grounds.

Our lack of understanding also results in disparities between science goals and achievements. In the U.S. and abroad, much publicly funded science is explicitly promoted and justified in terms of the quest for specified societal outcomes, such as those listed in the table below. The enormous challenge of using science to contribute to such desired outcomes rests upon the ability to implement appropriate science policies.

While the existing science enterprise includes highly effective mechanisms for judging the quality of science itself, there are few mechanisms aimed at understanding and assessing the linkages between scientific activities and desired outcomes. Such assessment processes are necessary to ensure progress toward goals. Growing demand for accountability can be recognized in Congressional action (e.g., the Government Performance and Results Act) and in public advocacy and activism (e.g., controversies over stem cell technologies, genetically modified organisms, and environmental regulations).

CSPO is the only intellectual center dedicated to understanding the linkages between S&T and its effects on society, and to developing knowledge and tools that can more effectively connect progress in S&T to progress toward desired societal outcomes. The Center draws on the intellectual resources of Columbia University and other institutions for the scholarly foundation to assess and foster outcome-based policies across a broad portfolio of publicly funded scientific research. The Center’s location in Washington, DC, speaks to its core commitment to generating useable knowledge for real-world decision making.

Lessons

Science and technology are demonstrably objective and effective; but they're unquestionably bound up with power relations as social systems. --Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian2

Federal science policy since World War II has been dominated by the idea that more science automatically generates better societal outcomes. But connections between scientific advance and societal outcomes are complex and often surprising. Consider the following examples:

Desired outcomes can drive science: For 50 years, the goal of materials research in the U.S. has been to produce smaller and faster devices for advanced military use. Desired outcomes were visualized in military terms alone, and focused on durability, radiation protection, and other specialized attributes. The military definition of the problem drove the science toward sophisticated silicon-based, high temperature materials with tremendous capacity for miniaturization. We committed to this path and remain on it, without having considered if it is optimal for a broader set of outcomes, such as environmental sustainability or electrical efficiency. Similarly, in the 1960s the world set out to increase agricultural productivity, and scientific research gave us the Green Revolution. But research agendas did not consider environmental, cultural, or socioeconomic impacts, and so the same research breakthroughs that helped to feed the world also led to environment degradation and the destabilization of small farming communities world wide. CSPO will help decision makers craft research agendas that respond to the broadest possible range of desired societal outcomes.

The societal value of new knowledge is determined by how it is used, and by whom: Consider the consequences of advances in atmospheric science that now allow the effects of El Niño to be predicted up to a year in advance. In Peru, for example, industrial fisheries used El Niño forecasts to track the migration of fish. The result was economic gain combined with more serious depletion of fish populations. Moreover, while companies that owned large fishing vessels could take advantage of the forecasts, local fishing communities could not. The forecasts thus undermined sustainability and magnified inequity. Again, the difficulty comes from a narrow definition of the problem that did not include consideration of social context, and thus did not lead to desired societal outcomes. No one asked what type of climate research would best contribute to sustainability and social equity. CSPO asks such questions.

The definition of the problem helps determine the relevance of the research: Combatting AIDS requires more than an understanding of the virus. Yet our research program on AIDS began with a narrow, biomedical definition of the problem. Because of that definition, society now is unable to help most of the tens of millions of AIDS patients throughout the world: the remarkable drugs created by biomedical research to slow the course of the disease are so costly that they are available only to a tiny fraction of AIDS sufferers. Fifteen years ago, if we had envisioned AIDS as a problem of socioeconomics, culture, and globalization, we could have developed a very different science policy agenda. Combating the virus would have been one part of a comprehensive approach that also would have addressed distribution systems, intellectual property, and human behavior. Our current science policy precluded such a broad perspective. CSPO will work to encourage policy makers and scientists to include societal context in the definition of scientific problems.

These examples have important implications for policy design. The materials science story indicates that choice of science objectives in the short term can constrain our options in the long term. The case of climate forecasting shows that knowledge about the potential users of information can help determine what types of information would be most broadly beneficial. The history of AIDS research suggests that integrating societal context into the definition of research problems can amplify the benefits of the research results.

A New Approach

We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. --Bill Joy, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems3

Despite the formative influence of S&T on the character and quality of modern life, there has been no institution devoted to understanding and enhancing the connections between the advance of science and technology, and the achievement of desired societal outcomes. As a first step toward filling this vacuum, Columbia University initiated the Center for Science, Policy, & Outcomes. The Center aims to foster new knowledge, public discourse, and policy formulation to help decision makers grapple with the immense power and importance of S&T as democratic society seeks to chart a course for the future.

How is it that a force of such overwhelming power and significance—the transforming power of scientific and technological advance—could be so neglected in the realm of public policy? The most important reason lies in the pervasive assumption that more knowledge and innovation lead directly and automatically to desired societal outcomes. In reality, S&T makes its way into society through institutions, enterprises, and other social structures that are themselves changed by the course of scientific progress. This is an entirely dynamic system, complex and nonlinear in its essence.

There are uncommon opportunities now to harness the synergy between science and public policy to address contemporary development issues such as the growing divide between rich and poor, the feminization of poverty, overpopulation, [and] climate change. --M.S. Swaminathan, "Father of the Green Revolution," 1999 Volvo Environmental Prize Laureate4

Until now, our policy regarding S&T was focused almost exclusively on increasing the supply of knowledge and innovation. This system has led to disconnects between scientific progress and societal progress: spectacular advances in biomedical research in the U.S. have been paralleled by skyrocketing health care costs, expanding inequity in access to health care, and mediocre levels of public health. Similarly, astonishing gains in information and communications technologies have been accompanied by declining educational achievement and stagnant levels of public awareness of issues of political, scientific, and cultural import. While science is not the cause of such problems, outcome-based science policies could make science a more effective contributor to their solution.

Historically, society has been content to react to the complexities created by advances in S&T as they arose. Yet the acceleration of scientific and technological progress increasingly renders such a laissez-faire approach untenable. The potential of such fields as information technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to transform society in a very short time challenges our ability to understand and shape our common destiny. There is an urgent need for open discourse and creative thinking to avoid the reaction, backlash, and disruption that can compromise both technological promise and civil society. The Center for Science, Policy, & Outcomes was created to address this need.

Making policy decisions to pursue specific lines of research and development (R&D) in order to deliver particular societal outcomes is not a new concept. Indeed, the quintessential example of such a decision— the Manhattan project—is also the most vivid illustration of the broader issue that CSPO seeks explicitly to confront. In the early 1940s, a focused and determined effort led, in very short order, to the harnessing of physical theory to engineering prowess in the quest to build a weapon that would quickly bring World War II to an end. Yet the unleashing of atomic weapons had extraordinarily broad repercussions that profoundly shaped society throughout the Cold War. Similarly, while the Green Revolution and AIDS research represent successful efforts to link science to specific desired outcomes, in both cases the quest for a solution to a narrowly defined problem has raised a much broader set of societal challenges. The point is not that such broad implications must be predicted (a vain goal, in most cases), but that they can be recognized and understood as they are arising, and that such insight can feed back into the research process itself.

The necessary new ingredient—and the value added by CSPO—is an integrated, informed, and self-correcting analytical capability that recognizes and responds to the inextricable links between S&T and societal evolution. The ultimate goal of CSPO is to replace our current approach to science and technology policy—where R&D is supported in isolation from consideration of its broad impacts—with this new integrated approach, built on a foundation of new types of insight, and new types of policies.

Yet laying this foundation will not be easy. We will need to develop and test a variety of approaches to understanding and enhancing the linkages between science and societal outcomes. We will also need to build collaborations among natural and social scientists, policy makers, research administrators, the media, and the public. Success will depend not just on new policy prescriptions, but on facilitating a more nuanced awareness of how the linkages between science and outcomes actually evolve. The list of current CSPO projects (See Below) gives some indication of the diversity of paths that we will have to follow in making progress, but this is no more than a beginning.

The Development of CSPO

Origins, 1994-1997: The Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes had its roots in a comprehensive review of U.S. science policy held fifty years after the end of World War II. Columbia University hosted a series of conferences to address critical issues of American science policy, framed around the anniversary of the publication of Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 report, Science: The Endless Frontier. Three conferences, featuring over 70 presentations by 55 leading scholars, practitioners, and observers of science policy, addressed the historical, present, and future implications of Bush’s vision.

The conferences highlighted the rapid increases in the size, scope, and impacts of the nation’s S&T enterprise, and the need for a comprehensive rethinking of science policy to keep pace with these changes and the increasingly complex challenges facing our society at the dawn of the millennium.

In this light, a new center was conceived to advance understanding of the complex linkages between science and its outcomes in society, and create knowledge to help decision makers understand how science and technology can most effectively contribute to an improved quality of life for the greatest number of people.

The Inauguration Phase, 1998-2001: The Center was conceptualized in 1998, and opened its doors in 1999. During its inauguration phase, the Center has been staffed by a senior researcher, a visiting scholar, a post-doctoral research scholar, research assistants, interns, and administrative staff. Two advisory boards were established and convened to advance the development of CSPO and its ideas. The Center’s Board of Visitors [Appendix A] includes 14 senior advisors who bring a diversity of high-level experience to bear on the problem of science, technology, and outcomes. Its Academic Advisory Board [Appendix B] is made up of 15 leading scholars drawn from fields related to science policy. CSPO has sponsored and cosponsored interdisciplinary meetings and conferences on a range of issues related to innovative science policy design. Center staff and associates [Appendix C] have published numerous books and articles in major national publications and peer-reviewed journals [Appendix D]. The Center’s website has been launched at www.cspo.org, providing access to outcome-based science policy information and publications.

CSPO has established a reputation in the science policy community as a source of innovative ideas and perspectives. Center staff serve on committees at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Research Council. They have been invited to brief staff at several Congressional committees and science agencies, including NSF, NASA, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Management and Budget, the Department of Energy, the Department of Interior, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Center staff have been invited to present CSPO’s message and unique perspective before such organizations as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Brookings Institution, the National Science and Technology Council, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the European Union’s science counselors, as well as at universities in the Washington, DC area, across the nation, and in Spain, Argentina, Germany, and New Zealand. CSPO was an invited participant at the inaugural Gordon Research Conference on science and technology policy, and has helped to organize the Washington Science Policy Alliance. CSPO’s activities and ideas have been reported in The New York Times, USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Boston Globe, and The Christian Science Monitor.

Current Center Projects

At present, Center projects focus on three general problems:

1. Choosing between different types of research.
2. Designing research programs to match knowledge creation with knowledge needs.
3. Enhancing the benefits of new knowledge and innovation.

Outreach

Central to CSPO’s activities is fostering dialogue among various stakeholders in the science policy process, and disseminating the Center’s ideas and products in a wide variety of venues and media. Through its outreach activities, the Center is beginning to build a community of researchers, analysts, and policy makers unified by their involvement in outcome-based science policy. The Center’s location in Washington, DC, facilitates involving Congressional and executive-branch science policy makers in our sphere of activity. Using our website, conventional and electronic newsletters, briefings, and other mechanisms, we are committed to being at the center of national discourse on science, technology, and society.

Education

CSPO takes seriously the long-term value of promoting outcome-based science policy through education and research opportunities. We have already launched programs that bring post-doctoral scholars, graduate research assistants, and undergraduate interns to the Center to participate in research projects and experience the federal policy-making process directly. We are now developing a module for graduate students working in science and engineering to learn about science in society through lectures, seminars, and direct participation in policy activities in Washington, DC. These programs aim at expanding the number of scientists, decision makers, and other citizens who can participate in the development of oucome-based science policies.

CSPO Twenty Year Plan

CSPO’s long-term goal is to catalyze an intellectual and political process whereby outcome-oriented thinking becomes the sine qua non of R&D policy making, and consideration of the societal implications of S&T progress becomes integrated into decision making across the broadest possible range of activities and institutions.

Years 1-5: In the near term, CSPO’s goal is to generate tools, methods, and intellectual products that legitimate outcomes-based R&D policy in both academic and public policy spheres. Successful progress on projects (those described above, as well as new initiatives), which includes dissemination of new knowledge to policy practitioners through publications, oral presentations, formal testimony, workshops, conferences, and the popular press, should provide a sound foundation for expansion of the Center’s activities and influence.

Years 6-10: A major intellectual effort during this second phase will be the development of science and technology outcome maps and indicators that can be used as both planning and assessment tools for R&D policy. Projects from the previous five years will provide a strong knowledge base for developing such tools. Meanwhile, CSPO’s primary political goal will be to normalize the idea of outcome-oriented S&T policy in public discourse through continued dissemination of its ideas and products. Evaluating progress toward this goal will require content analysis of Congressional debate and hearings, Administration documents on S&T, policy papers from the S&T community, and media reports. An additional institutional goal will be to launch a significant, Washington, DC-based educational module aimed at building a community of outcome-oriented R&D policy analysts and scientists.

Years 11-15: CSPO should now have the intellectual and financial resources to become responsive to emerging trends and breakthroughs in S&T, and launch projects as necessary to confront such changes. On the policy front, outcome-oriented R&D policies should begin to be reflected in budgets, legislation, and regulations at the national level, and in the operations and priorities of international organizations as well.

Years 16-20: If CSPO is reasonably successful in achieving its prior goals, it will become recognized as a central node for ideas, policies, data, and education on outcome-based science and technology. In-house staffing would still be modest, but the network of CSPO partners and affiliates should stretch across the globe. Real-world results should be readily apparent in the following areas: R&D budgets should map clearly onto national and global quality-of-life priorities; outcomes-oriented R&D planning functions should be integrated into the broad suite of policy realms across government institutions; research on outcomes of R&D should be integrated into all major, publicly funded S&T efforts; and public support for S&T should be strong and informed, in light of widespread recognition of the responsiveness of R&D to public needs.

Center Organization and Governance

CSPO comprises a small, permanent staff augmented by experts from the sponsoring institution as well as other universities and organizations. In coming years, we visualize adding perhaps three full-time research scholars and support staff as necessary. However, we intend to keep permanent staff small. A continual influx of visiting scholars, post-docs, and graduate students will ensure the maintenance of a fertile intellectual environment. In addition, research teams will be assembled to work on particular projects, with most team members residing primarily at their home institutions but availing themselves of CSPO’s location and resources as necessary. Post-docs and other resident scholars are formally affiliated with the Center.

The formal management structure of the Center is simple, with a chair, a full-time managing director/senior researcher, and a non-resident senior faculty advisor. Two governance boards provide guidance on planning and priority setting, and informal evaluation of Center activities. In the future, evaluation activities will be more formalized and integrated into the Center’s operation. At the same time, it is clear that CSPO will always want to maintain the flexibility to respond to rapid changes at the interface between science and society. Indeed, one important function of an outside advisory capacity is to ensure that such flexibility remains integral to the Center’s organizational structure.

Appendix A: Board of Visitors

Radford Byerly, Jr. Former Chief of Staff,  House Science Committee Linda Capuano Vice President of E-Business Integration,  Honeywell Corp. Edward David EED, Inc.; Former Director,  White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Chris Desser Coordinator, Funders Working Group on Emerging Technologies  Kerstin Eliasson Counselor, Science and Technology, Embassy of Sweden Helene Gayle Senior Advisor for HIV/AIDS, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Former Director for the National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  Eva Harris University of California at Berkeley,  School of Public Health Harriett Jenkins Former Assistant Administrator for Equal Opportunity Programs, National Aeronautics and Space Administration ;

Martha Krebs Former Director of Office of Energy Research,  US Department of Energy  Neal Lane University Professor and Senior Fellow, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University; Former Director, National Science Foundation; Former Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; Former Science Advisor to President Clinton Stephen Rattien Director, Science and Technology Division,  RAND Corporation  Gordon Rausser University of California at Berkeley,  College of Natural Resources  Richard Rhodes Writer and independent scholar David Robinson Carnegie Commission on Science,  Technology and Government  (retired) Rustum Roy Penn State University,  Intercollege Graduate Program in Materials Albert H. Teich Director, Science and Policy Progreams American Association for the Advancement of Science

Appendix B: Academic Advisory Board

Caron Chess Rutgers University,  Department of Human Ecology David Guston Rutgers University,  Bloustein School of Public Policy David Hart Harvard University,  Kennedy School of Government   Diana Hicks CHI Research, Inc. Dale Jamieson Carleton College,  Department of Philosophy Don E. Kash George Mason University, School of Public Policy Frank Laird University of Denver,  Graduate School of International Studies Emir Jose Macari Louisiana State University,  Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Carl Mitcham Colorado School of Mines, Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies Edward Miles University of Washington,  School of Marine Affairs Roger Pielke, Jr. Environmental and Societal Impacts Group,  National Center for Atmospheric Research David Roessner Georgia Institute of Technology,  School of Public Policy and SRI International Richard Rosenbloom Harvard Business School - Emeritus Eugene Skolnikoff Massachusetts Institute of Technology,  Department of Political Science  Paula Stephan Georgia State University,  Andrew Young School of Policy Studies Wendy E. Wagner University of Texas, School of Law

Appendix C: Center Management, Faculty and Staff Full Biographical Sketches Available On Request

Chair

Appendix D: Selected Center Publications

Books