POINT OF VIEW
Harnessing Science to Benefit Society
By MICHAEL M.CROW
Scientists have made many great discoveries during the past 100 years,
but those discoveries have affected society in complex and sometimes paradoxical
ways. For example, science and technology helped drive the economic boom
of the 1990's, but they also helped amplify the gap between the haves and
have-nots in the United States and around the world. We have already entered
the knowledge economy, but our public schools remain unable to prepare
our children for the challenges of that economy. Medical research has produced
benefits that we could not have imagined a generation ago, while health-care
costs spiral out of control and 40 million Americans lack health insurance.
How can we design a science policy that will distribute the benefits
of scientific discoveries more equitably, and will foster research that
addresses our most critical social needs?
Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier, proposed
an informal contract between science and society that became the foundation
of the federal government's financial support for research. In exchange
for the government's money, scientists were expected to advance the war
against disease, ensure national security, and create jobs. But since the
end of the cold war, we have more often rationalized federal spending on
science and technology in terms of their contributions to economic growth
and, more recently, of their capacity to extend the human life span. Various
academic economists have pointed out the high rates of return on investments
in research and development; last year, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
repeatedly cited unexpected advances in technology as the primary driver
of the nation's record-breaking economic performance.
Science is certainly a significant contributor to economic growth, but
that narrow view ignores much of what research can accomplish. We need
to think of ways to link scientific research more closely to the societal
results that we want to achieve. Two standard assumptions from the past
are far too simple to be productive guides to today's complex science policy:
that socially optimal outcomes will result from the amalgamation of the
results of individual scientific projects, and that science always benefits
humanity.
Our current science policy focuses on money, and advocates often urge
that we double our research budget. Yet, while data from the National Science
Foundation show that we rank first in the world -- by far -- in spending
on biomedical research, we rank only 24th in health attainment, according
to the World Health Organization. If the amalgamation of the results of
thousands of high-quality experiments produced the best results for society,
Americans would be healthier. One problem is that the benefits of health
research are not distributed fairly throughout the population.
It is far too glib to suggest that such problems have nothing to do
with science policy. The types of research that we choose to perform strongly
influence how the benefits of that research are distributed. In particular,
knowledge and innovation that drive up health-care costs can lead to reduced
access to health care by poor people.
To the extent that current science policy tries to incorporate considerations
of societal outcomes into the national research agenda, it does so through
very small and rather marginalized programs like the human-dimensions component
of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and the part of the Human Genome
Project that deals with its ethical, legal, and social implications. Such
programs have neither the mandate nor the capability to redesign federal
research-and-development priorities so that they are more responsive to
social needs.
The problem of distribution is only one of the issues that we need to
think about more clearly in designing our R&D policies. Last year,
in an issue of Wired magazine, Bill Joy, cofounder and chief scientist
of Sun Microsystems, pointed out that likely advances in the areas of nanotechnology,
biotechnology, and robotics may threaten our well-being. In particular,
Joy argued that progress in those areas will, for the first time in history,
enable people to unleash technologies of considerable destructive power
-- designer pathogens, for example -- without needing a sophisticated technological
infrastructure.
While I agree with Joy that we need to acknowledge the potential downside
that accompanies the tremendous promise of those and other frontier areas
of science, we must also realize that, while negative outcomes are conceivable,
they are by no means inevitable. Science is discovery, and discovery opens
a range of alternative paths to society.
What we must begin to do -- and what our current science policy fails
to even consider -- is to search for and follow the most socially beneficial
paths. That means that we must design R&D policies that respond to
the complex societal context within which science and technology are applied.
Our scientific and technical abilities far outstrip our knowledge of the
relationship between research and its outcomes, and the sophistication
of the methods we use to make decisions about science policy.
Consider, as an example, the science of crop genetics. Our quest for
expanded yields, year-round products, reduced perishability, and other
improvements has resulted in the development of genetically modified organisms.
Introduction of those products has created a firestorm of controversy,
first in Europe and now in North America and Asia. Our science policy failed
to consider the outcomes that society desired, and the results were widely
perceived as harmful to human health, the environment, and consumers' ability
to make choices. Neither policymakers nor scientists adequately connected
the research to outcomes that society wants.
What if, at the beginning, we had linked research on crop genetics with
popular goals like reducing the use of fertilizers in polluted areas of
California and the upper Midwest, or stabilizing maize yields in southern
Africa? The research might have followed different paths. The controversy
surely would not have been as damaging.
The social outcomes of science are rarely considered in a science policy
that focuses on financial support and the conduct of research. For instance,
the first draft of the human genome will have profound effects on medical
care, as well as on food production and consumption, health insurance,
future research, and possibly even marriage and human evolution. It is
fair to say that most of those outcomes have been much less seriously considered
and debated than the questions of who should pay, and how much they should
pay, for sequencing the genome. If we do not consider the social implications
of our science programs, we run the risk of generating knowledge that complicates
society's problems, rather than solves them.
No one should think that I am arguing for a master plan to guide the
conduct and output of science. I am simply saying that science policy must
broaden its view. It must incorporate the new industries that research
could produce; the new skills those industries would require; the social
implications of those industries and their products; the new institutions
we might need to manage those industries, teach those skills, and respond
to those implications; the new partnerships among academe, government,
and business to transfer knowledge about the research; and the ways in
which each change affects all the others.
To think about science policy in those terms, we will need better ways
to assess the social and economic impacts of scientific discoveries. But
more importantly, we will need to move beyond our current priority-setting
process for research and development -- which is at heart a Darwinian competition
among granting agencies, foundations, businesses, and researchers seeking
to expand their own slices of the budgetary pie. Simply put, science policy
must be supported by the same types of goal setting, analyses, and forecasts
that guide other critical areas of national policy, like defense and economics,
and that the private sector uses to develop business and investment plans.
Science and its power continue to advance, yet our ability to harness
that power for maximum social benefit remains stagnant. That mismatch means
that the societal costs of our current approach to science policy are likely
to grow in the future. Policies that focus on social outcomes are a key
part of the solution.
Michael M.Crow
is the executive vice provost and a professor of science policy at Columbia
University. He is the Chair of Columbia's Center for Science Policy and Outcomes.
