U.S. Science Facing a Crisis of Purpose, Expert Panel Says
U.S. science faces a search for answers that won’t come from a test tube, a panel of experts suggested Tuesday at UC San Diego.
“It’s not a crisis in science. It’s not a crisis of funding. It’s a crisis of purpose,” said Edward David, science adviser to President Richard Nixon and former head of the noted private research institution, Bell Laboratories.
Speaking at a Carnegie Foundation symposium at UCSD, David said the federal government’s lack of a road map for the nation’s scientific future has sent it careening down road after road, and as a result it isn’t likely to get anywhere. He said a collection of “basically ridiculous” projects is eating up dollars that might be better spent elsewhere, among them the superconducting supercollider, the space station, the Strategic Defense Initiative and a project to map out all the human genes.
“One thing you can guarantee is, if all those things are started, none of them will be finished,” David said.
Yet setting priorities on such mega-projects is just one of many long-term dilemmas science and technology face, panelists agreed. All are made more difficult because they stem from larger social, economic and political problems that are themselves a quagmire:
* Whether a deficit-ridden country can afford to hold onto its spot as No. 1 in science worldwide--and whether it can afford not to do so.
* How to make a troubled public school system into the training ground for the scientists of tomorrow.
* How to catch up with the Japanese in turning basic research findings into marketable products that will improve the American economy.
* Whether a lumbering bureaucracy can craft a hodgepodge of science and technology policies into a coherent, fruitful next stage for American science.
Ultimately, solutions will depend on convincing a public that alternately worships and fears science that the nation’s political and economic tomorrow depends largely on how we treat science today, they said. This is harder to understand in a time when there is no Sputnik to ignite the public’s support.
“What’s lacking now is an acute and immediate enemy,” said William T. Golden, who as an aide to President Harry Truman helped outline the National Science Foundation’s initial agenda.
Unlike when the Soviet Union launched the first spacecraft in 1957, today’s threat is more of a “a slow-acting virus” eating at the foundations of a structure on which the federal government spends more than $60 billion a year, he said.
David Beckler, who advised presidents from Roosevelt to Nixon about science, suggested that the growing concerns about competitiveness in world markets might eventually give the United States the kind of unity of scientific purpose that Sputnik and World War II did.
But that can’t happen without a stronger system for advising the president about scientific matters, he and the nine other panel members said.
“We need a policy framework to integrate science policy into other parts of the political process,” Beckler said.
Currently, a science adviser serves the dual role of advising the president and heading the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But scientists have complained that the office has little influence over the vast array of science-related issues that come before the president.
William D. Carey, former executive officer of the American
Assn. for the Advancement of Science, expressed a consensus of the panel when he said scientists need to begin pushing consciously and effectively for change.
