Toward a Global Science

In the early 1990s, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government published a series of reports emphasizing the need for a greatly increased role for science and scientists in international affairs. In a world full of conflicting cultural values and competing needs, scientists everywhere share a powerful common culture that respects honesty, generosity, and ideas independently of their source, while rewarding merit. A major aim of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is to strengthen the ties between scientists and their institutions around the world. Our goal is to create a scientific network that becomes a central element in the interactions between nations, increasing the level of rationality in international discourse while enhancing the influence of scientists everywhere in the decisionmaking processes of their own governments.

I am pleased to announce that we recently received a letter from the Department of State in which Secretary Madeleine Albright requests that we help the State Department determine “the contributions that science, technology, and health can make to foreign policy, and how the department might better carry out its responsibilities to that end.” I want to begin that effort by suggesting four principles that should guide our activities. Science can be a powerful force for promoting democracy. The vitality of a nation’s science and technology enterprise is increasingly becoming the main driver of economic advancement around the world. Success requires a free exchange of ideas as well as universal access to the world’s great store of knowledge. Historically, the growth of science has helped to spread democracy, and this is even more true today. Many governments around the world exert power over their citizens through the control of information. But restricting access to knowledge has proven to be self-destructive to the economic vitality of nations in the modern world. The reason is a simple one: The world is too complex for a few leaders to make wise decisions about all aspects of public policy.

New scientific and technological advances are essential to accommodate the world’s rapidly expanding population. The rapid rise in the human population in the second half of this century has led to a crowded world, one that will require all of the ingenuity available from science and technology to maintain stability in the face of increasing demands on natural resources. Thus, for example, a potential disaster is looming in Africa. Traditionally, farmers had enough land available to practice shifting cultivation, in which fields were left fallow for 10 or so years between cycles of plantings. But now, because of Africa’s dramatically increasing population, there is not enough land to allow these practices. The result is a continuing process of soil degradation that reduces yields and will make it nearly impossible for Africa to feed itself. The best estimates for the year 2010 predict that fully one-third of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa will have great difficulty obtaining food.

It has been argued that the ethnic conflicts that led to the massacres in Rwanda were in large part triggered by conflicts over limited food resources. We can expect more such conflicts in the future, unless something dramatic is done now. How might the tremendous scientific resources of the developed world be brought to bear on increasing the African food supply? At present, I see large numbers of talented, idealistic young people in our universities who would welcome the challenge of working on such urgent scientific problems. But the many opportunities to use modern science on behalf of the developing world remain invisible to most scientists on our university campuses. As a result, a great potential resource for improving the human condition is being ignored.

Electronic communication networks make possible a new kind of world science. In looking to the future, it is important to recognize that we are only at the very beginning of the communications revolution. For example, we are promised by several commercial partnerships that by the year 2002 good connectivity to the World Wide Web will become available everywhere in the world at a modest cost through satellite communications. Moreover, at least some of these partnerships have promised to provide heavily subsidized connections for the developing world.

Developing countries have traditionally had very poor access to the world’s store of scientific knowledge. With the electronic publication of scientific journals, we now have the potential to eliminate this lack of access. NAS has decided to lead the way with our flagship journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, making it free on the Web for developing nations. We also are hoping to spread this practice widely among other scientific and technical journals, since there is almost no cost involved in providing such free electronic access.

The next problem that scientists in developing countries will face is that of finding the information they need in the mass of published literature. In 1997, the U.S. government set an important precedent. It announced that the National Library of Medicine’s indexing of the complete biomedical literature would be made electronically available for free around the world through a Web site called PubMed. The director of the PubMed effort, David Lipman, is presently investigating what can be done to produce a similar site for agricultural and environmental literature.

The communications revolution also is driving a great transformation in education. Already, the Web is being used as a direct teaching tool, providing virtual classrooms of interacting students and faculty. This tool allows a course taught at one site to be taken by students anywhere in the world. Such technologies present an enormous opportunity to spread the ability to use scientific and technical knowledge everywhere; an ability that will be absolutely essential if we are to head for a more rational and sustainable world in the 21st century. Science academies can be a strong force for wise policymaking. In preparing for the future, we need to remember that we are only a tiny part of the world’s people. In 1998, seven out of every eight children born will be growing up in a developing nation. As the Carnegie Commission emphasized, we need more effective mechanisms for providing scientific advice internationally, particularly in view of the overwhelming needs of this huge population.

In 1993, the scientific academies of the world met for the first time in New Delhi; the purpose was to address world population issues. The report developed by this group of 60 academies was presented a year later at the 1994 UN Conference at Cairo. Its success has now led to a more formal collaboration among academies, known as the InterAcademy Panel (IAP). A common Web site for the entire group will soon be online, and the IAP is working toward a major conference in Tokyo in May of 2000 that will focus on the challenges for science and technology in making the transition to a more sustainable world.

Inspired by a successful joint study with the Mexican academy that produced a report on Mexico City’s water supply, we began a study in 1996 entitled “Sustaining Freshwater Resources in the Middle East” as a collaboration among NAS, the Royal Scientific Society of Jordan, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Palestine Health Council. The final version of this report is now in review, and we expect it to be released this summer. I would also like to highlight a new energy study that we initiated this year with China. Here, four academies-two from the United States and two from China-are collaborating to produce a major forward-looking study of the energy options for our two countries. Recently, the Indian Science and Engineering Academies have indicated an interest in carrying out a similar energy study with us. I believe that these Indian and Chinese collaborations are likely to lead us all toward a wiser use of global energy resources.

My dream for the IAP is to have it become recognized as a major provider of international advice for developing nations, the World Bank, and the many similar agencies that require expert scientific and technical assistance. Through an IAP mechanism, any country or organization seeking advice could immediately call on a small group of academies of its choosing to provide it with politically balanced input coupled with the appropriate scientific and technical expertise.

The road from here

In the coming year, NAS will attempt to prepare an international science road map to help our State Department. My discussions with the leaders of academies in developing countries convince me that they will need to develop their own road maps in the form of national science policies. To quote José Goldemberg, a distinguished scientific leader from Brazil: “What my scientist colleagues and national leaders alike failed to understand was that development does not necessarily coincide with the possession of nuclear weapons or the capability to launch satellites. Rather, it requires modern agriculture, industrial systems, and education . . . This scenario means that we in developing countries should not expect to follow the research model that led to the scientific enterprise of the United States and elsewhere. Rather, we need to adapt and develop technologies appropriate to our local circumstances, help strengthen education, and expand our roles as advisers in both government and industry.”

In his work for the Carnegie Commission, Jimmy Carter made the following observations about global development: “Hundreds of well-intentioned international aid agencies, with their own priorities and idiosyncrasies, seldom cooperate or even communicate with each other. Instead, they compete for publicity, funding, and access to potential recipients. Overburdened leaders in developing countries, whose governments are often relatively disorganized, confront a cacophony of offers and demands from donors.”

My contacts with international development projects in agriculture have made me aware that many experiments are carried out to try to improve productivity. A few are very successful, but many turn out to be failures. The natural inclination is to hide all of the failures. But as every experimental scientist knows, progress is made from learning from what did not work, and then improving the process by incorporating this knowledge into a general framework for moving forward. As scientists, I would hope that we could lead the world toward more rational approaches to improving international development efforts.

The U.S. economy is booming. But as I look around our plush shopping malls, observing the rush of our citizens to consume more and more, I wonder whether this is really progress. In thinking about how our nation can prove itself as the world leader it purports to be, we might do well to consider the words of Franklin Roosevelt: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.” As many others have pointed out, every year the inequities of wealth are becoming greater within our nation and around the world. The spread of scientific and technological information throughout the world, involving a generous sharing of knowledge resources by our nation’s scientists and engineers, can improve the lives of those who are most in need around the globe. This is a challenge for science and for NAS.