Science Policy
Public concern: new force in science policy Social context and public disenchantment with science and technology must be considered in making science policy, recent reports say Wil Lepkowski C&EN, Washington
A number of fresh ideas have been perking away in science policy over the past few months. Harvey Brooks, Benjamin Pierce professor of technology and public policy at Harvard University, in an important new report just issued by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, says the field has reached a new maturity. President Reagan's Science Adviser George A. Keyworth II proclaims a "science policy" based on "excellence and pertinence." The National Science Foundation's new "Five Year Outlook" says change is no longer in the air but is now on the ground. And the sleepy old Carnegie Institution of Washington has taken its own stab at analysis, saying essentially that scientists are only minimally qualified to be critics of their role in policy. Brooks' assessments form one section in OECD's report, "Science & Technology Policy for the 1980s." His section is an update of a 1971 report, "Science, Growth & Society," that tried for the first time to define the place of science and technology in social policy. The new OECD report as a whole sees a "declining authority of science advisory bodies . . . a feeling on the part of governments that independent scientific advice is less useful, or less necessary than it was." As a result, the feeling throughout the OECD countries is that although science and technology are crucial to future economic development and welfare, "public disenchantment with science and technology will become of growing importance." Brooks makes it clear that "scientific expertise" can no longer live under the myth of neutrality when
the public welfare is at stake. "There is an increased awareness," he says, "that professional expertise may carry with it value premises with implications going well beyond the purely technical 'facts' in a given situation, and that consequently the political neutrality of expert analysis
NEWS ANALYSIS cannot be taken for granted." In short, he sees the public viewing scientists as just another group of individuals with vested interests in advancing their own agendas. Innovation, Brooks says, today has a higher social content, a higher social visibility. It "must generally be
socio-technical, not just technical," he says. Technology has become so interrelated that the need to polish the still fledgling field of technology assessment is becoming more necessary. Brooks' vision is detached and by that virtue forms a powerful critique of Keyworth's science policy with its heavy, uncritical emphasis on a national security defined only in militaristic terms, plus its reluctance to recognize that the federal government has an active role of guiding technology toward optimal social use. For example, Keyworth's science policy in its implicit veneration of market forces ignores past failures of industrial competition to protect the public. Brooks counters this by saying that "if competition alone is left to govern evolution in the application of
Most OECD countries have moved away from basic research in universities toward civilian R&D areas
Key: · = 1975; A = 1980. This graph indicates trends in the emphasis of government spending in R&D by the various OECD countries between 1975 and 1980. For example, the U.K. under the Thatcher government has been increasing emphasis on military-related science and technology at the expense of both basic research and civilian technical knowledge. Thus, the arrow moves away from both those areas. Sweden, on the other hand, from 1975 to 1980 has moved away from defense R&D toward both basic research and civilian science and technology. a Health, energy, agriculture, etc. Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development
March 29, 1982 C&EN
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Science Policy new technologies, it is quite likely that the detrimental effects will grow out of control, since they are only weakly reflected in the competitive influences, whether they be political or economic. "Thus, an essential task for international consideration is to frame new ground rules which limit the detrimental impacts compared with where they would otherwise be driven by competition, and to do this at an early enough stage in the development before vested interests and competitive momentum make such ground rules impossible to enforce." Nowhere in Keyworth's prose is there talk about technology assessment and its importance, yet Brooks sees it as one of the processes western industrial countries will have to get together on, especially now that the information technologies, also not part of the substance of Keyworth's public statements, have pervaded the entire socio-technical community. Brooks gives considerable space to assessing the impact of the new information technologies on working life. Although it has been official judgement for years that automation does not lead to unemployment, developments in the office and shop floor do pose problems that promise to transform the industrial plant. The effect, he says, will be more power to the people, and thus a further erosion of the elitist view that technocrats and scientists know what is best for the public. Brooks says, for example, that people want more challenge and personal growth in their work. In some countries, workers are more and more integrated with management. Even union-controlled pension funds are being invested in technologies that meet the traditional social aims of the labor movement. Brooks also has much to say about the "vulnerability of technological societies," a theme that was the focus of the frequently discredited appropriate technology movement but which now seems to be gaining orthodoxy. He is a bit equivocal on this issue, saying that although nuclear reactors, electrical utility networks, and mass transportation systems are "inherently vulnerable" to natural or man-made damage, technological developments and sophisticated contingency approaches "can make the consequences of failure much less catastrophic." Brooks says, "There is probably no analytical resolution of this dilemma which is essentially a conflict of val44
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ues, and therefore political." But he says, "It is possible—indeed likely— that a blend of smaller-scale and large-scale technologies is less vulnerable than an either/or choice between them. It is clear that this will continue to be a major topic of political debate in the OECD countries in the 1980s." If Brooks brings a multination consensus to the field of science and technology policy, the National Science Foundation's "Five Year Outlook" takes a more parochial view along the same theme. "Any assessment of the outlook for science and technology must recognize the interdependence of science, technology, and society," the report says. It, too, says science and technology have come of age in recognizing the need to establish a blend among science, technology, economics, and society. Productivity, for example, is seen more and more as a problem of fitting the workplace to humans. The manufacturing economy has given way to the service economy and poses new challenges involving the new information technologies and their human aspects. The breakdown of large technological systems can best be prevented by designing the human factor into their operation. And if the Reagan Administration chooses to paper over environmental problems, the "Five Year Outlook" underscores the problems' persistence. Agriculture, it says, is not so much booming as much as it is under threat from increasingly scarce water resources, land erosion, depletion of the soil's fertility, excessive pesticide use, and the dying out of traditional crop strains through the emphasis on monocultures. Indeed, as the report says, science and technology are under "stress," and the stress can be alleviated by linking science, technology, and the public in a better dialogue. But these are "linkages that are not automatic and cannot be taken for granted." What does that say for the participation of scientists and engineers in science policy? An analysis comes from Christopher Wright, who directs the science policy program at Carnegie Institution of Washington. Wright's is one of the few attempts to arrive at some fundamental principles behind science policy as a field of study and analysis in itself. It tries to distinguish between the aims of science and the aims of policy, two entirely different estates, and how the two interact. He says a major goal of the Carnegie program is to develop
some guidelines for science criticism—"for voices, independent of the mainstream of government and of science, to monitor and comment on the implications of discoveries and the direction of the scientific enterprise, to stimulate dialogue between scientists and policy makers about policy and goals, and to encourage out-of-the-ordinary ideas and new solutions to ongoing problems of science policy." Wright makes his statement from an institution that although independent in scientific research has made no bid for decades toward offering any alternative, unique approaches to science policy. Moreover, its president, James D. Ebert, is vice president of the National Academy of Sciences, an organization noted for its own vested interests in the orthodox scientific enterprise. At many rhetorical turns in his essay, Wright seems more interested in pursuing the questions rather than insisting on answers. When is society a threat to science? When is science a threat to society? When does science ill serve society? And what should be done? Can scientists be independent to pursue their own questions when supported by the public? What he does say is that the answers probably can best come from an independent set of critics. "Disagreements about the merits of various styles of scientific activity, opportunities for productive research, or the significance of discoveries are legitimate objects of independent comment and criticism," he says. But there hasn't yet come into being an audience that critically watches political, economic, or cultural affairs. "Ideally," he says, science criticism should function much like literary, artistic, or social criticism. Science critics are not necessarily scientists any more than art critics are necessarily artists. Indeed, their credibility rests in part on their independence from the work they are critiquing and from the audiences to which they address themselves. "Science criticism," Wright concludes, "should identify important trends and changes in the interests, concepts, or values being advanced. It should monitor and comment upon how—and how well—the scientific enterprise sets about achieving its objectives. By its nature, criticism invites more criticism, stimulating controversy as a way of eliciting interpretations and of enhancing understanding of what science is and does." D
