Why Science Matters
This is the text of a speech I gave to the Board of the Tech Museum on May 19, 2011.
Why Science Matters
Good evening. Tonight I want to spend a few minutes talking with you about why science matters.
In today’s world we have a tremendous amount of focus on national security with two wars going on. We’re also focused on the economy and job creation and we have lot of focus on existential issues like climate change and food supply. At the same time people are also concerned about healthcare and improving the health and lives of millions of Americans.
At their root the solutions to each of these issues rely on advancements in science and engineering.
I am making a distinction here between science: ‘the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment’ (from the Oxford English Dictionary), and engineering: ‘the creative application of scientific principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes, or works utilizing them singly or in combination; or to construct or operate the same with full cognizance of their design; or to forecast their behavior under specific operating conditions; all as respects an intended function, economics of operation and safety to life and property.’ (from Wikipedia)
Recently there has been much written on the importance of engineering in the modern world…the shortage of engineers in the US…the fact that all members of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee are engineers, rather than lawyers! I don’t want to downplay the importance of engineering. It is required to turn new ideas and concepts into practical innovations that can help society, but tonight I want to focus on the importance of science which is responsible for much of the fundamental understanding that engineers apply to the problems they face. Engineering is clearly responsible for many of the innovations we see today but it is science which seeds these innovations.
I think we can all agree that the progress we have seen over the past 50-60 years is staggering. Whether one looks at materials, healthcare, transportation, communications, entertainment, food production, energy production and distribution, social interaction, even the financial systems, someone transported from 1950 to the present would be overwhelmed by the changes.
Although it pre-dates me, I trace much of this progress to the publication of ‘Science, The Endless Frontier’ by Vannevar Bush in 1945. Vannevar Bush was already an accomplished science administrator and head of the Carnegie Institution when he sent the report to president Truman. In the introduction Bush says, ‘Science, by itself, provides no panacea for individual, social, and economic ills. It can be effective in the national welfare only as a member of a team, whether the conditions be peace or war. But without scientific progress no amount of achievement in other directions can insure our health, prosperity, and security as a nation in the modern world.’ The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation, which Bush later led and became the cornerstone for much of the federal investment in scientific research in through the 1970′s.
My own background is as a physicist. In the mid 1970′s I entered college with the goal of studying the fundamental forces of nature and understanding the world at the most fundamental level. I was part of a generation that was excited by the possibilities of ‘big’ science and build our idealism on the foundation of science. In high school I was encouraged to explore science because I was interested, NOT because it was a clear path to a well defined career. As a college freshman I was torn between Math and Physics but a bad experience with a first semester math TA turned me to physics.
My motivation throughout college and graduate school (like my classmates) was curiosity: wanting to understand the world around me. Science was engaging and fun. When I finished my graduate degree the Superconducting Super Collider (later partially built in Waxahachie, Texas) was just getting started (it was cancelled in 1993) and the possibilities for science seemed truly endless.
After completing my PhD at Columbia University I stopped by the nearby IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center one day on a whim and picked up a job application. I was really looking for an academic position but I passed the IBM Lab on my way home every day and wondered about what went on there. About a week later I received a call from the director of physical sciences within IBM Research and he invited me in to meet with him for lunch. With my recent memory of being a grad student I couldn’t turn down a free lunch so I agreed to meet with him that same week.
It turned out that IBM was undertaking an experiment to measure the mass of the neutrino, work that was very closely related to my thesis experiment. I jumped at the chance to work in a well funded lab, getting paid, as a post-doc, more than most assistant professors and focusing in an area that would easily allow me to return to academia after a few years.
My experience as a graduate student in experimental high energy physics had provided a very broad exposure to physics, technology, engineering and even management so I felt quite comfortable at the IBM Watson Labs. After about a year I found that there were so many interesting things going on within IBM that I took a position in a group working on semiconductor technology and never returned to academics. At the time my colleagues said that I had ‘gone over to the dark side’!
My education in science had provided a fantastic foundation that I could apply to any number of areas that were important to IBM. It is interesting to note that of the five DIrectors of IBM research that I know personally, one was a mathematician and three were physicists by training. Only one was trained in the more applied field of materials science.
In hindsight, one can see that the early-1980′s were the peak of the science ‘bubble’. By the mid 1980′s the focus had already begun to shift from research based on seeking knowledge to research guided by expected outcomes. In 1975, Senator William Proxmire had launched his, now infamous, Golden Fleece award that focused on wasteful government spending. Many of these ‘awards’ were given to basic research projects funded by the Federal government. Much more recently, House majority leader Eric Cantor, launched a program to have the general public ‘vote’ on which NSF grants should be funded. Aside from the dubious political motives at work here I think it is part of a much broader trend to seek a direct connection between invested R&D dollars and a specific desired outcome. This is an ‘engineering’ approach not a science approach. When one sets out to build a bridge or a tunnel one needs a predictable outcome. When one is exploring the frontiers of knowledge, by definition, one can’t know what to expect.
This shift has affected the behavior of our students. I recently read an essay by a doctoral candidate in Biomedical Sciences bemoaning the fact that positions as post-docs are now mostly open only to those PhDs that already have experience in the same area of research, or even in the same signaling pathway as the post-doc work. Today’s entering college freshman seem to be more guided by what job their education can lead to than by what fields of knowledge they find most interesting.
At the same time that American students and researchers are becoming more outcomes focused and less likely to drive breaktroughs motivated by exploration driven science our global economic competitors seem to be taking a page from Vannevar Bush’s play book. According to the Thomson Reuters’ National Science Indicators, an annual database that records the number of articles published in about 12,000 internationally recognized journals:
The Asia-Pacific region increased its global share of published science articles from 13 percent in the early 1980s to just over 30 percent in 2009- China is leading the way, having increased its share of articles to 11 percent in 2009 from just 0.4 percent in the early 1980s
- Japan is next, accounting for 6.7 percent, followed by India with 3.4 percent
- The proportion of articles from the United States dropped to 28 percent in 2009, down from 40 percent in the early 1980s
I would like to quote from an article in by Sidney Brenner, the 2002 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine:
We need to take these matters seriously, otherwise science will lose the independence of thought required for innovation that it has cherished for centuries. In my own subjects, genetics and molecular biology, research has become so directed toward medical problems and the needs of the pharmaceutical companies that most people do not recognize that the most challenging intellectual problem of all time, the reconstruction of our biological past, can now be tackled with some hope of success. I hope it is not too much to ask that rich societies provide more support for this and other fundamental fields of biology. We need to assure the future of biological research and prevent it from becoming stilted and boring. We can only do this by attracting new young minds to our science and offer them problems as challenging as those that excited my generation.(1)Bear in mind that this was published in 1998!
We are privileged to live in the Bay Area. Arguably one of the most important centers for innovation for the past 50 years. In addition to my day-job as Chief Technology Officer for Symantec, I am chairman of a group called the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium. BASIC, an action-oriented collaboration of Bay Area research universities, national laboratories, independent research institutions, and research and development businesses, is dedicated to:
* Providing forums for Bay Area science and technology innovators to share ideas and collaborate on challenges to advance the region and nation’s R&D leadership;
* Advocating for key science and technology-related initiatives at regional, state and federal levels;
* Bringing science to the local and global communities by promoting Bay Area science and technology achievements and the societal benefits resulting from the achievements.
We are very lucky that a unique culture has grown up in this region that celebrates innovation and the entrepreneurs that take the initiative to turn ideas into new products and services and create new industries.
At BASIC we are undertaking a new study, together with the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, under whose auspices we operate, to examine the innovation pipeline in the Bay Area and hopefully to build an end-to-end model encompassing the Research Universities and National Labs that provide the intellectual seed capital, the colleges and community colleges that provide the skilled labor force, the venture capital community that provides economic support, and the social environment that glues it all together. We want to better understand the relationship between each of these areas so that we can advise legislators and others on policy and provide them with the data they need to make good decisions.
One of the key factors in the success of the Bay Area as a center of innovation has been the strength of the regional UC system: UC Berkeley, US Santa Cruz and UC Davis. These three universities, together with Stanford, have nurtured the basic research that has created industries as diverse as semiconductors, software, biotech, CleanTech, and the New World wine industry.
Earlier this week I received an email from UC President Mark Yudof describing the dire budget cuts that the UC System is facing. If certain temporary taxes are not continued, Governor Brown has indicated that an additional $500M will have to be cut from the UC budget on top of the $500M already taken out. This equates to a 32% year over year reduction and would take the budget back to where it was in the early 1990′s when the system served 80,000 fewer students.
We need to be careful that in our desire to resolve the current financial crisis we don’t make choices that will be hard to correct in the future. It has taken about 150 years to build up the UC System to it current state. It might take only a few years to set it back to state from which it won’t be able to recover. In contrast China currently has plans underway to build 22 (2) world class research universities to rival Harvard, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Clearly they are taking the long view.
The United States is a country that was founded and grew based on the concept of exploration of the frontier. In the 1700′s the entire country was a frontier. By the 1800′s the West had become the frontier and by the 1900′s the frontier had evolved to be science and industry. Today we still stand at the edge the endless frontier of science and we should be looking at how we can ‘exploit’ this frontier to improve our country and the world.
(1) Science 20 November 1998: Vol. 282 no. 5393 pp. 1411-1412
(2) Prof. William Kirby, Harvard Business School, private communication.